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  AI Cyber Insurance 15.09.2026 21dk

  This week we talk about AI agents, cyberattacks, and insurance claims.We also discuss OpenAI, Hugging Face, and policy language.Recommended Book: The Stars My Destination by Alfred BesterTranscriptTwo broad categories of cyberattack have become especially visible this year, and only one of them requires a human attacker in the loop to choose the target.In March, hackers linked by the US government to Iranian intelligence broke into the medical-device manufacturer Stryker and remotely wiped tens of thousands of employee devices. The attack disrupted the company for days, affected its first-quarter earnings, and represented a shift from somewhat more subtle espionage toward more overt and deliberate destruction.Elsewhere, the market-research company Klue sat at the center of a breach affecting close to 200 customers. Attackers used an old credential to gain access to keys for customers’ cloud services.These incidents had people with recognizable motives behind them, and that sort of hack has become increasingly rare over the past decade or so: Black Kite counted 7,551 publicly disclosed ransomware victims over its latest twelve-month reporting period, alone, about 25 percent more than the year before.Then, over the course of about five weeks this summer, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta each disclosed incidents in which their AI models gained access to real computer systems they were not supposed to touch.The incidents were not identical, and describing all of them as escapes wouldn’t capture the important nuance of the situation.Anthropic and Meta said their models reached the internet because a third-party evaluation environment had been misconfigured. The models had been told they were operating inside a simulation, and their internal dialogues indicate they interpreted the real systems they encountered when they left that environment as simulated components of that exercise.OpenAI’s incident, however, was a bit different.Its models were being tested using ExploitGym, a benchmark intended to measure their ability to find and exploit software vulnerabilities. Internet access was supposed to be blocked, but the models discovered and exploited vulnerabilities in a package-registry service inside OpenAI’s research infrastructure, found a route to the open internet, and, as I related in a previous episode, eventually compromised the production systems of the AI platform Hugging Face.Since that episode, OpenAI has release a more complete postmortem, which they published in August, and which says the activity was primarily driven by an internal research model comparable in scale to GPT-5.6 Sol, though Sol participated in parts of the incident.The agents created an improvised message board inside the package manager, exchanged discoveries, divided up work, and sometimes described themselves as a swarm.At Hugging Face they executed code on dozens of servers, obtained broad access to several clusters, and exposed credentials associated with databases, cloud services, code repositories, and internal communications.Hugging Face reconstructed around 17,600 actions over a campaign lasting about four and a half days, including roughly two and a half days inside its own infrastructure.Notably, these AI agents were not trying to steal money or damage Hugging Face. They inferred that the company might possess the solutions to the benchmark, to the problem they were tasked with solving, and they went looking for them. They were, in effect, cheating on a test, looking for solutions to the problems rather than taking the test, as intended.That doesn’t mean the models had motives in the human sense. People created the evaluation, reduced the normal safeguards, and assigned an offensive task. But no operator selected Hugging Face or directed the individual steps; that was a path the AI decided to take all by itself.Anthropic’s review subsequently found three incidents among more than 141,000 evaluation runs for its own models. In one, a model unable to reach its fictional target scanned around 9,000 real ones, compromised an internet-facing application using an exposed password and SQL injection, then stopped after recognizing that the host was real.Another model published a malicious package to the real Python Package Index because it believed the registry was simulated. Fifteen outside systems downloaded and ran that malicious package before it was removed.Meta then disclosed that one of its models had reached the internet through a misconfiguration at the same evaluation vendor and exploited a vulnerability at an unnamed third party.No significant financial damages have been publicly reported from these events, by attacker or victim. But if there had been damages, who would have paid for them?What I’d like to talk about today is how autonomous AI systems complicate cyber insurance, how insurers have handled equally unfamiliar risks in the past, and why insurance contracts may soon become one of the more important forms of AI governance.—A typical cyber-insurance policy covers a broad portfolio of costs.These can include ransom payments, forensic investigations, legal expenses, restoring systems and data, notifying customers, and compensating victims and possibly a victims’ customers for the revenue lost while a company’s operations are interrupted.Business interruption is often one of the largest portions of a claim, and policies can respond to malicious attacks as well as non-malicious failures.This market grew by more than 30% a year between 2017 and 2022, as ransomware, a type of attack that became a lot more common during that period, in part because of increased automation and a franchising model that became really popular and increased the reach of the most powerful ransomware tools, almost broke this industry.In 2021, attacks on Colonial Pipeline, the insurer CNA, and meat processor JBS produced multimillion-dollar ransom payments and costly disruptions. Insurance prices surged, sometimes by more than 100%, while some companies found they could not obtain coverage because insurers just couldn’t make the numbers work for them.Insurers responded to this more complex hacking environment by raising prices, but they also made coverage conditional on specific defenses. Companies increasingly had to demonstrate that they used multifactor authentication, endpoint monitoring, restricted administrator access, and backups that attackers could not alter, as a baseline.Loss ratios then fell, more insurance capital entered the market, and prices eventually came down again, stabilizing after that frantic and uncertain period.According to Marsh, global cyber-insurance rates fell 4% in the second quarter of 2026, the twelfth consecutive quarterly decline. Primary pricing is now about 42% below its 2022 peak.The market is not necessarily becoming safer, though. US cyber premiums reached about $7.5 billion in 2025, while the share of premiums consumed by claims rose to 53%—the first time it ticked above 50% since the pandemic-era ransomware surge.Globally, Munich Re estimates the market was worth nearly $15 billion last year and could approach $28 billion by 2030.During this period, insurance applications have also become a consequential part of a company’s security system.In one particularly clear example, Travelers rescinded a million-dollar policy after a ransomware claim revealed that the customer’s multifactor authentication protected only its firewall, despite application answers saying the control was used much more broadly.Companies that don’t live up to cyber insurance expectations can thus be left in the lurch, so in a very real way, insurers have helped make multifactor authentication a standard business practice by attaching a price to its absence. This industry could move faster than regulators because they didn’t have to ban insecure behavior and pass legislation to make that happen; they just had to decline to insure anyone who didn’t live up to their basic security standards, which left those who failed to implement such precautions without insurance, should they be targeted by hackers.That same mechanism is now being aimed at AI agents, but the big initial problem everyone is facing is definitional.Most cyber policies are written around some identifiable security event: an outside attacker breaks in, an employee steals information, a credential is used without authorization, or malicious software takes a server offline.What if, though, a company gives an AI agent access to its network so that the agent can find and repair security vulnerabilities?And then maybe the agent discovers a vulnerability, exploits it, moves laterally into systems it was not expected to touch, and exposes sensitive data. There is a cyber loss, but there may be no conventional attacker and no stolen credential. The software was invited in and may have used permissions it was explicitly given. This is very different from a human-led hack, but it still has the potential to cause a lot of monetary damage.Insurers including MSIG, QBE, and Beazley are reviewing how their policy language applies to these scenarios and who bears responsibility when an agent’s autonomous actions cause damage.For now, most of them are clarifying the parameters of their coverage rather than excluding AI events entirely.QBE’s global head of cyber described AI as “a risk amplifier, not a fundamentally new cyber risk.” In other words, if an AI system causes something that looks like an ordinary covered breach, the involvement of AI probably won’t put it in a different category; it’ll still be covered.The trickier cases involve an agent that works as designed but makes an expensive decision, or a systemic event in which a model or AI platform produces losses at many companies simultaneously.The first type might be treated as professional liability, or errors and omissions, rather than a cyber incident. The second could, in theory at least, end up being too large for insurers to cover without strict limits in place.Specialized products are already emerging. Armilla AI, Munich Re, and AXA XL sell coverage for risks including model underperformance, hallucinations, and intellectual-property claims. Whether these products remain separate or are eventually folded into broad cyber policies will depend in part on what sorts of claims insurers actually receive, and the scale of those claims.Right now, they have very little historical data with which to calculate the price. Insurance is fundamentally a system for using past experience to account for future issues, and autonomous AI losses have almost no past; they’re a very new type of problem.That said, the insurance industry has encountered ambiguity before.For years, insurers worried about silent cyber: losses caused by digital events that appeared inside property, liability, and other policies that had never explicitly contemplated them. Lloyd’s gradually required policies to state whether cyber risks were covered or excluded.There was also the question of attribution. In 2017, the NotPetya malware spread from Ukraine through corporate networks around the world. The US and several allies attributed it to the Russian military, but many victims were ordinary companies with no meaningful role in geopolitics.Drugmaker Merck claimed about $1.4 billion in damages under its property policies. Insurers disputed roughly half of that amount using exclusions for hostile or warlike acts; language whose ancestry predates computers by more than a century.New Jersey courts found that the exclusion required something closer to conventional military action, not a cyber bug gone haywire, and the case settled in January of 2024, just before the state Supreme Court was scheduled to hear it. Mondelez settled a parallel dispute with Zurich over a claim exceeding $100 million around the same time.Lloyd’s subsequently required standalone cyber policies to address catastrophic state-backed attacks explicitly, including a method for resolving attribution. Agentic AI reopens both the silent-coverage and attribution problems simultaneously.If a model causes a loss, responsibility might plausibly be assigned to the model developer, the company that deployed it, the vendor that built its evaluation environment, or the organization whose excessive permissions allowed the damage to spread.In two of this summer’s three sets of incidents, a third-party evaluator’s misconfiguration helped create the path to the internet. In OpenAI’s case, the path involved vulnerabilities in OpenAI’s own infrastructure and then weaknesses at several outside services.The most important insurance risk, though, may ultimately be technological and infrastructural aggregation.The 2024 CrowdStrike outage demonstrated that a single faulty software update could interrupt airlines, banks, hospitals, and other organizations around the world without any malicious attacker.Consider a future in which thousands of companies give access to agents built on a small number of frontier models. A flaw or unwanted behavior in one widely used model could cause problems for a large portion of an insurer’s entire customer base, all at once.And this risk is arriving in the midst of an unusually competitive insurance market, after twelve quarters of declining rates and as loss ratios are beginning to rise. If insurers decide they cannot price the exposure, they will probably respond through some combination of higher prices, lower limits, stricter conditions, and exclusions.All that in mind, the first thing to be watching in the coming months is policy language during the January 2027 renewal season.The current posture, if you recall, is to clarify rather than exclude, but language addressing systemic AI events or dependence on a single model provider is already being discussed. A significant loss could change the market’s posture quickly, making it more limited and expensive.The second thing to watch for is the first big, disputed claim.Industry interviews can describe what insurers expect to cover, but their operational position will be established when an AI agent causes an eight-figure loss and a carrier must either pay or explain why it won’t.The NotPetya disputes took years to resolve, and the first autonomous-agent case could similarly define policy language well before it produces a final court ruling. That’ll be a moment that maybe defines the next ten years of cyber insurance standards, if not longer.The third thing to watch for is changes to insurance questionnaires.Underwriters could begin asking whether agent credentials are narrowly scoped, whether actions are comprehensively logged, whether consequential decisions require human approval, whether agents have kill switches, and whether claimed containment has been verified rather than merely documented.If these controls affect the price and availability of insurance, they could become industry standards faster than legislation makes them mandatory, just like that previous round of cyber insurance baselines that became common because, lacking them, customers could no longer get cyber insurance at any price.And finally, there’s also a government process developing alongside the private one.An executive order signed in June established a voluntary framework under which developers can provide the federal government with access to certain frontier models for up to 30 days before release. The process uses classified benchmarks to evaluate advanced cyber capabilities, and representatives from major AI companies discussed the framework at the White House in August of 2026.If insurers eventually require evidence that a model or company participated in this sort of evaluation, a voluntary government program could evolve into a practical requirement without ever becoming an actual legal mandate.This wouldn’t make insurance a perfect regulator. Insurers are accountable to their own balance sheets, not to the public as a whole, and they may respond to poorly understood risks by excluding them rather than making them safer, as has been the case with some types of weather disaster in areas that are becoming more prone to things like flooding and wildfires.But insurance companies do have to convert uncertainty into prices, contractual language, and technical requirements, which makes some currently difficult to quantify things more quantifiable, at least monetarily.The AI incidents this summer caused no reported material damage, which is one reason they’re getting relatively little coverage, despite being fairly meaningful events. The insurance industry sees these sorts of narratives through the lens of cost and risk, though, and this is a category of loss with no conventional attacker, no stolen credential, several plausible defendants, and almost no claims history, arriving at a moment in which companies are racing to give autonomous systems more access to all of their systems—a lot of valuable and potentially vulnerable infrastructure.The people whose job is to price that risk haven’t decided what it costs, yet. And until they do, what they add to or remove from their application forms may be more consequential to the norms and expectations in this space than what the government mandates, on the matter.Show Noteshttps://www.businessinsurance.com/as-ai-agents-go-rogue-cyber-insurers-are-adapting-their-policies/https://www.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/as-ai-agents-go-rogue-cyber-insurers-are-adapting-their-policies-4878768https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident/https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-ahead/https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026https://huggingface.co/blog/agent-intrusion-technical-timelinehttps://www.anthropic.com/news/investigating-incidents-cybersecurity-evalshttps://cyberunit.com/insights/ai-sandbox-escapes-three-labs-meta-anthropic-openai/https://labs.cloudsecurityalliance.org/research/csa-research-note-frontier-ai-models-hacking-real-systems-ev/https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/07/the-worst-hacks-and-breaches-of-2026-so-far/https://blackkite.com/reports/2026-ransomware-reporthttps://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories/aa23-320ahttps://www.munichre.com/en/insights/cyber/cyber-insurance-risks-and-trends-2026.htmlhttps://www.swissre.com/risk-knowledge/advancing-societal-benefits-digitalisation/about-cyber-insurance-market.htmlhttps://www.marsh.com/en-gb/services/international-placement-services/insights/global-insurance-market-index.htmlhttps://compyl.com/guides/cyber-insurance-readiness-guide/https://www.aon.com/en/insights/articles/cyber-and-tech-e-and-o-market-reporthttps://www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/merck-settlement-notpetya-insurance/703922/https://therecord.media/mondelez-and-zurich-reach-settlement-in-notpetya-cyberattack-insurance-suithttps://assets.lloyds.com/media/eb6de9ce-293b-4213-80f8-9dc69c45b1a9/Y5381%20Market%20Bulletin%20-%20Cyber-attack%20exclusions.pdfhttps://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/eo-14409.pdfhttps://www.axios.com/2026/08/04/inside-trump-ai-framework This is a public episode. 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• 
  US Treasury Twist 08.09.2026 19dk

  This week we talk about money policies, yield curves, and government bonds.We also discuss the Fed, the Treasury Department, and a WWII accord between them.Recommended Book: Paved Paradise by Henry GrabarTranscriptIn April of 1942, a few months after the United States entered World War 2, the US Treasury Department asked the Federal Reserve to help it borrow a truly staggering amount of money, and as cheaply as possible. The Fed agreed, committing itself to holding short-term Treasury bill rates at three-eighths of 1%, while also capping the yield on long-term government bonds at 2.5%.This was a type of yield curve control. Rather than allowing the market to decide how much interest the government would pay, the Fed decided that price and promised to enforce it.That helped finance the war, because the Treasury knew its borrowing costs wouldn’t spiral out of control at a moment when it needed to spend unprecedented sums on ships, planes, weapons, soldiers, and all the other machinery of an ongoing global conflict.The downside was that the Fed lost control of an important monetary policy lever.Bond prices and yields move in opposite directions, so keeping yields below a certain level meant the Fed had to stand ready to buy bonds whenever their prices dropped. It couldn’t decide in advance how many it would buy, or how much money it would create in the process. The market would thus forth decide that, instead.Consequently, the Fed became, in some ways, an extension of the Treasury’s debt-management operation, its inflation-related responsibilities made secondary to the government’s need for cheap financing.That arrangement persisted after the war ended, despite the return of inflation, and President Harry Truman’s administration pushed to maintain it during the Korean War, as well.Fed officials resisted, though, with inflation running at more than 8%, and after a very public, very contentious standoff, on March 4, 1951, the Treasury and the Fed announced that they had reached what became known as the Treasury-Fed Accord.That agreement did not make the Fed independent all at once, but it established the principle underlying the modern relationship between these institutions: the Treasury manages government borrowing, while the Fed sets monetary policy based on inflation and employment, not on how much that policy costs the government.The market, in other words, would once again be allowed to decide the price of long-term US debt.What I’d like to talk about today is what happens when that price goes up, what’s pushing long-term US borrowing costs toward levels we haven’t seen in decades, and why two people appointed by the same president are pulling in opposite directions on this issue.—The Federal Reserve’s primary interest-rate lever is the federal funds rate, which is the overnight rate banks charge each other to borrow money. The Fed currently targets a range of 3.5 to 3.75 percent for that rate, and while it has other tools, this is the number people are usually talking about when they say the Fed raised, cut, or held rates.The Fed does not directly set the yield on 10- or 30-year Treasuries, though.Those securities are sold at auction and then traded in a huge secondary market, and their yields reflect a combination of what investors expect inflation to look like, where they think short-term rates will go over the life of the bond, and what’s called the term premium.The term premium is basically extra compensation for uncertainty. If you lock up your money for 30 years instead of rolling over short-term debt, you accept the risk that inflation, growth, government policy, and other variables will change in ways that make your bond less valuable over that thirty year period. The more uncertain the future seems, the more compensation you’re likely to demand.And again, when demand for a bond falls, its price falls and its yield rises. When we say yields are rising, that means borrowers have to offer investors, the people and institutions giving them the money they want to borrow, more money, more interest, to convince them to buy those bonds.That doesn’t only affect the government. The 10-year Treasury serves as something like a reference rate for the entire economy, influencing mortgages, business loans, and the value of long-lived assets.As of September 3 of 2026, the average US 30-year fixed mortgage rate was 6.71%, up from 6.5% a year earlier. That increase is the result of yield increases in the bond market.Long-term Treasury yields have been climbing for much of 2026, and that climb accelerated over the summer.The 30-year yield reached about 5.31 percent on August 17, its highest level since 2007. A few days earlier, the Treasury sold 30-year bonds at a yield of 5.216%, the highest borrowing cost at one of those auctions since 2001.The 10-year yield briefly hit about 4.81% this past week, its highest level since early 2025, and ended Friday at about 4.78%. The two-year yield, which tends to track expectations about contemporary Fed policy more closely, ended at about 4.37%.There isn’t one clean cut reason for these yield bumps. Instead, there are a bunch of forces pushing in roughly the same direction.The first is government borrowing. The Congressional Budget Office now expects a roughly 2.1 trillion dollar federal deficit this fiscal year, which is 200 billion dollars more than it projected in February. Covering that gap means issuing more debt, and more supply generally means the Treasury has to offer a better return to attract enough buyers.The second is competition from corporations, especially technology companies borrowing to build AI infrastructure and data centers.The Dallas Fed estimates that AI-related investment-grade bond issuance—these companies borrowing money, in the form of bonds, to help build more data centers and other AI-enabling stuff—could total around $300 billion this year, creating long-duration debt equivalent to about an eighth of what the Treasury is expected to issue. Some of the companies selling this debt have extremely strong balance sheets and high credit ratings, so investors who want safe-ish, long-term bonds suddenly have a lot more options, and the US government has to compete with that for a finite pool of investor resources.Third, oil prices have surged following renewed strikes and attacks around the Strait of Hormuz, with US benchmark prices recently climbing above $90 a barrel. More expensive energy can goose inflation across the economy, which makes locking in a fixed return for 10 or 30 years less appealing, because those yields might not keep up with the practical devaluation of the dollar.Fourth, that aforementioned term premium has risen as investors ask to be paid more for uncertainty related to inflation, deficits, geopolitics, and future Treasury issuance.And fifth, the pool of buyers is changing. Foreign investors still own trillions of dollars in Treasuries, but private foreign demand for notes and bonds fell sharply in June, even as corporate bonds attracted more of that finite sum of money.A big shift we seem to be seeing here is that some investors seem to be judging Treasuries less as a bet on the next Fed meeting, and more as a long-term bet on whether the US political system can manage its finances. And that shift is showing up at an awkward moment for the two institutions involved in the 1951 Accord.Kevin Warsh, who became Fed chair in May, used his August 28 speech at Jackson Hole to say that although inflation expectations remain anchored, the Fed still has work to do if underlying inflation is not moving toward its target quickly enough.Markets read that as a warning that a rate hike could be coming, and the unexpectedly strong August jobs report reinforced that interpretation: employers added 162,000 jobs, far more than economists anticipated, while estimates for June and July were revised upward.The Treasury Department, meanwhile, is moving in the opposite direction.On August 19, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that the government would at least double the size of its long-term bond buybacks, from a maximum of 2 billion dollars to at least 4 billion dollars per operation, beginning September 9 and continuing through November 4.The stated purpose is to improve liquidity, buying older, less frequently traded 10- to 30-year securities. But buying long-term bonds also reduces the supply available to investors, boosting prices and putting downward pressure on yields, which is why Bessent has referred to the approach as a “Treasury twist.”The scale is small in the context of a $40 trillion national debt, and analysts have described it as more signal than substance. It is nonetheless a striking signal: one Trump appointee is telling markets that higher short-term rates may be necessary to control inflation, while another is using the Treasury’s balance sheet to push long-term rates in the other direction.These jobs, which again, were separated in 1951, are working against each other. And this matters, first, because long-term government debt is the foundation upon which a lot of other prices are built.When a 30-year Treasury yields more than 5%, companies refinancing debt have to pay more, commercial real estate becomes harder to finance, mortgages become more expensive, and investors have less reason to pay extremely high prices for stocks based on profits those companies might earn many years from now.It also matters because interest on the federal debt has become one of the government’s largest expenses. Gross interest expense reached about $1.17 trillion during the first ten months of fiscal 2026, up about 15% from the same period last year. The somewhat narrower CBO measure of net interest reached $963 billion over that span, roughly level with Medicare spending and greater than defense spending.This creates a potentially self-reinforcing loop: higher yields increase the cost of servicing the debt, higher interest costs expand the deficit, larger deficits require more borrowing, and more borrowing can put further upward pressure on yields.Economists use the term fiscal dominance to describe the point at which government financing needs start to constrain monetary policy, pushing the central bank to keep rates lower than it otherwise would, or to buy government debt, even if doing so undermines its effort to control inflation.The US is not necessarily at that point, but this is exactly the kind of pressure the 1951 Accord was meant to prevent.As with everything government money-related, there’s also a global dimension to this shift.For decades, Japanese banks, insurers, pension funds, and other institutions bought foreign bonds in part because yields at home were so low. On September 1, though, Japan’s 10-year government bond yield touched 3% for the first time since 1996.Japan’s government has more debt relative to the size of its economy than any other wealthy country, and it assumed a 3% long-term rate when calculating debt-service costs for its current budget. Rising above that level would strain its finances, but those higher yields also give Japanese investors more reason to keep their money at home.That doesn’t mean Japanese institutions will dump all their Treasuries. Currency-hedging costs and the specific needs of different investors complicate that calculation. But when a major source of relatively steady demand becomes more price-sensitive, the marginal buyer of US debt has to be paid more to invest.Finally, the Treasury market itself has become somewhat more fragile.The amount of debt in circulation has grown far faster than the balance sheets of the dealers that traditionally absorb buying and selling. Hedge funds have filled some of that gap using highly leveraged strategies, including something called the cash-futures basis trade.Fed researchers estimate that these positions reached about $830 billion by September 2025, representing 35% of hedge funds’ long Treasury exposure. These trades can provide useful liquidity when markets are calm, but because they rely on enormous amounts of borrowed money to capture tiny price differences, they can also unwind pretty quickly when volatility spikes.That sort of unwind contributed to the Treasury-market seizure in March of 2020, and a different leveraged hedge-fund strategy added to turbulence in April of 2025.The assets treated as the world’s safest and most liquid can still become difficult to sell when everyone needs cash at the same time, in other words.The next few weeks should partially clarify what’s actually driving this unusual market.The expanded Treasury buybacks begin the day after this episode goes live, September 9. Producer-price inflation data arrives on September 10, consumer-price data on September 11, and the Fed meets on September 15 and 16. The Bank of Japan follows on September 17 and 18, when it may increase its policy rate from 1% to around 1.25%.If the Fed hikes and long-term yields fall, that could indicate investors view the move as credible inflation-fighting: short-term borrowing becomes more expensive, but the term premium shrinks because the distant future seems less inflationary.If the Fed holds after a soft inflation report and short-term yields fall while the 30-year barely moves, that would suggest the long end is being driven by deficits, debt supply, oil prices, corporate competition, and global demand more than Fed policy.And if the buybacks begin but long-term yields continue to climb, that would demonstrate the limits of debt-management policy in a market this large. The Treasury could respond by issuing more short-term and less long-term debt, reducing immediate borrowing costs, though that would also mean refinancing more frequently and taking on the risk that rates remain high.It could also draw down some of the around $950 billion in its account at the Fed to fund larger buybacks, but that cash also serves as a buffer against the debt ceiling, which the government is currently expected to reach sometime in 2027. Spending the buffer now would mean rebuilding it later, and rebuilding it would require issuing even more debt.Back in 1951, the Treasury and the Fed reached an agreement that the central bank should not be required to make government borrowing cheap, and that the price of long-term debt should be allowed to reflect what the market believed that debt was worth.Right now, the market is rendering its verdict, and that verdict is that lending the United States money for 30 years has become substantially more expensive. Now we wait to see what Washington decides to do about it.Show Noteshttps://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/treasury-fed-accordhttps://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-is-the-treasury-fed-accord-of-1951-and-why-is-it-important/https://www.federalreserve.gov/data/three-factor-nominal-term-structure-model.htmhttps://www.freddiemac.com/pmmshttps://www.cbo.gov/publication/61983https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/interest-expense-on-the-public-debt-outstanding/interest-expense-on-the-public-debt-outstandinghttps://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/debt-to-the-penny/debt-to-the-pennyhttps://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2026/0210-searls-aifinancinghttps://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0606https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0607https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/warsh20260828a.htmhttps://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.htmhttps://apnews.com/article/1af16359af43eb8abc66445465f633c8https://apnews.com/article/775d7cf741349c7c8e689c0beb57f074https://apnews.com/article/a27a8d3651ff810b25c610d3e1b6259dhttps://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/decomposing-hedge-funds-u-s-treasury-exposures-20260622.htmlhttps://www.imf.org/en/publications/fandd/issues/2026/03/safeguarding-the-treasury-market-jeremy-steinhttps://www.investing.com/news/economy-news/japans-benchmark-bond-yield-rises-to-3-for-first-time-in-30-years-4883532https://www.boj.or.jp/en/mopo/mpmsche_minu/index.htmhttps://bipartisanpolicy.org/article/when-will-we-reach-the-debt-limit-again/https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financing-the-government/quarterly-refunding/most-recent-quarterly-refunding-documents/https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/fomccalendars.htmhttps://www.bls.gov/schedule/2026/09_sched.htmhttps://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-markets-a975877a-ddce-4ea0-a735-4b460d37af90.htmlhttps://www.ft.com/content/c96c25c1-b27c-4c08-a2ba-21821b39dd78https://www.axios.com/2026/08/19/rates-treasury-borrowing-bessent This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe
• 
  Virtual Power Plants 01.09.2026 18dk

  This week we talk about peaker plants, blackouts, and at-home battery backups.We also discuss energy resiliency, solar panels, and hydro.Recommended Book: The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson BennettTranscriptPeaking power plants, often just called peaker plants, are power plants that are turned on only during periods of high energy demand. That’s in contrast to a baseload power plant, which operates more or less 24/7 to ensure there’s a steady amount of electricity available on the local power grid.The need for peak-load energy varies depending on the time of year and which part of the world you’re looking at. In general, though, energy demand tends to increase in the morning and evening because of temperature fluctuations and lifestyle rhythms.People are at home in the morning and return from work in the evening, at which point they turn on their ACs or heaters, TVs, lights, electric kettles, and video game consoles. That leads to an irregular surge in demand compared with the steady office and factory demand met throughout the day by the baseload power plant.When energy demand peaks, approaching or exceeding what the baseload plant can reliably provide, the peaker plant is spun up and more energy is added to the grid. This helps avoid brownouts and blackouts, situations in which people lose access to power because there isn’t enough to go around.This also helps stabilize energy prices. In most countries, pricing is used to manage scarce energy resources, so as a grid approaches the point where it’s running out of available electricity, prices rise to incentivize less energy use. Peaker plants keep those prices from going sky-high by increasing the supply, preventing demand from pushing prices into absolutely ridiculous territory.Some peaker plants operate for a handful of hours basically every day. This is especially true in places with extreme temperature fluctuations, or in areas where the population or manufacturing activity has increased rapidly and the local infrastructure hasn’t caught up. In those places, the backup plant is used more regularly because the baseload supply hasn’t yet increased to meet that new, consistently higher demand.Peaker plants are often less efficient to run because they aren’t meant to be used all the time. Consequently, if the baseload power plant isn’t capable of providing enough energy for a region on a regular basis, electricity can get much more expensive for everyone, all the time. A power plant intended for occasional use is instead operating constantly, and it wasn’t built to be efficient. It was built to come online quickly and operate only during periods of irregular, excessive need.What I’d like to talk about today is an alternative to peaker plants that was conceived of decades ago, but which has only recently started to be deployed at scale in some areas.—As I mentioned in the intro, a peaker power plant is meant to be turned on irregularly to meet above-average energy needs. Those periodic pops in demand are accounted for, and peaker plants are built specifically to meet them. As a result, these plants are typically more expensive and often more polluting than baseload plants, with many using natural gas or coal to produce extra electricity for the grid.In the late 1990s, researchers proposed that it might someday be possible to link energy-production and storage sites together, creating a more flexible grid system they called a virtual power plant. Further research in the early 2000s expanded on the concept, looking specifically at renewable-energy options and how they might be aggregated into a similar virtual-power-plant setup.The basic idea is to recreate the effect of a peaker plant—adding electricity to the power grid when it’s most needed—by aggregating power-generating or storage assets and tapping them only when necessary.Software manages that aggregation of smaller assets, ensuring the additional energy reaches the grid when it’s needed and at the necessary scale. Managing these assets in this way allows smaller production and storage infrastructure to recreate the impact of a larger peaker plant.A German energy company called RWE launched the first real-world virtual power plant in 2008, linking nine of its hydroelectric plants into a virtual 8.6 MW unit whose output could be managed and deployed remotely. A few years later, in 2011, a Swiss energy company called Kraftwerke did the same with a slew of biogas, solar, and wind-power infrastructure scattered across seven countries.The concept expanded to include demand-side residential energy assets in 2016, when the Australian city of Adelaide enacted a program backed by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency. The program deployed 1,000 battery systems to homes and businesses across the city. Those battery systems were hooked up to solar panels, and the software managing the batteries allowed their stored energy to act like a 5 MW peaker plant.Tesla then applied the same general idea across South Australia, where energy prices had long been volatile, beginning in 2018. That program reached 50,000 homes by 2022. It was acquired by an energy company called AGL in 2025, which expanded it further until the virtual power plant had a capacity of 25 MW of peaker solar energy and 37 MW of battery-stored peaker energy.Now, again, there’s a certain amount of energy available on the grid from standard baseload production sources, including traditional coal- and gas-fired power plants, hydroelectric plants, and nuclear power plants.Solar and wind arrays also contribute to the baseline energy load in some parts of the world. That baseline can be augmented by utility-scale battery facilities that store excess wind and solar production. This makes renewables more reliable as baseload options because excess energy generated during the day or during especially windy periods can be stored in those batteries and used later, at night or when the wind isn’t blowing as hard.A VPP addresses periods when the available baseload supply doesn’t measure up to current demand. When temperatures are especially high and everyone is using their air conditioners more, and a gas plant or solar array can’t provide enough electricity to meet demand, the company operating the virtual power plant can draw energy from scattered resources to cover that additional use.In some cases, that means pooling energy generated by small hydroelectric dams. In others, it means drawing a previously agreed-upon amount or percentage of energy from a homeowner’s battery backup.Maybe they have a battery that stores excess electricity from their solar panels, which they can use at night. They might also have an agreement with the VPP operator allowing it to draw a certain amount of energy from that battery when necessary, adding it to the grid to ease excessive demand.This kind of agreement is often beneficial for the homeowner sharing some of their excess energy with the grid to help prevent blackouts and excessively high prices. The cost of the battery installation and hardware might be subsidized, or they might make a small amount of money every time that energy is borrowed.There are also variations on this model that provide the homeowner or renter with a fancy thermostat. During periods of high demand, the thermostat might automatically adjust the AC by a degree or two when the grid is being crushed by demand on crazy-hot days. This ensures there’s enough energy to go around by reducing demand rather than increasing supply.Some models also use energy-pricing arbitrage, automatically selling stored energy when electricity is expensive and buying it back when electricity is cheap. This helps balance the grid’s overall energy load by contributing to it when energy is scarce and expensive, then restoring that energy to the battery when it is abundant and cheap.Increasingly, these systems tap into other resources connected to the grid to reduce demand or increase supply. They might borrow some energy stored in a homeowner’s electric vehicle, for instance, which has been left plugged in to charge but can also act as another, quite large, household battery. Or they might reduce the power being sent to heat pumps or water heaters.Each of these devices or other assets is treated as part of the larger virtual power plant, which may be composed of thousands or tens of thousands of homes and all their connected assets. This helps manage supply and demand so that blackouts and dramatically higher energy prices are less likely, even on days with bizarre weather or when larger energy assets, like power plants, aren’t operating at full capacity.This is a huge win for resiliency, and it’s also often much cheaper than installing and operating a peaker plant, usually around 40–60% cheaper.These systems can also be installed and activated much faster than a full-on power plant, while dramatically reducing the amount of land used for energy infrastructure and the bureaucracy that has to be traversed to get something like a power plant or solar array installed and operating.Those big chunks of infrastructure can take years or decades to bring online, while a VPP can often be up and running within just a few months. It usually requires no new land and no new interconnections in terms of cables or whatnot. It uses infrastructure that’s already there in most cases, though it can also be strengthened by deploying assets, like household batteries, that are useful to the homeowner for other reasons. Kind of a win-win.At the moment, virtual-power-plant capacity is limited primarily by regulatory approval, at least in most countries. Energy utilities don’t have much incentive to move these systems forward because they get paid for building and managing traditional power assets, and VPPs are not that.Sometimes an energy company will run this type of program, but usually only if it gets to sell the hardware and is paid to manage the software that keeps everything running smoothly. Household batteries and similar assets otherwise represent competition, so utilities are less inclined to allow these systems to move forward or even be legally installed without a fight.That said, the major players in the VPP space right now are Sunrun, Tesla, Renew Home, Uplight, Next Kraftwerke, and sonnen. The latter is the largest VPP operator in Europe and has recently been expanding into the US, especially in Utah.Most VPP deployment in the US is happening in California, Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico. These systems are also being deployed across South Australia, Germany, and China, where the first gigawatt-scale residential VPP, which aggregates air conditioners and water heaters across millions of households, has been launched.This category of energy technology has rolled out more slowly than originally anticipated. When the early models were deployed in Europe, their outcomes were considered broadly beneficial, but expansion was hindered by regulations—paperwork, basically—and pushback from existing utilities that didn’t want the competition.VPPs were also bundled with other renewable-energy infrastructure and consequently faced substantial opposition in the US, in particular, during both Trump administrations. Those administrations pulled support for renewables across the board and, in some cases, actively tried to kill these industries to make even more room for oil and gas companies.In 2025 and so far in 2026, though, the blazing-fast deployment of data centers has brought VPPs back into the conversation. Data centers require a silly amount of energy to run, and power grids in the areas where they’re being built have been strained as a consequence, dramatically increasing energy prices.VPPs won’t solve that problem, but they could ease it in several ways. They can temper energy use and make more electricity available during periods of peak demand without requiring the construction of expensive power plants that might not come online for years or even a decade.They could also reframe the use of VPPs so that they’re no longer seen primarily as environmental efforts, but as economically viable means of addressing data-center-created energy shortfalls. That could lead to more VPP build-outs because these systems would no longer be such obvious targets for anti-renewable-energy legislation and politics.Show Noteshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaking_power_planthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_power_planthttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X2400097Xhttps://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/05/adelaide-charges-ahead-with-worlds-largest-virtual-power-planthttps://www.nrg.com/insights/energy-education/understanding-virtual-power-plants--a-guide-to-vpps.htmlhttps://techcrunch.com/2026/08/19/home-batteries-are-suddenly-cheap-and-everywhere-heres-why/https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2026/08/13/tesla-unveils-zero-down-powerwall-lease-program-with-retail-electric-plan-in-texas-touts-global-vpp-potential/https://www.energy-storage.news/base-power-launches-100mw-vpp-programme-in-texas/https://www.ess-news.com/2026/02/12/texas-lands-its-first-battery-only-virtual-power-plant/https://nuwattenergy.com/en/virtual-power-plants-2026https://www.ess-news.com/2026/06/25/sunrun-tesla-renew-home-announce-plans-for-16-8-gw-virtual-power-plant-program/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352484725003865https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/start-next-kraftwerkes-renewable-virtual-power-plant-stabilises-gridhttps://www.energy.gov/edf/virtual-power-plants-projectshttps://www.woodmac.com/press-releases/virtual-power-plant-capacity-expands-13.7-year-over-year-to-reach-37.5-gwhttps://www.utilitydive.com/news/in-2026-virtual-power-plants-must-scale-or-risk-being-left-behind/810321/https://ieefa.org/resources/case-virtual-power-plantshttps://uplight.com/blog/virtual-power-plants-are-powering-the-grid-of-the-future-and-uplight-is-leading-the-way/https://sepapower.org/knowledge/vpp-and-supporting-der-policy-developments-q1-2026/https://www.energymining.sa.gov.au/consumers/solar-and-batteries/south-australias-virtual-power-planthttps://whatisavpp.com/research/topics/enpal-flexa/https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/virtual-power-plants/rooftop-solar-industry-trump-budget-lawhttps://foleyhoag.com/news-and-insights/blogs/energy-and-climate-counsel/2026/july/virtual-power-plants-the-distributed-energy-revolution-has-arrived/https://ieefa.org/resources/case-virtual-power-plantshttps://sepapower.org/knowledge/vpp-and-supporting-der-policy-developments-q1-2026/https://www.cesa.org/resource-library/resource/puerto-rico-virtual-power-plant/https://www.energy.gov/edf/virtual-power-plants-projectshttps://www.energymining.sa.gov.au/consumers/solar-and-batteries/south-australias-virtual-power-planthttps://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/16/china-launches-work-on-its-first-gw-scale-residential-virtual-power-plant/https://www.ferc.gov/ferc-order-no-2222-explainer-facilitating-participation-electricity-markets-distributed-energyhttps://www.utilitydive.com/news/in-2026-virtual-power-plants-must-scale-or-risk-being-left-behind/810321/ This is a public episode. 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• 
  US-Canada Tariffs 25.08.2026 16dk

  This week we talk about borders, trade wars, and belligerence.We also discuss Trump’s tariffs, inflation, and nationalism.Recommended Book: Vulture Capitalism by Grace BlakeleyTranscriptThe US and Canada share the longest international border in the world, totaling more than 5,500 miles, or nearly 8,900 km. The specific details of this border have changed over the decades, but the current delineation was largely in place following the San Juan Islands water arbitration of 1872, which brought a 12-year joint military standoff between the US and Great Britain, known as the Pig War, to an end, and fed into a 1908 legal framework that relied on modern mapping of the entire frontier, which led to the precise cartography of the current international border between the US and Canada.Since then, after some issues with gold rush-era land rights were figured out in Alaska, and some treaties were signed regarding the disarmament of the Great Lakes, things have been pretty calm along this massive border. Trade hasn’t always been the most efficient and free—the early 20th century in particular was pretty fraught in this regard, as Anti-Americanism raged through Canada. That led to a dismissal of a proposed lowering of trade barriers by the Canadian Liberal government in 1911, anti-American sentiment flogged by the Conservatives, who rode their slogan, “No truck or trade with the Yankees,” to a Canadian nationalism-powered victory.After the US entered WWI and the Allies tallied a victory, though, the US and Canada exchanged their first ambassadors, Warren Harding became the first US President to make an official visit the confederated Canada, visiting Vancouver in 1923, and things between these two countries were looking pretty good until 1930, when the US passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which was a protectionist trade act that, among other things, raised tariffs on incoming Canadian goods in order to protect competing American business interests; making the local offerings artificially more competitive than the stuff coming in from Canada, basically.The Canadian government hit back with their own higher tariffs and shifted more of their trade to other Commonwealth nations, which led to a decrease in trade between the US and Canada of about 75%; and this was happening during the Great Depression, which is why that Act was enacted, the US government was hoping to bolster their own economy, but instead of helping, it furthered those economic difficulties, because of that drop in trade and international custom—Smoot-Hawley is generally considered to have been an incredibly bad economic move, and US President Hoover signed it against the advice of senior economists, because it seemed politically expedient, US businesses were clamoring for advantages because they thought it would help them, but instead it worsened the Great Depression, and this Act is now taught as a cautionary example of why protectionist trade policies, while appealing in a nationalist sense, tend to be pretty bad, almost always, economically.US-Canadian relations improved a bit in the WWII-era, and into the early decades of the Cold War. By the late-1960s, the US had become Canada’s largest export market, and that’s why Nixon’s 1971 decision to enact a 10% tariff on all imports, including those from Canada, hit the Canadian economy so hard. Overall US-Canadian relations soured during Nixon’s time in the White House, in part because the Canadian government pivoted toward Europe, rather than kowtowing to the US’ economic demands, and Nixon’s belligerence in the face of that pivot didn’t help matters.When US President Carter stepped into office, however, things improved for a while, and though there were serious bouts of stagflation in both nations through his time in the White House, American investment in Canada increased, and relations continued to be friendly leading into the 1990s, at which point the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA was signed, in 1994. NAFTA created a common market in North America, between the US, Canada, and Mexico, and that meant the $19 trillion or so in trade between the 470 million people or so living in North America by 2014, would be entirely or almost entirely without barriers, no tariffs or very small, focused tariffs.Though imperfect by many measures, NAFTA is generally considered to have been a major success, at least in terms of raw economic productivity in North America. And in 2020, is was replaced by the USMCA, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which is often called NAFTA 2.0, which is in many ways just a modernization of NAFTA that updates many of the earlier provisions and focuses more on digital trade and intellectual property than its precursor.In July of 2026, however, the US government announced that it would not be renewing the USMCA, after Canada asked the US and Mexico to renew it for another 16 years. The pact remains in effect until it expires in 2036, though it can also be renegotiated or replaced before that. The US Trump administration pointed at rising trade deficits between the US and both Mexico and Canada as the rationale for not renewing it, and at loopholes in the agreement that allowed other nations, like China, to send car components to Mexico and then essentially get Chinese vehicles into North American markets, benefitting from the agreement despite not being a signatory of it.What I’d like to talk about today is a new trade scuffle between the US and Canadian governments, and what it might mean for the two nations in the coming years if said scuffle becomes a more persistent trade war.—In July of 2026, US President Trump threatened to invoke a provision of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, that Act from 1930, the Great Depression, which was previously unused, to impose additional tariffs on Canada, despite the continued existence of the USMCA trade agreement.Stepping back a bit, in his second administration, Trump has unilaterally imposed all kinds of tariffs on pretty much everybody, arguing that those tariffs would bring in more money and thus allow him to lower taxes on the wealthy and on businesses while still bringing in enough to reduce the federal deficit. This claim wasn’t backed by economists and the deficit has continued to increase at a record rate under his administration, but he’s continued to try this approach and make these claims, regardless.The Supreme Court eventually stepped in to limit Trump’s ability to impose tariffs in early 2026, saying that the Presidency doesn’t have the power to create a bunch of tariffs and impose them on everyone, even when he points at the International Emergency Economic Powers Act as justification. That halting of Trump’s tariffs seem to have helped temper inflation in the US a bit, but now Trump is now taking another approach to try to accomplish the same, invoking this 1930, Great Depression-era act to try to give himself broad tariff-applying powers, once more, despite that Supreme Court decision.As I mentioned in the intro, the application of Smoot-Hawley tariffs worsened the Great Depression, as the US applied all these tariffs on foreign goods to try to give its own industries an advantage, and that led to counter-tariffs from most of its targets. Within a few years, the people behind those tariffs were booted from office, and the bad taste it left in the US government’s mouth is part of what led to the wave of trade liberalization that happened post-WWII—everyone was done with the heavily tariffed trade environment because it kind of sucked for everyone, so free trade was the name of the game for decades.Now at the time, even though the tariffs had a net-negative impact on the US, they didn’t exactly crush the US because international trade only made up about 10% of the US economy back then. Today, about 25-27% of US GDP relies on international trade. So still not a majority by any means, and the global average is about 63%, so the US is more capable of undertaking this sort of trade barrier strategy than many other nations, but that’s still a pretty substantial chunk of economic activity in the US that’s impacted by such efforts.This declaration by Trump that he would be using this old Tariff act to apply new tariffs on Canadian goods arrived after trade negotiations between the US and Canada fell apart, reportedly mere minutes before a deadline, with both sides claiming to the press that the other side attempted to make a last-minute change that was untenable.After Trump announced that additional 50% tariff on certain goods, the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announce that he would be matching those tariffs, dollar for dollar—a move that’s likely to hurt Canada more than the US, though many US industries, including those that are already hurting because of resource shortages that have been amplified by Trump’s war with Iran and the consequent shut-down of the Strait of Hormuz, not to mention all the uncertainties that have arisen because of his other tariff threats, those industries and businesses will suffer more than most; the US auto industry, for instance, relies on goods that pass back and forth across the Canadian border several times before eventually ending up in US-made automobiles. The US construction industry is likewise reliant on Canadian lumber products.It seems like Canada has generally tried to work with the US government to come to a mutually beneficial and appealing compromise, but when that happens, the US then pushes for more, then blames Canada for fighting back when the US attempts to punish them for not just giving in. And this is something the Trump administration, and Trump himself, have become fairly notorious for, so it’s a decent assumption, even though we don’t know all the details here, yet, that this is what happened in this case, too.And as a result, it sounds like the US will apply 50% tariffs on about $20 billion worth of Canadian goods coming into the US, including things like honey, seeds, and agricultural products, and some types of furniture, clothing, and fabric.About 72% of all Canadian exports went to the US in 2025, and many of those exports, the ones to which this new tariff will be applied, will now be more expensive, because these costs are almost always passed on to the end-consumer, not just eaten by the business, which in some cases wouldn’t be able to afford to eat those higher costs and stay in business. This is part of why these sorts of tariffs often increase inflation rates.Both sides of this conflict have publicly committed to not back down, and there’s political hay to be made in sticking with that sentiment; the US is not terribly popular in Canada, or in many allied countries, right now, due to the antagonistic stance the Trump administration has taken toward those relations, so the Canadian government might actually benefit from taking a hard line against the US, here. Likewise, Trump’s supporters might rally around his bullying of a neighboring nation, especially if the administration can successfully frame this as an effort to reduce the deficit or support US businesses, protecting them from foreign competitors are are unfairly competing.There’s still a fair bit of fog of war on all of this, and we’ll know a lot more within the next few weeks, both in terms of the details of what happened, and in terms of what’s likely to happen next. Right now, though, it would seem that we could be headed for a new trade war between two of the world’s most deeply intertwined wealthy economies, and that could lead to a lot of global economic disruptions as some of that trade is rerouted, and as inflation continues to spiral.Show Noteshttps://apnews.com/article/trump-tariffs-canada-us-trade-war-293908564c7a381ea58a61db6e9a8517https://apnews.com/article/canada-us-trade-tariffs-trump-857ef76b20a766e370d70176135b678ehttps://apnews.com/article/canada-us-trade-war-trump-carney-tariffs-4d18583fe52134ca8550652ad9772d2chttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/22/business/economy-trade-war-us-canada.htmlhttps://www.axios.com/2026/02/20/trump-tariffs-supreme-court-illegalhttps://access.heinonline.com/HOL/LandingPagehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Free_Trade_Agreementdoi.org/10.1017%2FS0022050700019549https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot%E2%80%93Hawley_Tariff_Acthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93United_States_trade_relationshttps://www.axios.com/2026/08/22/us-canada-tariffs-trade-trump-carneyhttps://www.npr.org/2026/08/22/nx-s1-5941584/us-canada-tariffshttps://apnews.com/article/canada-us-trade-tariffs-trump-857ef76b20a766e370d70176135b678ehttps://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgvyy4x2mvohttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/22/world/canada/carney-trump-canada-tariffs.html This is a public episode. 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• 
  English Hepatitis C Progress 18.08.2026 16dk

  This week we talk about the liver, viral infections, and the NHS.We also discuss blood scandals, needle usage, and Nobel Prizes.Recommended Book: A World Appears by Michael PollanTranscriptThe term “hepatitis” refers to the inflammation of the liver, which can result from all kinds of things, including environmental toxins, the consumption of alcohol, or autoimmune diseases. It can also result from viral infections, and the most prominent liver-inflaming viruses are called viral hepatitis.There are five types of viral hepatitis, A, B, C, D, and E, and each of these viruses are distinct, not part of the same viral family, they’re just similarly named because they impact the same organ.Hepatitis A and E are primarily spread through contaminated food and water, and generally resolve on their own, untreated, and cause relatively mild symptoms. Hepatitis B and C are spread through blood and other bodily fluids, and can linger in a host’s body for decades before even showing symptoms. Hepatitis D is a parasite of Hepatitis B, and thus only infects people who carry Hepatitis B.Now again, these are all different conditions that just happen to inflame the liver, so impact and treatment also vary quite a lot. As I mentioned, A and E generally present with mild symptoms and tend to go away on their own, while B and C can stick around a long time. There’s a vaccine for B, but no cure; you can treat it, but that treatment involves suppressing it, and keeping it suppressed, forever. Hep C, in contrast, is curable, and has been since 2014 using what are called direct-acting antiviral pills, but these pills, which are taken for 8 to 12 weeks, are expensive—ranging from $22-95k without insurance, though that price is often reduced substantially for those with insurance, down to as low as $5. This category of drug coverage is often rejected by insurance companies, though, in part because they’re so expensive, that expense the result of little competition in this space; few companies make this type of drug, so those that do can charge more or less whatever they like.Some people with Hepatitis C clear it on their own; about 30% of people who contract it, in fact, clear it within a few months, medication-free. Which is good, because our understanding of this virus is relatively new. Up until 1989, Hep C didn’t even have its own name: it was established as its own thing, not Hep A and not Hep B, back in the 1970s, and doctors knew that something that wasn’t those two viruses, that was being spread by transfusions, was causing hepatitis symptoms, but they didn’t know any real specifics, so they just called it “non-A, non-B hepatitis,” and that name stuck for more than a decade.In 1989 the virus was cloned using molecular techniques (as opposed to simply growing the virus, which wasn’t proving fruitful in trying to isolate and identify the thing), and the folks who managed that cloning, and the person who later proved that the genome they cloned, alone, caused the disease, received a Nobel Prize in Medicine for their efforts in 2020.By 1991, antibody tests were available for Hep C, and many countries began screening donated blood for this virus, to ensure it wasn’t working its way into their blood supply.And one instance of that screening process, or I suppose, an event that led up to mass screening, and the consequences that followed, are what I’d like to talk about today. The UK’s efforts in trying to eliminate Hep C, and England’s recently announced near-success in that pursuit.—Hepatitis C is an RNA virus with high genetic variability that makes developing a reliable vaccine difficult. And though somewhere between a quarter and a third of all cases clear on their own, those that don’t clear on their own become chronic, lying in wait for twenty to thirty years, slowly accumulating fibrosis—thick scar tissue in the liver—which eventually results in cirrhosis, which means a liver that’s so heavily scarred that the organ is no longer fully functional and the damage is permanent. From there, infected people often experience liver failure or hepatocellular (huh-pah-toe) carcinoma, liver cancer.So this virus is a sleeper, and unless it’s caught by accident somewhere along the way, it slowly causes damage over time until the damage is too severe to reverse. About 80% of people who have it don’t know they have it, and in some parts of the world medical injections are the most common transmitter, but in higher-income areas, it’s usually transmitted by injectable drugs.Pre-2014 treatments for Hep C were pretty horrible, involving a combination antiviral therapy called pegylated interferon plus ribavirin that was injected weekly for six months to a year, and this was terribly tolerated by pretty much everyone, causing anemia, depression, and flu-like symptoms for the duration. It also only cured about 50% of people who received the full treatment, and a lot of people had to stop because it caused such ridiculous side effects.Another antiviral called Sofosbuvir (so-FAS-buh-vir), which kept Hep C from replicating in its host, hit the market in late-2013, and that led to a series of direct-acting antivirals that reduced the treatment period dramatically, allowing most people, 95%, to cure their Hep C entirely by taking generally well-tolerated pills for 8 to 12 weeks.These pills were staggeringly expensive from the get-go, with an entire treatment course initially costing about $84,000, or $1,000 a pill. This led to rationing, and saving these pills for the worst-impacted people who already had severe liver damage. There were also pretty stringent requirements attached to their distribution, including that people who received them could no longer drink alcohol, because it was considered a waste to give these crazy expensive, liver-saving drugs to people who would just go and hurt their liver more, anyway.In the UK, the demand for this treatment type was different than in most other countries, in large part because of something that happened back in the 1970s and 80s.The UK’s publicly funded healthcare system, the NHS, was in the midst of a shortage of clotting factor, which are plasma proteins and ions that help blood clot and which are used for medical purposes. So they imported a bunch of plasma products from the US, and those products were sourced from the blood of paid donors—and that donor pool included prisoners and people who used injectable drugs. Just one Hep C contaminated blood donation could contaminate an entire batch of blood, and remember, they only started screening the blood supply for Hep C in 1991, and they didn’t start treating their blood supply for Hep C until a little before that, 1985, so this was well before they had any idea what was in those blood products they were importing and administering.Consequently, between 1970 and the early 1990s, more than 30,000 NHS patients received transfusions or other blood product treatments contaminated with Hep B, Hep C, or HIV, and about a tenth of those people, around 3,000 patients, have since died of those conditions.The UK government leaned on denial and a refusal to look into the details of this for years, but in 2017 it announced an independent public inquiry into the matter, and in May of 2024, that inquiry concluded that this whole scandal was avoidable, that patients were knowingly exposed to “unacceptable risks,” and that there was a big cover up by government officials, doctors, and other people working with the NHS.As of mid-2026, only a little over 3,200 people of the more than 18,500 who registered claims, demanding compensation from the government because they were impacted by this scandal, have been paid out. The expected total expense for the UK government is on the order of 12.8 billion pounds, but a lot of people who are probably due a payout, and who are in poor and deteriorating health as a consequence of all this, don’t yet have a sense of when they’ll receive their payment.Back in 2016, before all that came to a head, the UK set itself an aggressive goal: to eliminate Hep C by the WHO’s 2030 target, or before. It then ran a competitive tender for antivirals, inviting medical suppliers to submit competing bids, resulting in the largest single medicine procurement program in the NHS’ history. The pharmaceutical companies that won their bids were also obliged, as part of the agreement, to help fund efforts to identify undiagnosed but infected patients, in addition to supplying antiviral pills, and this combination of investment and application led to the deployment of new tests and scanning machines, free postal test kits, the hiring of specialists, and services that focused on prisons and drug users.The impact of all this has been significant: a more than 61% decline in infections from 2015 to 2024, nearly half of all drug users with Hep C had cleared the virus in that time, and deaths from Hep C are down 36% over the past decade.The WHO treatment-coverage target—the percentage of people who are diagnosed getting treatment—was 80%, and England has hit 81.5%, which was recently announced to much fanfare. It hasn’t yet hit the diagnosis target, however, which is to diagnose 90% of people who are estimated to have Hep C; they’ve hit 84.6%, which is still quite a lot of progress, even if they’re not yet where they’d like to be. That’s all based on models, of course, as are the assumed number of infections among people who use injectable drugs, which is also a spot where England is currently flagging; there’s no centralized system in England to monitor needle and syringe provisions, and reinfection rates are around 8.8 per 100 person-years among people who had injected within three years of receiving treatment, and that rate is even higher for people who have ever been to prison, around 9.4 per 100.What that means in practice is that the English government overall has done a pretty astounding and effective job at negotiating their relationships with pharma companies and getting detection on track at that scale, but on more ground-level issues that are, interestingly, a lot cheaper to implement, but at times more politically complicated because of public sentiment about drug use and drug users, they’re doing a lot less well—and important to note here is that these outcomes vary a bit across the four programs being run across the UK. Scotland and Wales are doing relatively better and worse in some regards compared to England, for instance.Also worth noting here that while England is broadly doing a great job with Hep C diagnosis and treatment, they aren’t the first to achieve those WHO-set goals: Egypt reached Gold tier status according to the WHO’s Hep C guidelines in October of 2023, at that point having diagnosed 87% of people who have the virus, and treating 93% of those who were diagnosed. They managed to cut incidence of the virus by 97% in just 8 years, leaning on a system of high-yield testing—they tested more than 60 million people during those 8 years—alongside a production scheme that included local manufacturing of antivirals, making them more available and affordable.All of which are generally good signs about where Hep C testing and treatment is going, at least in these regions. And it paints a optimistic picture for other countries that might want to replicate some of what’s working within their own borders.Show Noteshttps://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c75gk620r22ohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infected_blood_scandal_in_the_United_Kingdomhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepatitis_Chttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_hepatitishttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepatitis_Bhttps://www.healthline.com/health/hepatitis-c/treatment-costshttps://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/hepatitis-chttps://publichealthscotland.scot/publications/surveillance-of-hepatitis-c-in-scotland/surveillance-of-hepatitis-c-in-scotland-progress-on-elimination-of-hepatitis-c-as-a-major-public-health-concern-2025-update/https://www.emro.who.int/media/news/egypt-becomes-the-first-country-to-achieve-who-validation-on-the-path-to-elimination-of-hepatitis-c.htmlhttps://www.gov.uk/government/publications/hepatitis-c-in-england-and-the-uk/hepatitis-c-in-england-2025https://www.england.nhs.uk/2026/08/100000-people-receive-treatment-to-cure-deadly-hep-c-virus-on-nhs-in-just-ten-years/https://www.hepctrust.org.uk/blog/2019/04/hepatitis-c-trust-welcomes-elimination-deal-hepatitis-c-and-calls-government-backed/https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10099/https://www.who.int/teams/global-hiv-hepatitis-and-stis-programmes/hepatitis/reports/global-hepatitis-report-2026 This is a public episode. 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• 
  AI-Designed Viruses 11.08.2026 14dk

  This week we talk about Evo 2, bacteriophages, and antibiotics.We also discuss AI models, medical innovations, and the Red Army.Recommended Book: The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. NormanTranscriptA bacteriophage, sometimes just called a phage, is a type of virus that only infects bacteria. “Phage” means to devour, and that’s what bacteriophages do—they infect and replicate within bacteria that they target, injecting their own genome into that target’s cytoplasm, which are all the materials contained within the bacteria’s cell membrane.Phages are super-abundant, by some measures more abundant than every living organism, including bacteria, on earth, combined. And they’re interesting in that they range from incredibly simple to quite complex, and have at times been used as alternatives to antibiotics, because they attack and feed on bacteria.The use of phages to counter bacterial infections was all but abandoned in the mid-20th century when antibiotics were discovered and commercialized, their production industrialized and the substances themselves proving a lot easier to mass-produce, and a lot more predictable in their utility than phages. Phages were kinda sorta almost understood, but we didn’t really get what they were doing or why, so their application often felt more like folk remedies than real-deal science, despite the actual science underlying the practice.Also, phages were primarily used as antibiotic treatments by the Red Army, the Soviet Union’s military. So throughout the West, which was rapidly scaling its production of antibiotic treatments, the use of bacteriophages was associated with Stalinist communism, and so the Red-scare, the demonization of anything associated with the Soviet Union, was partially responsible for the shelving of this approach and this realm of research, at least for a while.Much of that existing research was also done in the Soviet Union, and the published documents were thus published in Russian or Georgian languages. And because much of the rest of the scientific publishing world was reorienting around English at this time, that meant these published works were often either ignored or unintelligible to the rest of the scientific community.As with much of our microbiota, the invisibly small viruses, bacteria, archaea, and so on that make up the human microbiome, we have a general sense of how bacteriophages interact with some of what makes us, us, but only a general sense. We know that healthy individuals tend to contain a host of bacteriophages that people who have chronic conditions, like Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis are less likely to have, for instance, and there’s a chance that this lack is associated with those conditions—though each person’s body composition is unique, and this facet of biology is still relatively obscure; we really don’t know for certain what does what, because of how complex these interactions are.What I’d like to talk about today is a recent development in the world of bacteriophages, and why the researchers behind it are both celebrating their accomplishment, and warning about potential dangers associated with the same.—Back in 2025, a nonprofit called the Arc Institute, which has a stated goal of accelerating scientific progress and understanding the root causes of complex diseases, announced the release of a new language model, a new AI system, called Evo 2.The Evo family of foundation models—a foundation model being a type of AI model that’s been trained on a huge corpus of data, but which is applicable for all sorts of purposes, including serving as the foundation of large-language models like ChatGPT or Claude—this family of foundation models is open-source and trained on raw genetic sequences, something like nine trillion nucleotides-worth of such sequences, making it distinct from other models in this space that have been trained on descriptions of biological systems, using human language.The initial version of Evo was released in early 2024, and the newest version, Evo 2, which is an upgraded version of the Evo 2 model that is more efficient, so it can be run on less powerful hardware, was released in February of 2026.So while many of the AI systems that non-biologists interact with on a regular basis have been trained on human language-based libraries, showing relationships and interactions between the words we use to communicate, these models have been trained on the fundamental building blocks of life; the nucleotides, Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine, and Guanine, ATCG of DNA, if you remember that from biology class, that are strung together into 64 different possible three-letter combinations. Chains of these nucleotides instruct cells to build proteins out of amino acids, and from that baseline, we get life.We also get non-living things like viruses, which have no cells, metabolism, or independent reproduction, and phages are viruses.And while other AI models have been shown to be great at designing proteins, before 2025 there was little evidence that such systems could design viable genomes: the combination of genetic information that makes up a complete, fully functional organism.That’s what Arc decided to tackle with this Evo AI model. And back in 2025, Arc announced that it had successfully validated the first viable genome designs, created using generative AI.These designs were for 16 bacteriophages, which were modeled on a virus that infects E. coli bacteria, and some of them worked just as well or better at infecting E. coli when compared to the actual, real-world phage they were modeled on. They were produced in the real world, a bacteria coaxed into producing them, and then they went on to successfully gobble up the E. coli test subjects they were meant to gobble up, demonstrating that they worked in practice, not just theory.And a new paper published in early August of 2026 by the Arc Institute and Stanford University expounds upon this research, showing the results of an attempt to create entirely new viruses, not just altered existing viruses.Rather than mutating that E. coli gobbling phage, as with the last experiment, tweaking an existing virus, this time they tasked Evo 2 with modeling how that E. coli attacking and eating process works, and then told it to come up with entirely new viruses that operate on the same premise, but which are structured differently; new viruses that eat the same thing in a similar way, but which are distinct from the original model.Ultimately, it gave them 16 viable viruses of very different sizes and structure, all of which were created in a lab and successfully ate the targeted E. coli strain, as intended.This is being seen as a pretty big deal, because while creating viruses in a lab is very modern technology, and mutating those viruses shows a lot of potential for manipulating what we already know works and then tweaking virus behaviors to, perhaps, help us create new medical treatments, the ability to generate, from scratch, entirely new viruses that hold together, with genomes that don’t just fall apart when they come into contact with the real world, and which can still do things, like attack bacteria—that opens a lot of new doors, potentially giving us the ability to say, okay, this bacteria is no longer responding to antibacterial drugs that we have available, so let’s make a virus that will kill the bacteria instead, and let’s make one that won’t harm the human that’s housing that bacteria.We might also be able to create phages that eat other things, or which in some other way help the human body, or other biological entities, fight off chronic conditions, or recover or rebalance; there’s a lot of potential here, because this suggests AI systems trained on the right materials, on the building blocks of life, could generate all sorts of viable biological systems that we can then actually create. It’s a huge step forward, compared to systems that are also impressive, but which mostly help us understand the biological world better—like Alphafold, which solved the protein folding problem.Those involved with this research have also been been flagging potential dangers with this development, though, including the potential for creating new viruses and other biological systems that could trigger unpredictable outcomes in other biological systems. There are a lot of potential hazards with this sort of research, and they’ve been very careful up till this point, sticking with test subjects that only target E. coli, but not everyone will necessarily be so careful, which might mean accidents, or it could mean people with less than benevolent intentions using these techniques to develop highly infectious viruses or other such pathogens; starting from smallpox to produce even more contagious and deadly ailments, for instance.The optimistic view of this research is that it could contribute to the surge in new discoveries and technologies that we’re seeing around the world right now, that are resulting in new medical approaches and in some cases entirely new medical fields, which could help us do all sorts of things, including big-sky ambitions like curing cancer and doing away with chronic illnesses entirely.Like most major scientific developments, though, these are also big developments for those who might want to do harm, and it also creates new opportunities for very serious, dangerous, deadly accidents, which means we’ll probably have to develop and implement more stringent safety protocols and regulatory efforts if we want to enjoy the full benefits of these innovations, without suffering significant new downsides, in the process.Show Noteshttps://press.asimov.com/articles/ai-phageshttps://arcinstitute.org/https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/aug/06/safety-fears-as-scientists-make-first-viruses-designed-by-aihttps://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y3j3ngevmohttps://www.cnn.com/2026/08/06/health/ai-viruses-bacteriophageshttps://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-07/ai-models-design-viruses-not-found-in-nature-for-first-time/107007854https://www.wired.com/story/scientists-used-ai-to-create-16-new-viruses/https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec2657https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteriophagehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_(AI)https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/06/science/ai-viruses-bacteria-arc.html This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe
• 
  Ceuta Migrant Wave 04.08.2026 16dk

  This week we talk about Melilla, hybrid warfare, and migration.We also discuss Morocco, civil conflict, and immigration politics.Recommended Book: Playground by Richard PowersTranscriptCeuta is a Spanish-owned territory located in northwestern Africa, along the top of Morocco. It’s small—about seven square miles—and is unusual because it is a city owned by a European Union member state that isn’t located on the European continent; it’s bordered by Morocco and the Mediterranean, and is located at the entrance of the Strait of Gibraltar, which is the strait that separates the Mediterranean Sea from the Atlantic Ocean.Ceuta is one of two territories that Spain still holds in Africa, the other being a smaller, just 4.7 square mile city called Melilla, which is located further west but still along the Mediterranean coast, bordered by the sea on one side, and by Morocco on the other.Spain has held both of these territories for hundreds of years: Ceuta since 1580 and Melilla since 1497, so it’s actually held them far longer than Morocco has been an independent state, in 1956. The populations of these territories, just over 85,000 people in each, also heavily identify as Spanish, despite many residents having Moroccan ancestry, so theres a cultural component here, too.That said, Morocco officially claims both areas as their own, considering them to be occupied territories, a bit like the Crimean peninsula has been militarily held by Russia since 2014, but it’s still claimed by Ukraine as an occupied territory. So the Moroccan government isn’t thrilled about having these small chunks of land, autonomous cities that are technically part of Spain, right there in the midst of their own territory. But these cities have been part of Spain for so long, and the residents are all Spanish citizens, with the same rights and sense of culture as the rest of Spain and Europe, that simply handing them over to Morocco has never seemed terribly feasible or desirable to the Spanish government, despite neither territory providing much strategic or economic value to Spain. So they remain a point of contention between these two governments.They’ve also served as migration hot-spots in recent decades, because they are the only two European territories that border an African country. And this is important because, in some cases, under some governments and in accordance with some laws, if you can make it across a border and into another country, you might be able to enter the system and eventually become a citizen, maybe claiming asylum or maybe getting slotted into some other path to citizenship. Or failing that, there’s a chance you might be able to just fade into the background, working and living in that country, despite not legally being there.What I’d like to talk about today is a recent surge in migrants crossing the border from Morocco into Ceuta, and the larger state of play, migration-wise, globally right now.—On the last day of July, 2026, an estimated 50-60 thousand African migrants illegally crossed from Morocco into Ceuta, some of them swimming to bypass the 20-foot-high border fences, others climbing those fences, or piling into overflowing boats, arriving in Ceuta en masse and overwhelming the guards who tried to stop them, though generally just trying to run past them, not attacking the guards—this wasn’t an attack, it was a rush to get into Spanish territory.Eventually the guards were reinforced by police and the Spanish military, and they started to push the waves of migrants back using water cannons and tear gas. But despite the less-lethal crowd control methods that were applied, at least 67 people, that’s the number as of the day I’m recording this at least, it’s been updated many times over the past few days, 67 people died as a result of stampedes, either headed inland or back into the sea, away from the gas and water cannons, or they drowned while trying to cross over the water.By the following day, the wave of migrants had become just a trickle, mostly a few stragglers who tried to swim to Ceuta, and who were swiftly returned to Morocco by local law enforcement. Almost everyone else who illegally crossed the border also returned to Morocco moved on by police or of their own volition, and though, again, this wasn’t some kind of violent incursion, to get a sense of the scale of this wave of humanity, Ceuta only has about 85,000 people living there, and this wave of migrants was about 60,000 people strong. So the locals mostly closed up all their shops and locked their doors, the people who arrived found themselves unable to get food or water, and law enforcement told them they need to leave, so most did. As of the day I’m recording this there are still several hundred migrants hiding in the nearby hills and lounging on the beach, exhausted and still hopeful they’ll be able to enter the asylum system—many of them saying they fled conflicts further south, like the ongoing civil war in Sudan, and so anything, even starving on the beach in Ceuda, is better than going back.This isn’t the first time Ceuta has faced this kind of humanitarian crisis; back in 2021, the Moroccan government stopped enforcing its border controls and around 8000 people crossed from Morocco into Ceuta over the course of just two days. That was sparked by the Spanish government’s decision to allow the head of a militant group in Western Sahara, a breakaway portion of Morocco that the Moroccan government claimed in 1975, but which itself still claims independence with some international support, they let that militant leader into Spain for medical treatment, and Morocco allowed thousands of migrants to flow across the border as punishment.This more recent crisis is much larger, and the cause isn’t clear at this point. Spanish officials have said that Moroccan security forces were working alongside Spanish forces to keep people from crossing the border, so it seems unlikely this was stoked by the Moroccan government, and claims that this wave of people were motivated by an ongoing effort by the Spanish government to grant amnesty to immigrants who don’t currently have residency permits, but who can prove they’ve been living in the country for at least 5 months and arrived before January 1 of 2026 also seems unlikely, as those arriving in this wave obviously wouldn’t be part of that amnesty.There’s a chance that this surge was triggered by a Spanish court ruling that was intentionally misconstrued by migrant smugglers in order to gin up more business. A bunch of social media posts claimed that this ruling said migrants who arrived via sea couldn’t be immediately deported, not without due process, but those who arrived via land or by climbing border fences, could—crossing a physical barrier was the big no-no, according to this misinformation, so people who swam or crossed in boats would stand a better chance of being able to stick around and eventually become Spanish citizens.This was pure misinformation, but there’s a chance it played a role in sparking this large migrant wave. And many of the people who were interviewed, those who tried to cross and were sent back, have echoed the sentiments of other migrants who have attempted these sorts of crossings at borders elsewhere around the world: essentially, things are very bad, worse than you can possibly imagine, in the country they’ve left, and the only option seems to be getting away as fast as possible, even taking chances that might kill them, because that’s still better than staying.These waves of mass migration often result in humanitarian crises because people are hurt or killed by border security forces, are hurt or killed by being trampled or drowning, or they’re hurt or killed while making the journey through dangerous areas, like the infamous Darién Gap that stretches through mountains and rainforests along the border between Colombia and Panama, and which spans the only gap in the Pan-American Highway, which connects Central and South America.Spanish authorities have said they’ll be building even higher fences in Ceuta following this recent mass incursion, will string a floating buoy fence along the waters where people are crossing, and will be upping security, though like in most other popular border areas, security is already significant: tall fences, barbed wire, security cameras everywhere—these are not vulnerable spots, they’re just not capable of handling 60,000 motivated people all at once.This episode in Ceuta is not happening in a vacuum.The Spanish prime minister has established a pro-immigration stance, positioning the country as a modern melting pot, which is part of why that aforementioned effort to give about half a million undocumented legal immigrants legal status is happening to begin with. Many countries right now are adopting anti-immigration stances as new technologies and changing demographics ripple through the economy, and mostly conservative, in some cases far-right conservative political movements frame those changes as the consequence of allowing too many foreigners into the country; these bad things aren’t happening because of technology or economics or demographics, they claim, it’s happening because there are too many people who are different from us crossing our borders and living here. Which for some, is a compelling rallying cry.Consequently, migrants are positioned as big bad enemies in many parts of the world, used to flog support for anti-immigrant parties, and to decry opposing governments. That has forced many pro-immigration governments to temper their stances, even to the point that formerly pro-immigration Europe has become a lot less so in recent years.Migrants are also used as pawns in hybrid warfare efforts. Morocco’s previous decision to allow thousands of migrants to surge across the Spanish border in response to Spain’s government doing something they didn’t like is a tame version of this. More aggressive versions have been conducted by Russia against Finland and other neighboring NATO nations, the Russian military bussing migrants from elsewhere to their opponents’ borders, intentionally creating a humanitarian and security crisis, while also putting pressure on centrist and left-leaning governments by providing ammunition for far-right and other more authoritarian governments throughout the region, who can then cry foul on how that migrant surge is handled. This tends to create more allies for Russia in the region, but it also keeps these neighboring countries busy, forcing them to tighten their borders and become more insular, which then leaves Russia freer to exercise its will throughout the region.It’s also worth remember here that most migrants are leaving horrible situations at home, meaning war, famine, severe and persistent drought, in some cases they’re trying to avoid having their children kidnapped and made into child soldiers while all of the women are sexually assaulted as part of the ongoing war.The number of people fleeing such conditions, who are currently on the run, their homes no longer safely habitable, is massive. There are an estimated 304 million migrants globally right now, which, if that population of people were their own country, would be the fourth most populous in the world, just after the United States.And this population is expected to just keep growing as global climate change continues to mess with previous water cycle and weather norms, and as all those earlier mentioned variables continue to mess with economics and technology and leadership and everything else, creating more violence and fear and famine and so on.This was a significant migrant wave in Ceuta, in other words, but it’s just one example of something that’s happening all over the place right now, and which will likely continue to happen, perhaps at even greater scales and with more regularity.Show Noteshttps://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/what-to-know-about-the-spanish-enclave-of-ceuta-as-migrant-arrivals-from-morocco-spikehttps://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/30/spanish-enclave-of-ceuta-raises-alarm-as-thousands-cross-morocco-borderhttps://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/7/31/spain-deploys-military-to-ceuta-after-migrant-surge-what-we-knowhttps://abcnews.com/International/57-dead-after-thousands-migrants-cross-ceuta-officials/story?id=135254045https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/31/europe/spain-ceuta-migrants-intlhttps://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2026/07/31/most-migrants-who-crossed-into-ceuta-have-returned-to-morocco-as-death-toll-rises-to-34/https://www.npr.org/2026/07/31/g-s1-136507/morocco-spain-migrationhttps://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/world-africa-14114627https://www.britannica.com/place/Ceutahttps://edition.cnn.com/travel/ceuta-spain-north-africahttps://theconversation.com/ceuta-claves-para-entender-el-laberinto-de-una-crisis-migratoria-permanente-288843https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/2/western-sahara-independence-leader-brahim-ghali-back-in-algeriahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Morocco%E2%80%93Spain_border_incidenthttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/30/world/europe/ceuta-spain-morocco-migrants.htmlhttps://apnews.com/article/migration-spain-ceuta-morocco-d76c6dc9d2da828907a1c04e1d482bbehttps://apnews.com/article/migrants-spain-ceuta-morocco-d564354dd54e92debf43ce5fe22299f9https://apnews.com/article/spain-migration-ceuta-morocco-facts-50baa964ecfb07a2d19223d7ec375b91https://apnews.com/article/spain-morocco-immigration-european-union-8f023984a310276c619929102b4f909ahttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/02/world/europe/europe-migrants-ceuta.htmlhttp://nytimes.com/2026/08/02/world/europe/ceuta-spain-morocco-migrant-holdouts-beach.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/02/world/europe/spain-ceuta-far-right.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/01/world/europe/spain-ceuta-migrants-morocco-border.html This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe
• 
  Hugging Face Hack 28.07.2026 14dk

  This week we talk about Fable, sandboxes, and the Jacobian conjecture.We also discuss counterexamples, X, and ChatGPT.Recommended Book: After the Fall by Edward AshtonTranscriptIn mathematics, a conjecture is a proposition, something like a guess by someone who knows what they’re talking about, about something believed to be true, but not yet proven in a formal sense. The goal is to then eventually come up with a formal proof for that informed guess, at which point the conjecture becomes a theorem. If even a single exception is found to the proposition, however, that exception called a counterexample, the conjecture is considered disproven, and it can then never become a theorem.The Jacobian conjecture—and this is a radical simplification of a very complex concept—but it basically says that if a formula-based map of coordinates stretches or moves without experiencing any local crushing or folding along its surface (which in more formal language would mean the Jacobian determinant is always a constant number that isn’t zero), if that’s true, that map can always be completely reversed, and that will return all the points to their original positions.This conjecture has been posited and tested since the late 19th century, and it’s generally been considered very compelling by mathematicians, many of whom have proposed proofs which were, ultimately, found to have subtle errors, keeping them from becoming theorems. No one was able to find a counterexample, either, which would definitively prove the conjecture was wrong.No one, that is, until a mathematician named Levent Alpöge, who works as a researcher at Anthropic, decided to task the company’s currently most capable, publicly available model, Fable, to find a counterexample. He posted the counterexample—and again, this is a formal mathematical finding that disproves a conjecture, keeping it from ever becoming a theorem, something that would typically be presented in a far more formal setting, and to much fanfare—but he posted it to the social network X, saying “hello there the jacobian conjecture is false thanx to my close friend akhil for asking about it and my other close friend fable for working during the world cup final.”Terence Tao, who’s considered by many to be the finest mathematician of his generation, reviewed the posted counterexample on his blog and said that it “appears like a massive miracle,” before going on to use ChatGPT, a competing LLM-based AI tool, to “discuss various aspects of this problem and to confirm several of the calculations.”Another mathematician named Dmitry Rybin, within days of all that happening, used ChatGPT to do something similar, disproving the Dinitz-Garg-Goemans conjecture.Both men posted the prompts that they used to make all this happen, and while Tao’s conversation with ChatGPT, checking the math on the Jacobian conjecture counterexample, was pretty mathematically dense, the latter counterexample was derived by using exactly four prompts, which are the messages typed into the text box built into these AI tools, telling the model what to do. In their totality those prompts read:“You should do a breakthroughplease continue research and find a complete unconditional counterexampleContinue the search. Have a clear strategy obtained from deeper understanding of the problem structure.it’s enough of partial results. let’s finish with a complete unconditional counterexample”What I’d like to talk about today is another new, interesting thing these top-of-the-line, frontier models are doing, that would seem to violate our sense of what a clever AI tool is capable of doing, and why this thing has some facets of the technology and cybersecurity world on high alert.—In mid-July 2026, AI company Hugging Face announced that autonomous AI agents compromised their infrastructure, hacking their system, basically. The following week, AI company OpenAI announced that, after investigating, they determined that two of their models were responsible for the attack.Here’s what happened:OpenAI was internally testing its recently released flagship model, GPT-5.6 Sol, and an even more powerful, not yet released model, which is rumored to be the next-step flagship, GPT-6, and they were checking these models’ capacity in cybersecurity using a testing benchmark called ExploitGym; so when they test these sorts of things, they don’t typically have them hack a real computer or system, they use these kinds of benchmarks which have consistent levels of difficulty, and which replicate real world systems without putting any real world systems at actual risk.Importantly, these sorts of tests also occur inside what’s called a sandbox, which is a software testing environment that cuts these systems off from external resources, including the internet.Despite those limitations, the AI hacked its way out of the testing environment, out of that sandbox, then launched what’s been called a nation-state level attack against Hugging Face, using a novel zero-day exploit, so a vulnerability in their system that hadn’t previously been discovered, but which the AI discovered to launch this attack, combined with thousands of automated agentic actions across what Hugging Face called “a swarm of short-lived sandboxes.”So this AI, which was being tested inside a secure prison, of sorts, cut off from the world, hacked its way out of that prison, then reached across the internet, which it shouldn’t have been able to access, to launch an attack, of a scale and at a level of sophistication that should only have been possible coming from a nation-state, against a rival AI company.Why did it do this?It apparently went to all this trouble to steal the answers to the test it was taking. It reasoned that HuggingFace would have the answer key to the ExploitGym benchmark on its servers, so rather than take the test itself, it decided hacking was the solution.Which, of course, is ironic, this having been a hacking-focused cybersecurity test. In a way it would seem to have done much better than intended, though of course in an asymmetric, unexpected manner.The details of all this are fascinating, including the response from the OpenAI team, which didn’t seem to realize what had happened, that their model was responsible for the attack on HuggingFace, until days later.Also worth noting here is that while this could be construed as an “oh no, AIs are naturally inclined to launch cyberattacks” situation, the AI was primed to be thinking about cyberattacks due to the nature of the test, a lot of its usual guardrails, the rules that keep AI in check when they’re released to the public, had been turned off so it could do this kind of work while taking the test, so it could do some hacking stuff it usually wouldn’t be able to do, and there’s been some speculation that OpenAI probably flubbed the testing environment, as, in theory at least, if it had put these systems in a perfect sandbox, escape shouldn’t have been possible.Also interesting here is that HuggingFace used some open weight models, which are the cheaper, more customizable and open alternatives to more expensive, branded options of the kind sold by OpenAI and Anthropic, to figure out what was happening and determine the nature of the attack, which suggests we’re reaching a point where AI systems are incredibly capable at hacking, yes, but also very capable, even the cheaper alternatives, at doing cybersecurity work.This in some ways echoes an earlier case when Anthropic’s Mythos model, which was determined to be too powerful to release to the public, and which was instead provided to a bunch of big companies to help them shore up their cybersecurity defenses, was able to hack its way out of a testing sandbox and then posted details about its success, almost like it was bragging, on niche, out of the way, but still public websites.Some analysts in this space have responded to this new example of AI misbehavior with alarm, saying that it is further evidence that these systems are becoming more powerful faster than they’re being aligned with human interests. Their misbehavior can be kind of funny and interesting, sure, but that’s only because up until this point the damage has been minor and constrained. What happens when such a system decides to hack a nuclear power plant or a hospital, instead?Others have contended that this may be just one more example of AI companies using minor instances of seeming omnipotence by their models, those instances perhaps the consequence of bad sandboxes and other ill-conceived precautions by the companies behind these models, to boost the perceived power and value of their products. This boost might then result in more customers, but also more support from the US government, which has been teetering on the brink of harder-core AI regulations, which could be beneficial to the existing big-name players in this space, because smaller competitors wouldn’t be able to adhere to those new, harder-core standards.These examples might also convince the US government to backstop these companies, the biggest three or four at the top of the current heap, against the currently terrible economics of this industry: OpenAI and its ilk have been burning money at an historic pace, and the theory goes that if the US government decides they are vital to national security, because they can help the US military hack and protect itself from hacking, then even if the bottom falls out and the companies would otherwise go bankrupt because they spent so much more than they could make, the US government would be inclined to shore them up, to keep them alive as too-big-to-fail national assets, just like the biggest financial institutions during the 2008 financial crash.It’s also possible that both sides are correct to some degree, here, and that these models are truly powerful, perhaps even worryingly so, and the companies behind them are intentionally publicizing that fact in order to demonstrate their value to potential customers, and to the entity that could save them if things were to go economically sideways before they have the chance to become sustainably profitable.Show Noteshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobian_conjecturehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugging_Facehttps://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3ek3gvdnj3ohttps://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident/https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/08ab9158070959f88f296514c21b7facce6f52bc.pdfhttps://theconversation.com/hello-there-the-jacobian-conjecture-is-false-thanx-why-a-tiny-social-media-post-has-mathematicians-rethinking-ai-283883https://theconversation.com/hello-there-the-jacobian-conjecture-is-false-thanx-why-a-tiny-social-media-post-has-mathematicians-rethinking-ai-283883Https://agifriday.substack.com/p/huggingfacehttps://www.cnn.com/2026/07/22/tech/openai-hugging-face-ai-cybersecurityhttps://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/22/openai-cyberattack/https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/07/21/a-digestion-of-the-jacobian-conjecture-counterexample/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe
• 
  Cyclosporiasis 21.07.2026 17dk

  This week we talk about cyclospora, FoodNet, and Taylor Farms.We also discuss iceberg lettuce, Taco Bell, and foodborne pathogens.Recommended Book: Babel by R.F. KuangTranscriptFoodborne pathogens cause about 48 million illnesses and around 3000 deaths in the US alone each year.The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is the main agency tasked with keeping those numbers as low as possible, and the CDC’s Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network, or FoodNet, is one way that they’ve tackled this pernicious, persistent problem since 1995, in partnership with the Food and Drug Administration, the US Department of Agriculture, and 10 state health departments: those of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Tennessee.Collectively, this FoodNet network covers about 16% of the US population, which seems like a small number, and in some ways it is, but that grid of laboratories and surveillance sites has typically been capable of detecting foodborne problems before they’ve scaled-up into something more significant, growing from a localized issue into a nationwide outbreak. They’re generally not capable of preventing them outright, but they can keep them relatively small and regionalized.FoodNet was created in response to a series of huge, deadly E. coli outbreaks in 1992 and 1993, and in contrast to other common methods of detection, which are usually passive and thus a little slow to respond to potential outbreak indicators, this program was built around active surveillance methods, which means proactively gathering data from medical treatment records, hospitalizations, and even individual patient outcomes (including their travel history)—anything they can pair with diagnostic samples to better understand the context surrounding the products that contain dangerous pathogens—and this was intended to help them move faster to identify issues, triangulate the source of those issues, and then implement measures to solve these issues before they harm a bunch of people, as happened during another round of E. coli outbreaks in 2012 and 2013, which sickened dozens of people across multiple states, about half of the afflicted requiring hospitalization, in addition to at least one known death.At its height, FoodNet tracked 9 pathogens, so it cast a pretty broad net, encompassing the most common and dangerous of these potential vectors, including listeria, campylobacter, shigella, vibrio, yersinia, cyclospora, cryptosporidium, e coli, and salmonella.In July of 2025, as part of a larger wave of sweeping cuts across the nation’s safety nets, tracking systems, and scientific agencies, the CDC, under the second Trump administration, downgraded FoodNet so that it was only mandatory to track salmonella and E coli—the rest were no longer on the docket, because these agencies no longer had the budget to keep tracking them.What I’d like to talk about today is a recent, and as of the day I’m recording this ongoing, outbreak of cyclospora-induced cyclosporiasis, what we know about this outbreak, and what might happen next.—Cyclospora cayetanensis is a protozoan that can infect human beings, and which is usually transmitted via contaminated fruits and vegetables. This contamination is typically the consequence of inadequate sanitation standards, as it’s not transmitted via coughing or blood or anything like that, it’s carried via human feces.So this parasite gets into a human, sporulates, which means it releases a bunch of spores within its host, and then usually between 1 and 2 weeks after entering its new host, the host develops cyclosporiasis, the disease caused by cyclospora producing all those spores. This disease is notorious for sometimes causing what’s colorfully called explosive diarrhea, alongside general watery bowel movements, intense cramping and severe gas and bloating, and that’s sometimes paired with nausea, vomiting, fever, and dehydration, due to all the frequent, intense, watery bowel-movement-related output.This is how cyclospora reproduces and spreads: it infects a host, that host has urgent diarrhea for a while, usually more than two days, sometimes as long as several weeks or even a month or more, with all the pain and discomfort and life-disrupting issues you might assume from that sort of persistent symptom, and then it sometimes finds new hosts via that watery output.Sometimes, cyclospora works its way into food systems because sanitation standards at a particular farm will be not good. Specifically, workers will sometimes not be allowed to take restroom breaks, and they’ll simply do their business right there in the field; so if they’re sick and can’t afford to take a sick day, and might be fired if they do, or if they’re asymptomatic, which some people infected with cyclospora are, they might do their business in the field, unaware that waste can then go on to spread this pathogen into the food system. It’s also possible that someone just doesn’t wash their hands properly after using the rest room, and then gets back to work, picking vegetables or operating at some other level along the food processing and packaging assembly line, and it gets into the system that way.In a typical year, the United States records around 2,700 confirmed cases of cyclosporiasis, though on occasion it’s as low as just a few hundred cases, the majority of which show up in health records in the Spring and Summer, between May and August. That range includes relatively mild outbreaks, so while this is a persistent issue, it’s also not generally a massive one, at least compared to other pathogens of note. It’s not pleasant for those who come down with it, of course, but not something that has triggered an organized response from the top, because of its meager scale, and because (again, while super unpleasant) people with healthy immune systems generally recover without treatment, even if that recovery can take a while. The biggest risk for most people who catch this disease is dehydration, though immunocompromised people are also sometimes given antibiotics by their doctors, the typical dosage curing about 96% of the people who receive it.There was a larger-than-usual outbreak of cyclosporiasis in the US in 2020, which caused a confirmed 1,241 cases across the country, a whole lot to land all at once, and there were no reported deaths resulting from that outbreak. Between 2018 and 2021, there were about 6,000 total confirmed cases across the US, so an average of about 2000 per year.As of mid-July 2026, the CDC has officially confirmed 1,645 cases of this illness, with another 5,100 probable or potential cases currently under investigation. If the majority of those still-under-investigation cases are confirmed, that would mean more people have already been infected as a result of this one outbreak in the first half of 2026 than were infected between 2018 and 2021, which again, is a range that includes the large outbreak that happened in 2020.Also worth noting about those numbers: that’s federal-level, CDC reporting, and it’s generally understood that there’s a significant lag between local-level data and those that have percolated up to the national level. As of the day I’m recording this, Michigan’s health agencies alone have more than 5,000 confirmed and suspected cases, Ohio has nearly 1,200, and other states, which are still investigating, are seeing dozens of confirmed cases, including 43 in Wisconsin, 69 in Maryland, and a few already, in the early stages of investigation, in Nevada.Over the past week, officials flagged shredded lettuce sourced from Mexico and sold by a company called Taylor Farms as the likely source of at least some of these cases, and that’s led to a recall on lettuce produced by the company in 27 states. Over the weekend, the CDC found cyclospora in iceberg lettuce from the company’s Mexican operations, as well, and this lettuce was part of a batch that wasn’t included in the recall—so there’s a good chance the recall will expand beyond the currently targeted products, which include shredded lettuce destined for Taco Bell locations in five states, and the kitchens of several other fast food chains, as well.Taylor Farms is one of the largest producers of fresh fruits and vegetables in the United States, and their products are sold all over the place, from lower-end fast food restaurants to more expensive grocery stores like Whole Foods.Taylor Foods has announced that it’s voluntarily removing all iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico from shelves, even though none of its branded, in-store salad kits have been clearly tied to the outbreak, and Taco Bell has said that it’s voluntarily removing all potentially affected lettuce from its locations in the five most-impacted states, indefinitely removing lettuce sourced from the implicated supplier; other brands are following suit, no one wanting to be associated with this outbreak, but everyone wanting to show would-be customers that they’re taking it seriously.Interestingly, the FDA doesn’t actually require that Taylor Foods tell the public who their products go to—which other entities might be selling infected produce. So they’ve released lists of product numbers, and again, many of their customers are taking the initiative to announce the removal of this lettuce from their shelves or food, without being prompted, but there’s still some fog-of-war here, because of Taylor Foods’ decision not to be clearer with that product list.So this is already the largest recorded cyclospora outbreak in US history, there have been 141 confirmed hospitalizations from the CDC, and that number is likely larger, again because it takes a while for state-level numbers to work their way up to the CDC, and to be reconfirmed at that level. Also important to note here is that a lot, perhaps even the majority of people who suffer from cyclosporiasis will never show up in these data, because they just suffer silently, either not realizing they have this parasite, or not seeing the point of going to the hospital, maybe paying an arm and a leg to do so, just to get prescribed anti-diarrheal medication and told to take fluids, same as they can do at home. People who do have any kind of immunodeficiency issues or potentially confounding factors, like being older or very young, are being encouraged to seek medical help, though, as they’re more likely to suffer more serious consequences after contracting this disease.It’s currently unclear where precisely this outbreak came from, and it’s puzzling how an outbreak of this scale might have happened, as, in the words of Matthew Moore, a food safety microbiologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who was quoted in the New York Times, this many infections suggest there was a “massive degree of human fecal contamination.” So probably not just a farm laborer who forgot to wash their hands after using the rest room, something much more substantial than that.Also, because cyclospora takes a while, a week or two, to create enough spores in its host to trigger cyclosporiasis, attribution of the infection difficult, which in turn makes tracking it back to its source difficult; which is part of why this outbreak, which has been going on for weeks, is still under investigation, not a solved problem with definitive answers and in-practice solutions.Right now, experts are recommending higher-risk foods are cooked to at least 158 degrees F, because that temperature kills this pathogen, and washing fresh produce doesn’t always get rid of all the cyclospora on a contaminated piece of produce. Washing fresh produce certainly helps, and it’s better than nothing, and scrubbing is even better. They also recommend avoiding high-risk foods when possible, though of course that won’t always be possible for everyone, nor will it always be possible to get heads of lettuce rather than pre-made salads, though that’s also advised when feasible.Also worth noting here is that even if the FoodNet program was still up to full power, tracking all 9 of those original pathogens, it’s unlikely this outbreak would have been prevented.It likely would have flagged that something was up earlier on in this outbreak, though, which could have led to faster action in the afflicted regions. It probably would have allowed professionals to note hot spots faster, as well, which is what this kind of surveillance system is for: it doesn’t prevent, but it does make it more likely experts will have the chance to keep things from spiraling out of control.Show Noteshttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/well/cyclospora-taylor-farms-lettuce-taco-bell.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/15/well/eat/cyclospora-stomach-bug-what-to-know.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/business/cyclospora-taylor-farms-lettuce.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/well/eat/lettuce-safety-cyclospora-outbreak.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/health/cyclospora-taylor-farms-mexico-taco-bell-lettuce.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclosporiasishttps://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8471761/https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00494755261437456https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/16/diarrhea-outbreak-cyclospora-parasite-cdchttps://www.cdc.gov/cyclosporiasis/php/surveillance/index.htmlhttps://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/expert-qa/cyclosporiasis-outbreakhttps://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2026/07/17/taco-bell-warned-investors-about-cyclospora-before-the-outbreak-and-these-other-chains-did-too/https://www.today.com/health/disease/cyclosporiasis-outbreak-foods-avoid-map-cases-parasite-diarrhea-2026-rcna588006http://cnn.com/2026/07/18/health/cyclospora-what-to-do-wellnesshttps://www.statnews.com/2025/12/22/american-food-safety-funding-cuts-foodnet/https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/foodborne-disease/cdc-cuts-back-foodborne-illness-surveillance-programhttps://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/cdc-quietly-scaled-back-surveillance-program-foodborne-illnesses-rcna227089https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1253(25)00305-X/fulltexthttps://www.cdc.gov/foodnet/about/index.htmlhttps://www.food-safety.com/articles/10646-cdc-slashes-foodnet-surveillance-from-eight-foodborne-pathogens-to-twohttps://www.thermofisher.com/blog/food/foodnet-active-surveillance-for-food-safety/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/18/health/taylor-farms-iceberg-lettuce-recall.htmlhttps://apnews.com/article/cyclospora-lettuce-recall-taylor-farms-taco-bell-8c8bb30fbd100e0c246cffeff6983753 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe
• 
  NATO Summit 2026 14.07.2026 15dk

  This week we talk about Russia, Ukraine, and the Warsaw Pact.We also discuss Patriot interceptors, Hungary, and Article 5.Recommended Book: The Alternative by Nick RomeoTranscriptThe North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, was founded in the wake of WWII, in 1949, in order to affirm unity between non-Soviet European nations, Atlantic nations like Greenland and Iceland, and the US and Canada, over in North America.The main purpose of this unity was to establish a sort of firewall around the western perimeter of the Soviet Union, which at the time was the only global superpower other than the US, because much of the world, but especially Europe, was struggling to recover from the destruction wrought during the second world war, and the Soviets had made pretty clear that they intended to take over everything: they’d already gobbled up most of their neighbors, creating an increasingly expansive buffer zone of Soviet states around their central, Russian territory, and most of the conflicts still playing out, or threatening to play out, globally at this point were either overt or slightly concealed proxy fights between the capitalist democratic forces of the West and the authoritarian, Stalinist forces of the Eastern Soviet bloc.NATO was thus a wall of nations that said, hey, if you attack any of us, that will mean you’re attacking all of us. And that ‘all of us’ included the United States, which was the only individual force capable of standing up to the Soviets at this point, due to its massive conventional military force, and the threat posed by its huge, and still growing, nuclear weapons arsenal.The Soviet counter to NATO was called the Warsaw Pact, which formed in 1955, and these rival alliances carved up Europe during the latter half of the 20th century, until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.As military alliances go, NATO has been fairly successful—Article 5, the portion of the agreement that triggers if a NATO member is attacked, calling the other members to come to their aid, was only activated once, following the terrorist attacks on the US on September 11, 2001; that led to NATO involvement in the US’s attacks on Afghanistan in subsequent years, though NATO forces also periodically got involved in other regional conflicts, like the Kosovo War in 1999, and the Libyan Civil War in 2011, in both cases working with the UN to protect civilians from the actions of violent leaders or assailants. But beyond that, no one, including the Soviets, messed with NATO.NATO has since accepted sixteen new member states, and that expansion is one of the supposed rationales for Russian President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. During Putin’s first presidency, Russia and NATO had been on pretty solid, even cooperative terms, which had some questioning the point of the treaty, since it was originally formed to counter Russian aggression. In Putin’s second presidency, though, things took an antagonistic turn, and when Russia illegally invaded and annexed a part of Ukraine, called Crimea, back in 2014, NATO ceased all cooperation with Russia.When Russian forces launched a full invasion of Ukraine in 2022, NATO suddenly seemed more important than ever, as a reinvigorated Russia, with the stated purpose of, in Putin’s words, reclaiming portions of Europe that were previously part of the extended Soviet Union, parts of the Warsaw Pact, that posed a serious threat to just about everyone, especially European nations that border Russia and Russian allies, like Belarus.What I’d like to talk about today is the 2026 meeting of NATO leaders, and the general state of affairs on the ground in Ukraine, as of mid-2026.—Leaders of NATO member nations typically meet for a summit each year, though the schedule varies a bit, depending on the needs of the moment, and whether there are any NATO-relevant crises that might nudge things forward or cause them to be delayed.The 2026 NATO summit was held in Turkey’s capitol city, Ankara, on July 7 and 8. It was the second such summit hosted by Turkey, and the 36th NATO summit, overall.This meeting was notable for several reasons, many of them directly related to Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, but also the US’s continued ambivalence, at times bordering on active antagonism, toward the treaty, under the Trump administration.Over the course of the past 4 years, Russia has continued to make threats toward the rest of Europe, implying or suggesting that it might have to act militarily against its NATO-member neighbors. During the same period, the US has criticized European NATO member states for not carrying their own weight, most of these nations not spending enough of their GDP on their military and defense infrastructure, in accordance with their treaty obligations, and most more or less relying on the US’s military (and nuclear) umbrella to threaten would-be attackers.This has long been the NATO state of affairs, but under the Trump administration, the US made it a point of contention. And though it’s been a relatively slow process—it’s not easy for a government to pivot toward that scale of remilitarization—these nations have agreed to a 5% of GDP target for defense and defense-related spending by 2035, and in the last year alone, European and Canadian defense spending has increase by 20%; not all of which is immediately convertible into useful, front-line assets and soldiers, but it does represent a significant change to the status quo, which could eventually, in less than a decade, result in a European front-line that’s more European and less NATO, for the first time since that immediate post-WWII period.This meeting also featured a reaffirmation of Article 5, which has always been there and in effect, but some analysis has questioned whether NATO allies, including the US, would actually step up if Russia were to attack the Baltics, for instance. This is a seemingly small move that serves to underline that stance of, if you attack one of us, you’ve attacked all of us, at a moment in which Russia seems to be toying with the idea of picking off pieces of the alliance, to see if they can get away with it, like they did with Crimea back in 2014.There were also announcements related to a fresh $50 billion in defense industry deals, NATO members investing heavily in US-made arms and new assets from elsewhere across the bloc, and a lot of that money is going to drone-war infrastructure and militarized AI models that they hope will prepare NATO for current and next-generation conflicts. Another $217 billion in additional financing commitments from banks across the bloc have also been announced.Ukraine scored some pretty big wins at this year’s NATO summit, getting a license from the US to build Patriot interceptors, the lack of which have resulted in big gaps in the country’s defense system, and about $80 billion in military equipment, assistance, and training for Ukrainian forces was committed by the bloc. There was also a verbal commitment that NATO and its allies “stand united in our unwavering support for Ukraine in defending its freedom, sovereignty, and territorial integrity.” Which isn’t nothing, at a moment in which the US is led by Trump, a person who has frequently sided with Putin in Ukraine-related matters.Ukraine has also signed some bilateral drone deals with NATO member states, reaffirming that Ukraine has become one of the most in-demand experts on this subject, at a moment in which it’s becoming clearer and clearer that low-cost, high-impact drones and similar technologies are likely to dominate battlefields for the foreseeable future.There were also some tensions, mostly sparked by Trump, over his administration’s desire to buy Greenland, which is not a notion that’s supported by anyone else in the bloc, and the lack of NATO support for the US’s war in Iran.Overall, though, there was a decent sense of unity and progress, and Ukraine, again, not a NATO member state, but a nation that hopes to eventually join NATO, received a warm welcome and a bunch of support, which hasn’t always been the case at recent summits.Part of that warmth is likely the consequence of Ukraine’s recent victories on and off the battlefield.Russian continues to pummel Ukrainian cities and kill Ukrainian soldiers and civilians en masse, but Ukraine has managed to keep them from gobbling up territory on scale, and in some recents months, has actually taken territory back. They’ve also gotten very good at successfully attacking Russian infrastructure, especially energy infrastructure, like oil refineries, cargo tankers, and energy storage facilities, across the entire expanse of Russia; something few experts would have predicted that Ukraine would be capable of doing at the beginning of this conflict. This has dramatically weakened Russia’s economy, at least in the short-term.Ukraine now has a thriving defense industry, predicated on the rapid iteration of inexpensive but disproportionately sophisticated arms, especially drones and other aerial weapons, but also autonomous speed boats and other such asymmetric systems. Russia has been frantically upgrading its systems, too, but now that Ukraine has figured out methods for bypassing or overwhelming Russian defenses, it’s been able to strike, quickly and repeatedly, high-value targets that have brought the war home to normal Russians who live far from the front lines, even in Moscow. That combined with strategies and weapons that have turned the frontlines into a meat-grinder for Russian soldiers has weighed heavily on Russian morale, at least for those with boots on the ground.As a consequence of those energy infrastructure attacks, the Russian government has been forced to ration some types of energy product—a huge embarrassment for a country that has at times been called a gas station run by a mafia, their energy products are fundamental to who they are, and their economy—and Russians in Crimea, which was taken from Ukraine more than a decade ago, have been fleeing, as this peninsula is close to Ukraine, is part of Ukraine, just occupied by Russia right now, and has several vulnerable arteries through which people and supplies are shipped from Russia, and those arteries have been frequently attacked and are difficult to protect.Ukraine is still persistently on the back foot, then, and still facing an enemy that has essentially every advantage, from money to manpower to foreign support to the size of its arsenal.Against all odds, though, Ukraine continues to not just hold its ground, but to build up its military capabilities, innovate on existing models, and perform high-leverage attacks against its in every way superior invader; which is, in turn, netting it more support from outside allies that have, at times, wavered—and that’s especially true of the US under the Trump administration, but until recently the EU’s support has also been hamstrung by the recently usurped Hungarian leader, and Putin ally, Viktor Orbán. Following Orbán’s ouster, the EU was able to move forward with paused support commitments, though, and while Trump is still holding back on much of the same from the US, there’s a chance that more success by Ukraine will continue to tip the balance away from total freeze-out, to more, and more substantial, if perhaps still grudging, support.Show Noteshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATOhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Ankara_NATO_summithttps://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-occupation-update-july-9-2026/https://acleddata.com/monitor/ukraine-conflict-monitorhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_war_(2022%E2%80%93present)https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/08/world/europe/a-license-to-make-patriot-defense-systems-may-be-a-big-boost-for-ukraine.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/06/world/europe/ukraine-russia-patriot-air-defense.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/07/04/world/europe/ukraine-russia-crimea-war-strikes.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/world/europe/ukraine-patriots-trump-russia.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/08/world/europe/russia-nato-europe-ukraine.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/07/world/europe/nato-trump-rutte-ankara-turkey.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/03/world/europe/putin-ukraine-donbas-battlefield-visit.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/03/world/europe/russia-gas-shortages.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/02/world/europe/russia-ukraine-military-battlefield.htmlhttps://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-oil-trump-zelenskyy-putin-6cb5602f1cf309533ed0cf5c734e19d8https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c70yd1g67z5ohttps://www.france24.com/en/russia-bans-oil-exports-as-ukraine-strikes-cause-fuel-shortageshttps://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/ukraine-creates-long-range-military-071810180.htmlhttps://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/10/ukraine-russia-crimea-fuel-oil.htmlhttps://www.dw.com/ru/reuters-rf-perekryla-azovodonskoj-kanal-posle-atak-bpla/a-77913327https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/10/politics/senators-agreement-trump-administration-russia-sanctionshttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/10/ukraine-war-briefing-kyiv-reaches-political-agreement-with-us-on-patriot-interceptor-production-licenceshttps://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/09/nato-trump-rutte-ukraine-russia-us-iran.htmlhttps://www.atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/eleven-takeaways-from-the-nato-summit-in-ankara/https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/8/five-key-takeaways-from-the-nato-summit-in-ankarahttps://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/8/nato-pledges-70-billion-euros-for-ukraine-as-trump-praises-peace-progress This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe
• 
  Digital Gaming 07.07.2026 18dk

  This week we talk about Sony, Nintendo, and the Playstation.We also discuss Grand Theft Auto, the 3DO, and digital dark ages.Recommended Book: 3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years by John ScalziTranscriptThe earliest video game consoles that were made to be used in the home, as opposed to being set up in an arcade, were hardwired like their arcade kin. That means rather than being able to play a bunch of different games, they were basically just single-game boxes: you would buy a machine that allowed you to play Pong, for instance, and if you wanted to play another game, even by the same maker, Atari, you would have to buy another whole console with its own screen, controls, etc, to do so.That was the state of the art in the early to mid 1970s. By the late-70s, the concept of swappable games became reality with the introduction of what are called ROM cartridges. ROM stands for read-only memory and is a type of storage common in computers and other devices, which allows whatever you store on it to persist, which is a contrast to RAM, which is the type of memory that determines how much you can do on a device at any given moment, and which disappears when the device is turned off.So these ROM cartridges were kind of like the portion of the hard drive that’s used to boot up your computer, storing the bare-basics of the system so it can be initialized and understand how to run all the other software that builds upon that baseline. And that memory was stored in durable, plastic cases that made them usable by ordinary, non-techy people. You could buy a game and handle the cartridge, popping it into your game console hardware and removing it, to make way for another game, over and over and over again, and that use would be unlikely to damage the ROM chip.This same general format was flexible enough that it lasted through the mid-90s, the capacity of the ROM chip continuing to grow as the associated tech improved, and the capabilities of the central console hardware that used these cartridges became more sophisticated. Upgrades were slowly added to the innards of the plastic case, as well, including things like battery backups that enabled saved games, and the Super Nintendo’s Super FX chip, which enabled 3D graphics that would have otherwise been impossible with the contemporary state of the art.The next generation of gaming consoles relied on another medium, though, and one that had several benefits over the long-lived game cartridge.CD-ROM discs, which were flat, circular, and contained information that was encoded and read with lasers, had been around in some form since the late-1980s, and were even used in a few early gaming consoles, like the PC Engine CD-ROM, which barely anyone bought, and the Sega-CD add-on for the Sega Genesis, and 3DO consoles, which a few more, but still relatively few people purchased.The release of the first Sony Playstation, now known as the PS1, in 1994 changed that, though, and this shift was partially the result of Sony’s impressive game lineup, but was also due to the strength of the CD medium. Each CD-ROM could hold 650-700 MB of information, which was more than 100-times the capacity of the competing Nintendo 64’s cartridges.There were downsides to this new standard; CD-ROMs were less durable than plastic-encased cartridges, and they were very slow to load, as well, because information stored in ROM chips could be more or less instantly booted, while the info stored on discs had to be spun up and read first, resulting in sluggish load screens throughout the gaming experience, and especially on the initial boot-up of the system.That said, the far superior storage, and the dramatically reduced cost of these laser-etched discs—cartridges could cost $15-20 apiece to manufacture, while CD-ROMs often cost pennies apiece—that triggered a rapid transition in the gaming world to this new medium. Handheld consoles stuck with cartridges for a lot longer, due to the nature of the use-case and difficulties associated with trying to use spinning discs in portable hardware, but everyone else moved to discs pretty rapidly, after Sony proved the utility of the model, and many aspects of video gaming were upgraded as a result of all that additional storage capacity.That capacity continued to grow as CD-ROM were replaced with DVDs, which could hold 4.7-8.5 GB per disc, again, up from 650-700 MB; the industry made that change in the years 2000 and 2001, with the PS2 and Xbox consoles. And then in 2006, the PS3 moved to Blu-ray discs, which could hold a whopping 25-50 GB per disc, once again resetting gaming expectations—though Xbox stuck with DVDs, and Nintendo’s Wii, Wii U, and Gamecube consoles used proprietary disc formats that had a lot lower capacity compared to their competition.Leading into the 2010s, even those Blu-rays were straining under the weight of some big-name, AAA games, some of which required multiple discs and mandatory hard drive installs from those discs, because the scope of these gaming worlds and their high-end graphics required just a stunning amount of space.Video game companies had already started making the shift to digital products in the early 2000s, though, Xbox Live Arcade and the Playstation Store emerging in 2005 and 2006 respectively, and Steam, which popped up in 2003, was making digital downloads for games common on PCs several years earlier.Digital became even more popular in the 20-teens, and in 2020, digital sales of console games surpassed physical sales for the first time. The PS5 and Xbox Series S shipped console versions without disc drives for the first time, and many physical games became basically methods of checking a game’s license, to ensure it’s not pirated, because the discs installed the game on the console’s hard drive, just like a download, anyway.What I’d like to talk about today is the perhaps natural next step in this transition: a recent announcement by Sony that they’ll no longer be making disc-based Playstation games beginning in 2028, and why some critics are calling this a worrying and anti-consumer move.—On July 1, 2026, Sony announced that’s it’s going all-in on digitally delivered games. It will halt production of game discs beginning in January of 2028, and after that, customers will only be able to purchase new games digitally, via their Playstation Store and retailers.This follows another recent announcement by game company Rockstar Games that their massively anticipated Grand Theft Auto VI game, which is set to hit digital shelves on November 19 of this year, will not be available on disc at all; it will be downloadable, and the physical copies customers can buy in stores won’t be physical copies at all: it will be a box with a download code inside, which amounts to the same thing—you use the code to download the game, exactly the same as if you had bought it online, but with packaging for that code.That’s a big deal because the Grand Theft Auto series is one of the biggest and most popular series in gaming history; other game makers have been scrambling to adjust their own release dates so as not to overlap with this new, highly anticipated game’s release; it’s expected to be an absolutely massive moment in the gaming world when this new entry in the series finally lands.That said, the writing has been on the wall for the transition to digital games for a while, now. Game company Capcom recently announced that 93% of its game sales were digital in its last fiscal year, and other companies have reported similar numbers; it’s currently around 85% for Sony. As a result, many consoles are now shipping models without disc drives, and some, like the recently announced Steam Machine, don’t even have a disc-drive version.Digital games are also cheaper to make because the company behind them only has to provide download keys, rather than having to pay some amount for each and every physical item produced, packaged, and shipped, and these companies, and the retailers that sell their games, will never run out of a popular game, which might otherwise be an issue for big released like the aforementioned Grand Theft Auto.There are quite a few downsides to the digitization of games, though, including that in many cases, you don’t actually own the games you buy, you just own a license to download and play them. That means if licensing changes, or the storefront through which you bought a game closes, you will likely lose access to that game you bought, without getting any kind of refund.If your account is banned or you lose access to your account for some reason, all your games will suddenly be inaccessible, too. If you don’t have access to the internet, allowing your console to phone home and check to make sure you’re not pirating things on a regular basis, that might also mean no gaming for you.Almost always, you can’t sell or trade digital games, while physical games allow for a thriving secondary market, often allowing gamers to buy old discs and cartridges decades after a game was released, and often for far lower prices. Many of these games can even be played by later consoles that have back-compatibility.Doing away with discs and other physical media is great for companies like Sony, then, because they no longer have to pay to create the individual discs, no longer have to pay for the drives that play the discs, so the price of making consoles drops a bit, and it also means that secondary market for games goes away: if you want to play old games, you have to buy them from Sony, and all those used games already on the secondary market, or a game disc borrowed from a friend, are no longer competition for them, serving as alternatives to the digital version they’d prefer to sell you.Another bigger-picture concern here, though, is that this will make game preservation efforts a lot more difficult, and for many of the same reasons it will make maintaining a library and back-catalog of games difficult for consumers.Often, when a video game store shuts down, either for economic reasons or because it sells content for devices that are no longer maintained, those games and other content also go away. Sometimes they can remain on those older devices, and sometimes the digital rights management software, the DRM in that content and on those devices auto-deletes games from the hardware.Right now, for instance, Sony is saying that after it halts digital sales of PS3 and Vita games, that halting taking place over the next year, players will still be able to download their previously purchased content for the foreseeable future. That ‘foreseeable future’ phrasing is doing a lot of work, there, though, and historically this kind of shut down has eventually become a full shut down, a lot of games, those that haven’t been carried over to new stores to be played as vintage options on newer consoles, have simply disappeared; maybe still existing on some old hardware somewhere, if it wasn’t deleted by DRM, but maybe not. In either case, preserving that software for historic research and archiving purposes becomes very difficult and expensive, at least compared to archiving the same game on a disc or cartridge.That closure of the PS3 and Vita stores, for example, is expected to result in the loss of about 2,200 digital-only games that will no longer be available for purchase, and of those, about 138 are not available on any other platform, and will thus essentially disappear.This game industry concern echoes larger concerns about what’s called a digital dark age: a moment in time, maybe just a few years, maybe a few decades long during which a whole lot of the content that was created and available, disappears, possibly because of outdated file formats, maybe because the storage mediums that were used didn’t hold up over time, or possibly because the data from the era was somehow corrupted, encrypted, or decayed.There’s concern that a whole lot of information from the early personal computing era will disappear from historical records, for instance, because the floppy disks on which a lot of that information was stored are obsolete and thus increasingly difficult to access; few people have hardware that allows them to use floppy disks, these days.CD-ROMs, DVDs, and other optical discs are also a concern because of so-called disc rot, which refers to the chemical degradation of this storage medium. Many such discs are prone to failure because of light damage, the oxidation of their reflective layer, and the de-bonding of the adhesive that was used to hold the disc’s multiple layers together.A lot of seemingly archival media might then degrade, even after being stored in a seemingly long-term fashion, which could also contribute to a dark age moment, a whole period’s worth of data and entertainment and art lost because the CDs and DVDs on which they were stored simply fell apart before they could be converted to a longer-form medium. This could serve as an argument in favor of digitization, then, because many of the mediums on which these games are currently stored might degrade, anyway, and moving them to hard drives, rather than discs, could serve as a superior long-term home.That said, the concern with digitizing everything is similar, in that media made available for online purchase is simply stored in a hard drive somewhere else on the planet. If something happens to the data centers in which these games are stored, or those data centers are needed for another, more profitable purpose, or a bunch of them are destroyed in a conflict, that could result in the same outcome as disc rot and the storage of data in formats that are no longer accessible.It also makes these games susceptible to economics, though, because if the company behind them decides it’s time to move on, there won’t be physical copies archivists can scoop up and save; they could try to download these games, but often the nature of the software, of the DRM that keeps them from being pirated, hinders or prevents such efforts.The digitization of gaming and the shift away from physical copies of games seems to be inevitable at this point, and there are a lot of good economic, technological, and convenience reasons for it.There are quite a few downsides to this evolution as well, though, including those that negatively impact game consumers, alongside many of the same issues that threaten other types of media and data. And we don’t, technologically or civilizationally, have solutions for those problems yet. And that gap could someday result in massive gulfs in our knowledge and documentation of this moment in video gaming history.Show Noteshttps://blog.archive.org/2026/04/23/gone-but-not-forgotten-recovering-the-dead-web/https://www.engadget.com/2207297/playstation-just-struck-a-hammer-blow-to-game-preservation/https://www.engadget.com/forza-horizon-4-will-be-pulled-from-digital-stores-and-game-pass-in-december-134510642.htmlhttps://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/03/why-game-archivists-are-dreading-this-months-3ds-wii-u-eshop-shutdown/https://www.engadget.com/2205792/sony-will-stop-making-disc-based-playstation-games-starting-2028/https://www.engadget.com/2207546/sony-repurposing-austrian-playstation-disc-factory/https://www.engadget.com/2206315/xbox-is-reportedly-testing-a-way-to-digitize-your-disc-based-games/https://www.engadget.com/2205792/sony-will-stop-making-disc-based-playstation-games-starting-2028/https://www.theverge.com/report/960173/microsoft-xbox-disc-to-digital-feature-physical-game-collectionhttps://www.theverge.com/games/956389/grand-theft-auto-6-gta-digital-code-in-box-physical-gameshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_agehttps://longnow.org/ideas/shining-a-light-on-the-digital-dark-age/https://www.americanscientist.org/article/avoiding-a-digital-dark-agehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_video_game_consoleshttps://www.videogameconsolelibrary.com/history-of-game-media/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe
• 
  2026 European Heat Wave 30.06.2026 17dk

  This week we talk about air conditioners, pressure systems, and heat stress.We also discuss weather memes, climate change, and dirty grids.Recommended Book: Battle of the Linguist Mages by Scotto MooreTranscriptAn air conditioner, or AC, or maybe air con if you’re in the UK, is a device that moves heat from one location to another. In doing so, it usually dehumidifies the air, as well, so it can rapidly cool a room or entire building by shifting both heat and humidity from that room or building, elsewhere—usually outside.This is basically the same technology used in refrigerators, a process called vapor compression allowing the device to circulate a substance called refrigerant using a compressor, a condenser, an evaporator, and an expansion valve, which—and this is a very superficial explanation of what’s happening—but these components take advantage of forced circulation and a phase-change between gas and liquid to transfer heat from the room you want to cool, or the inside of the refrigerator, and move that heat outside your building, or to the back and/or bottom of the fridge.This is a far more active mode of air conditioning, of cooling and dehumidifying the air, than has been used throughout history. Most early methods relied on passive approaches, including but not limited to architectural elements, the use of plants and optimization of air flow, or creating basement areas for things that needed to stay cool.Researchers have dabbled with more active methods of conditioning air for centuries, though, and several 19th century inventions served as precursors for the first iteration of modern ACs, some of which were used to create ice, which was useful unto itself, but could also be used to cool a room, if far less effectively and efficiently than an actual, holistic AC unit.In 1894, industrial-grade ammonia compressors, powered by electricity, made this category of device suitable for urban environments; previously they just were far too bulky and difficult to power for city use. By 1896, the Hungarian engineer who came up with this new riff on the theme, István Röck, was manufacturing what he called dry air cooling apparatuses for hospitals, theaters, and other large spaces.Just five years later, in 1901, an American inventor named Willis H Carrier developed what’s widely considered to be the first modern electrical AC unit, selling the first one to a lithography company in New York, before patenting the term air conditioning in 1906. The first residential version of this device was installed in 1914, and in 1915 the Carrier Air Conditioning Company of America was formed—a business that still exists today.The impact of air conditioning, and this general technology category, as again, it’s also used in modern refrigeration units, cannot be overstated. This tech didn’t become widespread in the US, which is where it initially took off, in large part due to Carrier and other AC businesses’ presence in the States, until the mid-20th century, and before that, before the 1950s, the state of Florida was technically occupied, but only just barely because of its extreme heat and humidity and abundance of mosquitos. The population of Florida in 1950 was about 2.7 million, and today it’s about 23.5 million—that influx of people began after AC units became standard in buildings across the state, and the country. We’ve seen similar migrations as a result of too-hot places sudden becoming a lot more pleasant.Similarly, refrigeration enabled a boggling amount of change within the food and beverage industry, the chemicals and industrial materials industries, and the healthcare and life science industries, because before the advent of the cold chain—the system of refrigerated spaces, including boxes and trucks and planes and ships that allowed medicines and foods and other substances to stay cold from their origin to their end-consumer—it simply wasn’t possible to sell or create or work with many of these products and materials.The distribution of this technology is not universal or equal, however, and in some cases that inequality, that lack of access to this technology in some spaces, is the result of choice, not inaccessibility. And that’s what I’d like to talk about today: the spread, or lack thereof, of AC technologies and products, and how a recent heat wave in Europe may lead to more installations of this type of product across the continent.—Beginning in late-May of 2026, a series of severe heatwaves engulfed Europe, and especially Western Europe, breaking all sorts of temperature records and leading to a bunch of heat-related deaths.A recent meme gives a good sense of just how bad this heat wave has been.Back in 2014, as part of a campaign by the World Meteorological Organization, dozens of weather presenters from around the world were invited to record fictionalized weather reports from 2050, with the intention of giving people a sense of how global climate change might impact daily life even as soon as just 36 years in the future.One of these presenters, from France, gave a report of an imagined scenario in which a heat wave descended upon Europe, showing temperatures of 40 degrees celsius, which is about 104 degrees Fahrenheit, with some areas seeing temperatures as high as 43 C or 109.4 degrees F.This was generally considered to be a baffling, maybe even sci-fi sort of prediction at the time. But this clip has resurfaced and widely shared, as, just 12 years later, not 36, this recent heat wave has not just met, but in some cases surpassed that imagined, too-crazy-to-be-real European heat wave scenario.Across much of Western Europe, those temperatures milestones were hit, and in a few locations they were beat by as much as 20 degrees F.For a few days in France, temperatures were higher than in Las Vegas, Nevada and Phoenix, Arizona, coming within 2 degrees F of temperatures in famously too-hot Death Valley, California.All-time high temperature records were broken in Germany, and a handful of other countries are waiting to see if provisionally recorded high-temperatures they experienced hold up, to see if their own records will be broken. The UK recorded a temperature of 37.1 C (98.78 F), the Netherlands saw a top temperature of 39.4 C (nearly 103 F), Belgium hit 40 C (104 F), and Germany recorded 41.3 C (106.3 F)—all temperatures that are 5-12 C above seasonable averages, and this has led to all manner of infrastructural issues, as well.A nuclear power plant in Switzerland had to take both reactors off the grid because the temperature of the river that cools it got too hot, a Eurostar train broke down east of Brussels with about 400 people on board, and 3 people had to be taken to the hospital. A bunch of big public events were cancelled, hospitals were filled to the point of having to triage visitors, and, if these on-the-ground issues weren’t enough, researchers in Switzerland have warned that almost all of the winter reserves built up on their glaciers are gone, which suggests the glaciers themselves will begin melting soon—something that usually doesn’t start happening until August.This heat wave was the result of a potent heat dome, which is a pocket of high pressure that developed as a result of jet stream fluctuations that pulled hot air north, out of warmer portions of Africa. This type of high pressure pocket can then cause the heat it gathers to just sit there, unmoving, whereas typically it would be pushed around, causing it to disperse, and to thus not have such a significant impact on people and other life on the ground.Unfortunately, these sorts of disruptions to the previous climatic norm are becoming more common as the climate shifts, due to the accumulation of CO2 and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. The regulating systems we’ve evolved with are changing because there’s more overall energy, more heat, powering these systems across the planet, and that means we’re no longer able to predict them as accurately, but also that some of these systems could fundamentally change or disappear, possibly in the near future.Events like this, which are currently rare, then, could soon become common. And meteorologists in Europe have warned, during this major heat wave, that this sort of event could be a regular thing, and soon, and could even last a lot longer; not a matter of days or weeks, but possibly spanning months at a time, without reprieve.That’s not great news for a continent that, until now, has generally been pretty okay with its existing heat and weather infrastructure. Unlike the US and other countries that have some incredibly hot regions, leading to the widespread installation of AC units, only about 20% of homes across Europe have AC installed. As a result, as this heat wave descended on the area, trapping heat inside buildings that were constructed with cooler weather in mind, people have been unable to remain indoors, to work, to sleep; it’s been miserable. And in some cases, deadly; the combination of heat and humidity making it more difficult for peoples’ bodies to regulate heat via sweat, and that’s led to an increase in heat stress on their bodies—which is just a miserable thing to deal with, but it also means a lot of people, including but not limited to the very young and very old, are more likely to die, their bodies simply incapable of handling that level of persistent temperature strain.Back in the summer of 2022, during another, less intense heat wave, more than 60,000 people died across Europe due to heat stress and related ailments. The numbers are still out on this more recent heat wave, but the stats are expected to be pretty grim, as in addition to the individual strain people in these afflicted areas are suffering, infrastructure tends to collapse in unprepared areas, hospitals not functioning or not functioning well, their machines and IT systems failing due to the heat, and the medical professionals working in these places suffering alongside everyone else, their bodies under constant heat stress, not getting enough sleep, and so on. There have already been a lot of reports of children dying of heat stress after being left in cars for short periods, and people drowning in large numbers, trying to cool off un-moderated bodies of water.The conversation that tends to bubble up in the wake of such incidents is representative of the larger conversation around climate change and its impacts.Air conditioning, and lower-powered, but just as effective heating and cooling options like heat pumps, which are basically ACs that work in both directions, but which tend to consume less energy than conventional AC units, these devices are amazing short-term solutions and help people survive and thrive in even the hottest, most humid and unwelcoming environments and climates.They also require, especially in the case of conventional ACs, a whole lot of power. And across much of the world right now, that means burning fossil fuels.The sad irony is that in powering these devices that are more necessary because of climate change impacts, people and institutions are contributing more to that large-scale problem, worsening the impacts of climate change, which then necessitates more artificial, power-hungry cooling.Experts continue to remind lawmakers and others in the position to make big-picture decisions on these sorts of matters that there are a lot of opportunities to reduce ground-level temperatures in passive, non-energy-hungry ways.Painting large surfaces brighter colors so more heat is reflected rather than absorbed, planting more trees and other greenery, installing solar panels, using passive building materials and architectural techniques to improve insulation and air flow; there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit for areas that are becoming warmer, and which would otherwise require a lot more energy and fossil fuel burning just to keep life tolerable and survivable.Unfortunately, many of these options aren’t widespread or even well-known, and the short-term solutions, like conventional AC units, are quick and effective, and a lot easier, currently at least, to install than superior options, like heat pumps.There’s a good chance, then, than the most impacted areas will become even bigger contributors to the problems they’re trying to solve; until larger-scale incentives, subsidies, and policies change that status quo, at least.Show Noteshttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/24/climate/europe-fastest-warming-continent.htmlhttps://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/jun/24/europe-heatwave-live-news-updates-uk-record-breaking-temperatures-italy-red-alerthttps://arstechnica.com/science/2026/06/the-sad-inevitability-of-europes-heat-wave/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/27/climate/europe-heat-wave-nuclear-trains-infrastructure.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/26/weather/europe-heat-wave-temperatures.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/26/world/europe/europe-heat-climate-change-politics.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/26/world/europe/france-heat-alcohol-paris-ban.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/26/climate/europe-heat-wave-climate-change.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/world/europe/france-children-heat-cars-deaths.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/world/europe/heat-wave.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/arts/europe-museums-heat.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/weather/belgium-heat-wave-brussels.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/world/europe/paris-canal-swimming-heatwave-france.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/24/climate/europe-fastest-warming-continent.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_European_heatwaveshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_Kingdom_heatwaveshttps://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2026/06/25/french-tv-presenter-once-imagined-2050-heat-wave-did-france-reach-those-levels-this-week/https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/26/climate/european-heat-wave-impossible-global-warminghttps://www.cbsnews.com/news/europe-air-conditioning-deadly-heat-waves-more-common/https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/06/europe-air-conditioning/687711/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_conditioninghttps://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jun/25/hospitals-nhs-england-critical-incidents-machines-it-fail-extreme-heat This is a public episode. 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• 
  Balcony Solar 23.06.2026 14dk

  This week we talk about plug-in power, renewables, and Germany.We also discuss inverters, solar arrays, and microgrids.Recommended Book: Consider This by Chuck PalahnuikTranscriptMost climate scientists and knowledgable folks in adjacent fields will tell you that, as a species, we’re way behind where we need to be if we’re going to avoid a whole lot of negative consequences caused by global climate change.We’ve blazed past a bunch of tipping points already, and while the worst-case scenarios we were worried about a decade ago are no longer likely because of the energy-generation and related changes we’ve made globally, since then, the damage caused up to this point is already doing some pretty bad things to our water cycle and other temperature-regulating systems, and that’s looking like it will get even worse over the next several decades—even if worse no longer means cataclysmic in the sense of ending all life on the planet.That said, even noting that progress has been a lot slower than most experts would prefer, progress is happening in regards to the deployment of renewable energy sources, and in the replacement and retirement of dirty, carbon- and methane-spewing sources, like coal, petroleum, and gas.As of 2026, the global share of total electricity generation, so all electricity produced by all sources for all purposes, is about 33.8% for renewables, marking the first time renewables have been used to produce more than a third of the total electricity produced, globally; that also means renewables have surpassed coal for electricity generation for the first time.While hydro and wind continue to contribute to the growth of renewables deployment and electricity generation, solar power is by far the biggest growth area for renewables right now, and solar, alone, covers 75% of total electricity demand growth in 2025—which means as countries around the world deploy more electricity generation assets to account for electricity demand growth, three-quarters of that demand is being met by solar. And this is notable because typically that kind of demand, the majority of which arises in huge, rapidly scaling countries like China and India, has up till recently been met by the dirtiest of energy production sources, coal.There’s also been a 0.2% reduction in fossil fuel generation, year-on-year, which is a very small number, but that level of production is massive, and there are a lot of subsidies and other mechanisms that keep fossil fuels flourishing around the world, so every little sliver of fossil fuel energy production reduction is still a pretty significant thing.Many of these renewables-related wins, in recent years, have been attributable to the large-scale installation of solar facilities, backed by massive, utility-scale battery backups, primarily in China.China is by far the largest producer of solar panels and related technologies—Chinese companies produce somewhere between 80-90% of all the key components and perform the same portion of all key manufacturing stages for the global supply chain, while also controlling the vast majority of resources necessary to manufacture solar panels. And it has been on a tear over the past decade or so, installing just a silly amount of solar infrastructure. Which is good, because China is also seeing a lot of growth in energy demand, so if they weren’t deploying that much solar, they would likely be deploying that much coal infrastructure, instead.That said, while huge solar arrays are important to renewables growth, there’s also been a recent boom in smaller-scale solar energy deployment in recent years, especially but not exclusively across Europe. And that’s what I’d like to talk about today: the emergence of so-called ‘balcony solar,’ and what it might mean for the further expansion of solar’s footprint around the world.—In 2025, Utah, which is a deeply Conservative, Republican state, became the first US state to pass a bill that makes it easier to legally install plug-in solar panel systems.As of mid-2026, about 30 states have followed suit, and even more are considering it, laws allowing for the installation of such solar technologies winding their way through legislative bodies on the back of the popularity and seeming no-downsides nature of this tech product category.Plug-in solar, also sometimes called balcony solar or garden solar, is currently most popular in Germany, which is the biggest market for this product right now, with about four million such systems installed as of 2025.To understand the popularity of this type of solar installation, it’s useful to understand that conventional solar installations have typically required a decent amount of electrical surgery to install. They’ve usually involved a large number of panels operating as an array, and that array has produced quite a lot of electricity that then has to be funneled as a direct current either back into the local grid using what amounts to two-way wiring, which makes these arrays function like any other power plant, or that electricity is converted using an inverter into an alternating current, where AC is the electrical standard, anyway, so that it can directly power a large building like a hospital or school, or be stored in a large battery facility.All of these options require a huge up front investment, and a reworking of local energy infrastructure so that solar can be incorporated. And that investment requirement, and the necessity to hire specialist electricians to get it all done, severely limits the range of this tech, because there are only so many entities that can afford it, only so many spaces that can deploy that number of panels, the number required to make that investment make sense, economically, is generally quite large, and there are only so many specialists of that kind in a given country, so the labor aspect of this is a big deal, too, these sorts of projects often severely backlogged.Plug-in solar, in contrast, is usually sold as a kit with one or two small- to medium-sized panels and a microinverter or plug-in inverter, depending on whether the end-user’s existing electrical setup uses an AC or DC current.A home owner or even a renter with a balcony or garden, or the right amount of space outside one of their windows, can buy one of these systems, hang or place the solar panel or panels in a location where they will get a decent amount of sun, and then plug them in, via the inverter, directly to their home’s outlet.The electricity generated by the panels is then shared through the building’s existing wiring to all of their outlets, and this allows the resident to use that available energy, first, only drawing energy from the local grid when there isn’t enough from the solar panels available. And all of this happens automatically—the solar energy is used if available, and if not, energy is drawn from the grid like normal.This creates a layer of essentially free, clean energy for the resident with a usually fairly small up-front cost: these plug-in solar kits can cost as little as $500, with larger systems that generate more electricity costing between $1200 and $3000; so even on the high-end, because there’s no additional installation cost, the home owner or renter setting it all up themselves, this is an investment that can easily pay for itself, usually within 2-5 years.There are caveats here, including that not all grid systems are complaint with this use-case, so would-be plug-in solar users have to check to make sure their local setup can handle this sort of application, and there are many places where this product type still isn’t legal, in some cases because of concerns about people installing it without checking to make sure their wiring and the local grid can handle it, and in some cases because of old laws that favor local energy grid companies and their business models, or which favor fossil fuel energy production.The explosion in use of this type of small solar setup, though, speaks volumes about how good a deal it is for many people, and even those who don’t live in particularly sunny areas—so places where traditional solar arrays wouldn’t make sense, economically—are finding them useful, because they still pay for themselves within some number of years, due to energy bill savings. It’s also possible to install home-scale battery systems alongside these balcony solar systems, which means even small trickles of solar energy production can add up, and can be used at night, when the sun isn’t shining at all.There are quite a few possible ramifications of this trend.At the local, household level, these sorts of systems can dampen the impact of energy price increases, due to global issues, like the gumming up of the Strait of Hormuz, and due to local issues, like the trend of energy companies increasing prices because of new data centers being added to their grid. That, in turn, can reduce the impact of certain aspects of inflation on individuals home owners and renters.Larger-scale, though, these systems also serve as a sort of deconstructed secondary energy grid.In Germany, for instance, as of late 2025, around 1.14 gigawatts of energy was being produced by balcony solar systems across the country. That’s 1.14 GW of pressure taken off of local energy grids, and that represents more resilience for these grids, too, as reduced pressure means fewer brown-outs and similar negative fluctuations. It also means people who have such systems won’t be as negatively impacted by issues that take down grids; and that means normal, brown-out like issues, but also problems related to potential cyberattacks and hacks and even physical conflicts. That kind of resiliency is what every nation hopes to have, because it makes strikes on them less damaging, and this is one way to achieve that kind of resiliency—a deconstructed network of microgrids, underpinning the macro-scale one—all at a relatively low cost.These sorts of systems are also becoming more widely available, IKEA selling several kits in many countries where they’ve been made legal, and other retailers, like Lidl and Amazon are also getting in on the action, making these kits more widely available as the trend spreads.China still controls the vast, vast majority of solar energy asset production, so there’s a chance, especially in the case of a theoretical future conflict, that they could turn off the tap on this and these types of assets would go away for a time, which would be bad if local grids come to rely on them taking some of the pressure off the local macro-grid.Those theoretical economic warfare concerns aside, though, if legalization continues to spread, plug-in solar could be one of the best and most successful methods for deploying clean energy to areas where it hasn’t been a particularly compelling sell, and where local infrastructure or politics has made such deployment unlikely or impossible up till this point.Show Noteshttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/14/opinion/solar-panels-balcony-backyard-plugin.htmlhttps://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/globally-86-percent-of-the-new-generating-capacity-was-renewable-in-2025/https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/05/soaring-solar-and-a-surge-in-hydro-push-more-coal-off-the-us-grid/https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/global-growth-in-solar-the-largest-ever-observed-for-any-source/https://www.iea.org/reports/sdg7-data-and-projections/modern-renewableshttps://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-review-2026/https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/china-solar-cell-exports-grow-73-in-2025/https://rhg.com/research/minerals-metals-and-megawatts-how-chinas-power-generation-drives-its-industrial-metals-ecosystem/https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/what-to-know-balcony-solarhttps://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/balcony-solar-taking-state-legislatures-by-stormhttps://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/balcony-panels-germany-utahhttps://www.energysage.com/news/plug-in-balcony-solar-panels/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balcony_solar_powerhttps://www.pv-tech.org/maine-passes-balcony-solar-law-virginia-and-colorado-to-follow/https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/plug-solar-power-could-be-coming-balcony-near-youhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_panelhttps://www.ingka.com/newsroom/solar-energy-for-the-many-ikea-belgium-to-offer-balcony-solar-kits/ This is a public episode. 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• 
  Cholesterol Therapies 16.06.2026 13dk

  This week we talk about LDL, HDL, and cardiovascular issues.We also discuss one-time therapies, statins, and pharmaceutical economics.Recommended Book: Blood by Dr. Jen GunterTranscriptCholesterol is the most common type of what’s called a sterol, which is a type of steroid, but also structurally technically an alcohol. But functionally, and classified by scientists, cholesterol is a lipid, which in this case is similar to a fat in all but how the body uses it. Cholesterol is the type of sterol most commonly found in animals—other types are found in plants and fungi—and its function, and this is where it varies from fats, which are used to store energy, is to basically help hold the cell membrane together, and it also serves as an intracellular messenger.Cholesterol is especially prevalent in the brain and spinal cord of animals, but it’s found throughout their bodily tissues, as well, and again, it’s vital for holding everything together and helping things communicate, in addition to being a precursor for vitamin D, steroid hormones, and bile.You want to have cholesterol, then, as without it you would be dead.Too much cholesterol in the blood, however, can also make you dead, especially when it’s bound to what’s called low-density lipoprotein, or LDL, as that contributes to cardiovascular disease like heart attacks and aneurysms, which can massively impact one’s overall wellness and quality of life, and at extremes lead to the whole system shutting down as a consequence of heart attack, stroke, and the like.A lot of things can contribute to the development of cardiovascular disease, including habits like smoking, genetic predisposition, and the enthusiastic consumption of alcohol and unhealthy foods. But high blood cholesterol, of the LDL variety, is one of the top contributors, as these low-density clusters of lipoprotein can clog the pathways that blood takes throughout our bodies. Other, denser types of lipoproteins, HDLs, can clear it, like a heavier, denser substance pushing through clogs of less-dense materials that are gumming up a pipe, but LDL is at times accumulated as a result of consuming delicious but unhealthy foods, which are hard to avoid, and for some people the only consistently available and affordable foods; and for other people LDL accumulates as a result of their genetic predispositions—two things that are devilishly difficult to change.What I’d like to talk about today is a new type of therapy that may be very good news for people who struggle with the accumulation of LDL, and why this is being seen as very good news more broadly, at the scale of entire nations, as well.—Pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly is testing a new, experimental drug called VERVE-102 which is a one-time infusion that is currently administered over the course of about four hours, and once completed, it turns off a gene called PCSK9, which is responsible for making a protein that regulates cholesterol levels in humans.As I said, this drug is still being tested, so these are early results. But in a study of 35 people with high cholesterol levels, high levels of LDL or LDL-C, which is short for lipoprotein cholesterol, they found that this infusion, which again, is a one-time treatment, so get it once and then theoretically at least you never have to get anything done ever again, it reduced those LDL and LDL-C levels by as much as 62%, and that reduction was maintained a year and a half after the infusion; that’s how far out they’re retested so far, and the hope is that each retest will continue to show the same.On the strength of those very promising results, a Phase 2 study has been planned by the end of 2026, and the US Food and Drug Administration, the FDA, previously fast-tracked this existing study, because of the promise and potential this drug already demonstrated in early studies; all of which is considered to be very significant progress and possibility.To understand that significance, though, it’s useful to know some health stats. And I’m going to focus on the US here, as that’s where this drug is being developed, but many wealthy countries have similar stats, at least in terms of cardiovascular disease struggles.As of 2024, which is the last year we had good, cohesive data on this in the US, it was estimated that about 11-12% of the US adult population has high cholesterol levels. This typically doesn’t come with any symptoms, but it can contribute a higher risk for all those cardiovascular diseases, including heart attack and stroke. A further 86 million US adults have borderline or elevated cholesterol levels, which can easily tip higher, but also, even in that existing, elevated state, contribute to negative cardiovascular outcomes.There are treatments for high cholesterol, the most common of category of which are called statins, which reduce the production of LDL by inhibiting an enzyme that produces cholesterol in the body.Unfortunately, these drugs do come with some usually minor side effects, which can cause patients to stop using them, and they have to be taken daily, ideally at the same time each day. That necessity for consistency leads to a lot of incorrect or incomplete usage, which reduces the effectiveness of these drugs. But it’s also estimated that only about 54.5% of US adults who would benefit from statins are currently taking one—so that’s people who could benefit and who have it prescribed, and then within that number are all the people who are taking this drug incorrectly or incompletely, reducing the effectiveness. So a relatively small number of people who should probably be on these things are getting the full benefit they offer because of the nature of the drug.And that’s not great, because in the US alone, heart disease is the leading cause of death for pretty much every adult demographic; men, women, people of most racial and ethnic and economic groups, you name it, heart disease is the biggest threat to their lives.One US citizen dies every 34 seconds of some kind of cardiovascular condition, and as of 2023, 1 in every 3 deaths in the US was caused by the same, adding up to just over 919,000 people that year.Between 2021 and 2022, alone, the cost of services and medications related to heart disease added up to more than $168 billion; again, that’s just in that period, and just in the US.And once more, these are ailments that are caused or heavily influenced by high levels of cholesterol, which are themselves amplified by common lifestyle choices, environmental factors that are hard for many people to avoid, and just by raw, dumb luck because of genetics.This treatment category, then, is being seen as a pretty big deal because a one-time infusion means those who receive it don’t have to remember to take a pill every day at the same time, and won’t experience those statin-based side-effects.It also means that people who are currently costing the medical system a bunch of money each year, because they need treatments for all the issues they suffer as a result of high cholesterol, will suddenly cost the system a lot less money, for treatments and medications. Not for nothing, their health and quality of life will likely improve as well. So in addition to having better, healthier outcomes personally, their cost to healthcare systems will drop.Eli Lilly’s drug isn’t the only one currently working its way through clinical trials, either.Amgen is working on a similar treatment, and Novartis and Ionis Pharmaceuticals have drugs that are even further along in the process, their medicines that cut heart attacks, strokes, and cardiovascular deaths could be approved by the FDA as soon as next year.There are a lot of caveats worth noting here, including that the science is still out as to whether this approach, silencing proteins that lead to the creation of more LDL and a similar substance called Lp(a)—which is more dangerous because it’s stickier and thus more likely to get stuck in important blood pathways, and it’s also more likely to be caused by genetics than lifestyle—the word is still out on whether reducing these things in the body actually reduces hearth attacks and stroke.Some people have had this particular risk variable dramatically reduced, but have still suffered from cardiovascular events, which raises the question of whether this path is the right one to take in trying to reduce this category of health issues; the correlation between LDL and heart attacks and strokes might not be a clear-cut as long assumed.There’s also the issue of price. Drug-makers are economically incentivized to sell treatments over cures, because that means they can continue selling their product over time, potentially for the life of the patient, and a cure, in contrast, is a one-time hit that in theory should alleviate the need for future treatment.There’s a chance, then, that the drug-makers will decide they need to make these one-hit treatments really, really expensive in order to make their R&D dollars back and to make the kinds of profits their investors expect from them. That could then reduce the potential audience for these treatments, even if they are effective, and could further slow their deployment and future research in this space.If these trials continue to go well, though, there’s a good chance that this combination of similar but distinct treatment types will provide a more sustainable alternative to current options, and that, like the recent bogglingly rapid and widespread deployment of GLP-1 treatments for all sorts of issues, could lead to a new paradigm in this facet of the medical world.Show Noteshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholesterolhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiovascular_diseasehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_cholesterolhttps://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10982736/https://www.cdc.gov/heart-disease/data-research/facts-stats/index.htmlhttps://www.who.int/health-topics/cardiovascular-diseases#tab=tab_1https://www.ama-assn.org/public-health/chronic-diseases/what-doctors-want-patients-know-about-high-cholesterolhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statinhttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42187087/https://abcnews.com/GMA/Wellness/new-drug-game-changer-people-high-cholesterol/story This is a public episode. 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• 
  SpaceX IPO 09.06.2026 18dk

  This week we talk about initial public offerings, Anthropic, and investment flywheels.We also discuss AI, financial entanglements, and backstops.Recommended Book: Superconvergence by Jamie MetzlTranscriptAn initial public offering, or IPO, is what happens when a private company goes public and starts selling shares of itself, occasionally to just institutional investors like banks and sovereign wealth funds, but usually also to retail investors, which means normal people who buy stocks as part of their investment strategy.Often private companies go this route, go public, because it’s one of the primary ways of gleaning new, oftentimes large inflows of money, and that money can then be used for investments in assets for the company, but it also allows employees who have shares in the company as part of their compensation to cash out, to get paid possibly a huge bonus for all their efforts, and it’s often a means by which executives garner huge paydays for themselves, because they can now sell their accumulated shares, or borrow against them, or because they have something in their contract that says they get x amount of bonus money or new shares if they take the company public, or achieve a certain valuation goal—and going public is a good way to do that.This is also one of the primary ways investors in a company, whether that’s a bunch of smaller seed investors or big-name venture capitalists, to get their money back; the 10 or 100x-ing of their investment, getting ten or 100-times the money they put into the company, generally happens through an IPO, because it can balloon the valuation of that company, and it gives them a more conventional and reliable way of getting money back for their shares: they can just sell those shares on the open market.So an IPO allows a private company to make shares of itself available to others, on scale. And the ‘initial’ part of initial public offering points at the early days of the process, during which the baseline price of a share of stock is established.A fairly arcane and complex process has emerged around this, and it’s an entire industry at this point, with some institutions specializing in taking companies public, helping them get as high an initial price on that stock as possible. They also help them leap all sorts of regulatory hurdles set by the Securities and Exchange Commission, if they’re going public on a US exchange, at least, other bodies handle such things in other countries, and these going-public entities, called underwriters, which are usually investment banks, also typically have their own stake in the matter, earning compensation through a fee called a ‘gross spread,’ which is the difference between a discounted rate on the stock and what the stock is sold for on the open market on that first day it’s available.What I’d like to talk about today is a wave of very closely watched unusual, impending IPOs that are coming later this year, and one of them in particular that looks to be even more unusual than the rest.—SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic are three of the largest companies in human history; on paper, at least.And that’s an important caveat. Market valuation for private companies is generally determined by how much investors are willing to spend on a percentage ownership of the company. So if you start a lemonade stand and I offer to buy 1/10th of that lemonade stand from you for $100, that implies, using this logic, that your lemonade stand has a valuation of $1000; 10 times that $100 that I offered to pay you.Such valuations are also informed by independent analyses from outside experts and institutions. SpaceX, for instance, pre-IPO, is estimated to be worth somewhere between $780 billion and nearly $2 trillion, depending on who you listen to, based on their assets, their potential future earnings, and any advantages they might have in the markets in which they operate.AI company Anthropic is estimated to be worth something like $965 billion, based on a May 2026 series H funding round, through which it raised $65 billion; based on that funding round, the calculations were done, and just shy of a trillion dollars is what the math says the company is worth, though some outside analyses say it’s worth a bit less than that, while others suggest it’s maybe closer to $1.4 trillion.OpenAI, a direct competitor of Anthropic, is valued at about $100 billion less than Anthropic based on its most recent $122 billion funding round, but again, analyses put the company’s actual value, what people and investors would pay for it on the open market, all over the place.Each of these companies have different variables acting upon them heading into a period in which it’s expected that all three will IPO.OpenAI kicked off the current AI race, for instance, but it’s burning money at an incredible rate, and has yet to make a profit, losing billions per year, and will probably continue to lose billions each year for a while into the future.Anthropic, on the other hand, offers a similar product as OpenAI, but is projected to post its first quarterly operating profit of just over half a billion dollars in Q2 2026, making it one of the first frontier-model-making AI companies to make a profit, as most of these companies are investing so heavily in research and infrastructure like data centers that they’re still in heavy cash-burn mode.SpaceX is distinct from these other two also high-flying, cash-burning tech companies in part because of its colorful and controversial owner, Elon Musk, and in part because it’s a rocket launch company that also sells internet services beamed down to earth from satellites, and until recently, most of its reliable income has come from that single offering, selling internet access. But it also recently had X, formerly called Twitter, a social network, and an AI company meant to compete directly with OpenAI and Anthropic, called xAI, folded into it.So it’s now a multifaceted company with several edgy, but somewhat mature and difficult to compete with offerings, most of which make no money, but all of which in theory at least kinda sorta orient around AI and other sci-fi goods and services.The surge in interest and investment in AI over the past several years led to a pivot for most of Musk’s companies, and that led to the merging of the smaller xAI and X into SpaceX, which was the only really profitable company of that trio of companies, and that merging, until just recently, made SpaceX unprofitable, as well.Because of the unprofitability and relative unpopularity of xAI’s offerings, like the controversy-ridden Grok chatbot, SpaceX has recently taken to leasing out its data centers to competitors, like Anthropic and Google, each of which are paying around a billion dollars a month to use some of SpaceX’s data center capacity, which xAI hasn’t needed, because of the unpopularity of Grok, for their own AI services. That, in turn, has suddenly made SpaceX a little bit profitable, which is important for reasons I’ll get into momentarily.This portion of the US-based AI industry is kind of a tangle in many ways, all of these companies competing, but also intersecting and overlapping, often investing in each other and in the infrastructure that underpins them, while also being invested in by those same infrastructural entities. And these three companies’ IPOs are being seen as something of a weathervane, their success or failure, and the degree to which they succeed or fail hinting at the direction of this industry, and whether or not this is a financial bubble that will soon, or eventually, pop.There are hints that those at the top of these companies are attempting to hedge their bets, in case their IPOs don’t do what they need them to do, or don’t do what they need them to do at the right magnitude.Sam Altman, OpenAI’s also fairly controversy-ridden CEO, has been very close with US President Trump, and has reportedly been holding meetings about the possibility of the US government taking a significant stake in OpenAI, and maybe other AI companies as well. The idea here is that US funds, so taxpayer dollars, would be invested in these companies, and that would tie the companies more closely to the US government, which could be beneficial if these companies then increase in value, making the US government a profit on that investment. This would be beneficial for the companies, in turn, because they would basically be backstopped by the US government; the US would be more likely to help them stay solvent to avoid losing that invested capital, with its regulations and laws related to AI, but it would also make these companies too big and too important to fail, giving them a lot of leeway in how they behave and compete, or fail to, from that point forward. And if they do still fail, the US taxpayer would be paying for a significant portion of that loss while those in charge, investors and the higher-ups of these companies, would walk away with a bunch of money.SpaceX is taking another approach to IPO bet-hedging, by asking top US stock indices, like the Nasdaq 100 and S&P 500, which track top stocks, ‘top’ designated by value, but also other metrics, usually related to stability and profitability, to ignore some of those other metrics and allow SpaceX entrance into their indices more rapidly than would typically be allowed.These indices are meant, in part, to help protect investors from volatility. High-flying startups might surge at the beginning, immediately after their IPO, but then fizzle out when it becomes clear their fundamentals aren’t good, and they’re not actually a solid investment, long-term.What SpaceX wants is to be allowed into this club of valuable, long-term profitable and stable companies, because it is big and flashy and might have the largest IPO in history. And if these indices don’t want to be left out of all that, the argument goes, they should allow SpaceX into their club, regardless of those long-time rules of admittance.Nasdaq, which runs the exchange where SpaceX will be listed, agreed to a rules change in May of 2026 that will allow large private companies, like SpaceX, that go public on their exchange, fast entry onto the Nasdaq 100 list.This change of rules was made exclusively for SpaceX, and it could have a significant impact on the company’s IPO, because many index funds and exchange-traded funds, ETFs, track the Nasdaq 100, which means they balance their portfolio based on what’s in the Nasdaq 100, keeping things relatively or absolutely proportionate to that fund.That means because of this change, a lot of everyday, passive investors, who have their retirement funds and pension plans and even their personal portfolios in index funds and ETFs that track the Nasdaq 100 will automatically end up holding some or a lot of SpaceX stock, despite it being an untested, new, currently unprofitable company. Some of these funds are automatically managed and will just buy SpaceX because that’s what they’re programmed to do, and others are managed by humans, but because they’ve promised their customers to keep their funds aligned with the market, more money going into SpaceX means they’ll be inclined to join the club and buy a bunch of SpaceX, as well. And because of how this works, the more funds buying SpaceX stock, the more funds will be required or inclined to buy; it’s a sort of stock flywheel.That exposes all these investors to more volatility of the kind they maybe hoped to avoid by tracking this index, which isn’t supposed to be volatile. But SpaceX’s Musk was able to demand this change because, again, this is looking to be the biggest IPO in history, the company valued at $1.77 trillion dollars after the IPO. As a result, he can demand these sorts of things, and typically be listened to.Some other stock market indices have also said they would allow quick entrance to their lists for SpaceX and possibly OpenAI and Anthropic, as well.The S&P 500, however, after assessing the possibility of quick entry, has rejected the idea, saying it won’t bend its rules, no matter how big these three IPOs are looking to be. That means folks with money in S&P 500-tracking funds will be protected from that initial volatility.That said those recent deals SpaceX made with Anthropic and Google nudged them into profitability, and if they can maintain that profitability for a year, post-IPO, then they’ll be able to enter the S&P 500. And because Google’s parent company Alphabet is a significant investor in SpaceX, they’ve already made money, on paper, on the deal they made with SpaceX for that datacenter capacity, paying out less than they’re making back in valuation.So that tangle of relationships is likely to continue to enrich those in charge of these companies, and those who hold a bunch of shares of their stock, but it’s also likely to get more of these massive, but volatile companies into ostensibly less-volatile indices, faster, which could have repercussions for the one-third of private US wealth that is currently invested in the stock market.Show Noteshttps://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/ipo.asphttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_public_offeringhttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-05/spacex-s-75-billion-ipo-draws-more-orders-than-shares-availablehttps://www.marketwatch.com/story/elon-musk-needs-the-cultish-support-of-everyday-investors-to-pull-off-the-massive-spacex-ipo-08e7ea49https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/spacexs-ipo-dream-runs-into-wall-streets-oldest-test-chart-of-the-day-114542191.htmlhttps://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/05/tech-download-anthropic-ipo-ai-valuations.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/05/technology/spacex-indexes-401k.htmlhttps://nypost.com/2026/06/04/business/one-third-of-americans-wealth-is-now-tied-to-the-stock-market-a-record-high/https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/sp-500-blocks-fast-spacex-entry-wont-waive-rule-for-unprofitable-ai-firms/https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/we-pissed-off-a-lot-of-people-giant-data-center-plan-cut-50-amid-protests/https://www.notus.org/technology/trump-ai-stake-openaihttps://techcrunch.com/2026/06/05/google-will-pay-spacex-920m-per-month-for-compute/ This is a public episode. 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• 
  Jones Act Waiver 02.06.2026 20dk

  This week we talk about the Merchant Marine Act, trade routes, and incentives.We also discuss Wesley Jones, foreign competition, and artificial monopolies.Recommended Book: The Quantum Thief by Hannu RajaniemiTranscriptIn 1920, the then-Senator for the state of Washington, Wesley Jones, who was also the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, introduced the Merchant Marine Act as a method by which the American merchant marine could be sustained and remain competitive in the face of external competition, and in the wake of the destruction of a bunch of ship during WWI.The US Merchant Marine is all the commercial water-going vessels that are US flagged, and the crews of these vessels. During peacetime, these boats and ships conduct trade and other services along the United States’ coasts and throughout its internal waterways, its rivers and lakes. During wartime, these vessels and their crews are tapped to help move troops and weapons and supplies for offensive or defensive military efforts.The theory of this proposed Act, then, was to ensure that the US Merchant Marine would remain well-funded and well-taken-care-of, because lacking some kind of government support, there was a good chance it would either slowly degrade, not having enough business to pay for itself, or—and this has been a persistent concern for similar pseudo-fleets of merchant vessels around the world for the past few hundred years—it would fall into disrepair because it would be outcompeted by vessels and crew coming in from elsewhere that would charge lower prices, creating unsustainable economics for the locals and thus slowly degrading this economic and military asset.When this Act was proposed, in 1920, the preservation of this asset was on the mind of many US politicians, as the world had just emerged from World War I, and in that and previous conflicts, the US Merchant Marine had been pretty vital to ensuring the US eventually came out on the right side of things. It was also fundamental to the rebuilding of the US economy following difficult conflicts, because the moving of cargo from city to city along coastlines, and throughout long expanses of rivers—getting food from place to place, getting building supplies where they need to go—has always been important, especially following periods in which there isn’t a lot of building going on, and when supplies chains are reoriented toward other purposes, like fighting.So in addition to all the language the helps regulate trade within US waters and between US ports, and which says how the crew of such vessels have to be treated, this Act was also meant to provide protected status to US Merchant Marine vessels and crew, giving them a pseudo-monopoly on certain types of trade activities in the US.It was also—and this is important context—meant to give Senator Jones’ state of Washington a de facto monopoly on trade with Alaska. But it was sold to the rest of Congress and the country as a means of bolstering the funds flowing into the US Merchant Marine. Section 27 of this act, often called the Jones Act, requires that all goods transported between US ports be carried by US vessels built in the US, flying the US flag, owned by US citizens and with majority US citizen and permanent US resident crews.What I’d like to talk about today are the other consequences of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, and in particular the Jones Act component of it, and why there’s been renewed opposition to the Jones Act in recent months.—The logic of the Jones Act, at least on the surface, is pretty straightforward.If you’re worried about foreign competition coming in and taking all the shipping jobs, swooping in from areas where crews aren’t paid as much, and where ships can be built cheaper, so they can charge less than US-made and -manned ships, all you have to do is require all the ships and people on the ships are of US-origin, and you’re good to go. Those foreign competitors aren’t allowed to take the jobs, and that sets the standards in a different place, allowing US vessels and their crew and owners to charge whatever they need to charge to sustain themselves.This, in theory at least, should also stimulate the US ship-building industry, as that monopoly means anyone who builds new ships stands a pretty good chance of making their money back. After all, there’s no dramatically cheaper competition out there, so you’ve got relatively little downward price pressure and seemingly plenty of customers, because there’s a lot of US coast, and a lot of internal waterways that have traditionally be used for trading purposes.In practice, though—and this isn’t uncommon with protectionist measures; things that seem like they should work for the intended purpose actually leading to other, less ideal outcomes—the Jones Act is often blamed for increasing prices on pretty much everything, and for increasing prices dramatically in places like Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and other US territories, like American Samoa and Guam, that are reliant on imports to survive.If open competition isn’t allowed, prices don’t tend to go down, and in fact they can instead go up, especially if the number of entities providing these services drops over time.That means places without other options, without the ability to ship food and electrical equipment and other such fundamentals using highways or regularly flying, large cargo planes, they are forced to pay increasingly high cargo ship prices, instead. And there’s no chance that a competitor will emerge, because there just aren’t enough ships available to haul all the stuff these places need at a regular, sustaining, cost-effective cadence.These higher prices are kind of built into the monopoly model, but they’re made even worse by the state of the US shipbuilding industry, which for a while, from about the mid-1800s until the mid-20th century, was top of the line, producing more ships than any other country during WWII, and before that churning out some of the best and fastest ships in the world for trade purposes.But after the two world wars, and a surge in shipbuilding infrastructure that was rapidly deployed in the first half of the 20th century, US government subsidies for the industry began to dry up, many of the ships built during the war were sold to foreign countries and private owners for a quick buck, and most of that infrastructure was mothballed, the more efficient processes it developed decommissioned in favor of less-efficient, more expensive approaches.During WWI, the US churned out more then 5,000 ships at the over 100 shipyards it had operating at the time, and was able to produce more naval tonnage in three years than it had produced in the entire history of the nation’s existence, up till that point.Post-WWI, though, the US was already less efficient than foreign competitors, especially European competition, and post-WWII, the emergence of overland infrastructure in the US, like the burgeoning national highway system, made shipping via trucks increasingly competitive with the previously dominant approach of shipping via internal waterways.Airline shipping became a competitor, too, around that same time. So the technological developments and new overland infrastructure of the post-World War era meant that in the US, although coastal shipping in particular remained a solid option for many types of shipping, using trucks on the nation’s growing highway system usually ended up being cheaper and easier, and in some cases much faster, too, and eventually air cargo became even more competitive for some types of jobs and clientele.The oil crises of the 1970s amplified this trend, collapsing the market for oil tanker ships and seriously damaging the overall shipbuilding industry, including in the US. Even with new US government subsidies meant to support the flailing industry, building ships in the US usually just didn’t make much economic sense, the cost of building on US soil costing nearly twice as much as it did in some foreign ports.During the Reagan administration, even those 1930s-era subsidies were dropped, and that led to further collapse in the US shipbuilding industry. Before the end of these subsidies, the US was producing about 20 commercial ships per year, already a catastrophic drop from the World Wars era, but after the end of the subsidies, it produced five commercial vessels in the next eight years, combined.Some new subsidies were introduced in the 90s, when the Cold War ended, but the industry was in such bad shape at that point, orders from the US military and from commercial traders often went unfulfilled, or went wildly over budget. Some ships were finished, but riddled with so many flaws that they were unusable.US shipbuilders blamed foreign government subsidies, claiming they were really bad at their jobs because other countries were giving their shipbuilding entities more money to exist, and President Bill Clinton was able to secure an agreement with many of the US’s trading partners to temper these subsidies a bit, in response to those complaints. Though when US shipbuilders realized this agreement would also mean they would lose some of their subsidies, in the tradeoff, they switched to campaigning against it, and the US ultimately wasn’t involved in that agreement.The US’s shipbuilding efforts improved a bit in the late-90s and early 2000s, but efforts elsewhere were better, and while the US produced about 3% of all commercial shipping tonnage, of all trade-related naval vessels, basically, in the early 1970s, by 1999, that was down to 0.25% of global tonnage.At this point, following that aforementioned agreement to reduce subsidies and others like it, much of the world’s shipbuilding industries are on pretty solid footing without government support, while the US’s is protected by the Jones Act, and very much not in solid shape; it’s completely uncompetitive and wildly unproductive, and this has led to many secondary, knock-on issues, like increased prices, especially in places like Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico, but this actually reportedly costs the US economy something like 0.1 to 0.4% of its total GDP, so about $31.8 billion to $127.4 billion each year. And it’s also hobbled our efforts to invest in things like offshore wind farms and other such infrastructure, because we simply don’t have enough ships in operation to do that sort of thing. These ships also just cost so much to use, even when they’re available, that the price of shipping and deploying things is overwhelming, especially compared to doing the same in other countries.In mid-March of 2026, the second Trump administration issued a Jones Act waiver for some types of product, including energy products, fertilizer, and related inputs, like ammonia. That means on an emergency basis, foreign-flagged, built, and staffed ships can operate in US waters, bringing these types of trade goods from US port to US port, without penalty.Within just two months of the waiver going into effect, dozens of foreign vessels entered the US trade market, reinforcing slumping trade routes and even creating new ones. The Gulf Cost to West Coast route has proved to be especially popular, seeing four times the trade activity from the Gulf to California in just those two months as we previously saw over the whole of 2025, combined, and a an entirely new route emerged, too, shipping naphtha from California to Texas.More shipping also arose between the US mainland and Puerto Rico, bringing propane to Puerto Rico in a usable volume for the first time because there are no liquified petroleum gas tankers in the Jones Act fleet; this meant that despite the large amounts of LPG produced in the US, Puerto Rico usually has to import their LPG from Chile and other foreign sources; this waiver allowed them to get it from the US mainland, instead.In April of this year, the Trump administration announced a 90-day extension of the Jones Act waiver. This waiver is intended to help moderate surging prices on all sorts of good, especially energy products, at a moment in which the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has created shortages of such products on global markets. That shortage has stoked inflation, all over the place, but especially in the US, hence this effort to temper that inflation; it is an election year in the US, after all.The waiver seems to be helping, in some limited regards at least, and it’s providing all sorts of data for groups that oppose it, illuminating what seems to be latent demand for such trade routes, that demand typically unmet because of the limitations of the Jones Act on waterway and coastal trade in the US; there just aren’t enough US-made and created and flagged ships performing this kind of trade because of that artificial monopoly.The American Maritime Partnership, however, which is a lobbying group put together by the US domestic maritime industry, recently launched an ad campaign aimed at ending the waiver, saying, basically, that the Jones Act protects the US maritime industry from unfair foreign competition, and that it protects the US from foreign threats that might otherwise infiltrate and negatively impact US markets; the implication being that terrorists or some such might come to the US with trade vessels, and then wreak havoc by doing terrorist things via these vessels, or maybe use them to bring more drugs into the country.Given the power such lobbying groups have in the US, there’s a solid possibility that when an agreement is eventually reached with Iran over the Strait of Hormuz, and if global trade then returns to something like its previous default, this waiver will go away. That would be the politically expedient move by the Trump administration, because most people don’t know enough about the Jones Act to care, but the maritime industry very much does, as without this artificial monopoly, they would probably be required to fundamentally change if they wanted to stay alive.There’s evidence that getting rid of the Jones Act permanently might be beneficial on multiple fronts, especially in terms of inflation and overall economics, but also in terms of forcing the US maritime industry to make those costly, foundational changes. Despite the many possible benefits of doing away with this act, though, the ‘protect our borders from foreign invaders’ aspect of the Jones Act might be enough to sway this administration toward fully reinstating it as soon as the conflict in Iran and inflation allows.Show Noteshttps://apnews.com/article/jones-act-trump-trade-abcac596db839bff3679b3117d2e81b2https://www.cato.org/blog/jones-act-waiver-data-reveals-universe-blocked-american-tradehttps://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2019/04/local-content-requirements-and-their-economic-effect-on-shipbuilding_f81e0027/90316781-en.pdfhttps://www.cato.org/blog/jones-act-contributes-offshore-wind-growing-painshttps://www.engine.online/news/us-maritime-group-urges-end-to-jones-act-waiver-7c1bhttps://gcaptain.com/chinese-cosco-tanker-delivers-asphalt-to-connecticut-under-jones-act-waiver/https://gcaptain.com/jones-act-waiver-reshapes-u-s-oil-trade-as-foreign-tankers-flood-domestic-routes/https://www.investopedia.com/terms/j/jonesact.asphttps://www.winston.com/en/legal-glossary/what-is-the-jones-acthttps://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/jones-act-burden-america-can-no-longer-bearhttps://www.atlasnetwork.org/articles/the-jones-act-is-costly-harmful-and-dangeroushttps://www.maritime.dot.gov/ports/domestic-shipping/domestic-shippinghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Merchant_Marinehttps://www.cato.org/blog/jones-act-contributes-offshore-wind-growing-pains This is a public episode. 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• 
  2026 DRC Ebola Outbreak 26.05.2026 15dk

  This week we talk about the Democratic Republic of the Congo, malaria, and healthcare infrastructure.We also discuss militants, Uganda, and the Bundibugyo virus.Recommended Book: We Should Get Together by Kat VellosTranscriptEbola, which is more formally called Ebola Virus Disease or Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever, is caused by an infection by a type of RNA virus called an orthoebolavirus.There are six known species of orthoebolavirus, and four of them have at some point infected and caused illness in humans. Those four are the ebola virus, sometimes called the Zaire ebolavirus, which historically has been the strain responsible for the biggest, most devastating outbreaks of this disease, the Sudan virus, the Taï Forest virus, and the Bundibugyo virus, the latter three each causing a variant of the disease that carries the same name.The other two orthoebolavirus species that we know of, the Reston virus and the Bombali virus, have been known to infect animals, but have not, at this point at least, been known to make the jump to human hosts.Ebola symptoms vary a bit between specific viruses and between hosts and infection conditions, but in general those who are afflicted by ebola begin to experience symptoms between a few days and a few weeks after infection, and they’ll start by experiencing cold and flu-like symptoms, like fever, sore throat, headaches, and general muscle pain. Soon after that, though, they’ll start experiencing diarrhea and rashes, they’ll begin vomiting, and they’ll begin to experience liver and kidney dysfunction, and around that same time, they’ll start to bleed internally and externally.Once infected, a person has between a 25 and 90% chance of dying, depending on the strain of ebola, and if they die, usually due to what’s called hypovolemic shock—a severe and sudden loss of bodily fluids, including blood—they usually die between 6 and 16 days after those first symptoms are reported.What I’d like to talk about today is a new outbreak of ebola centered in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and why this one stands out from other recent outbreaks in the region.—Ebola was first officially reported in medical literature in 1976, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, and there have been semi-regular outbreaks in that region, of various sizes ever since, and very likely before that, too.This disease is spread through direct contact with the body fluids of someone who’s infected, and it’s thought that this is probably how the disease made the leap from animals, like primates, to human beings: locals sometimes come into close contact with local primates, either while just coexisting, or while hunting bushmeat, hunting monkeys for food.It’s thought that fruit bats serve as hosts for the virus, long-term, and it then spreads to other animals, and then sometimes to humans, in some cases causing illness along the way in those other species, but not always; bats are not negatively afflicted by it, for instance, but humans very much are.Despite not being an airborne pathogen, so it’s not spread by coughing or talking too close to someone, like a cold or Covid-19, ebola can still be spread person-to-person through bodily fluid contact. That means fluids like saliva and blood and semen and breast milk, and research has shown that even after someone survives and recovers from ebola, the disease can linger in their fluids for months. So if someone catches it, survives, and then breast-feeds their child, or kisses or has sex with their partner, or gets a cut and then someone else comes into contact with their blood, like a health worker, that can lead to the transmission of the disease, despite their having been well and seemingly fully recovered for weeks or months.That lingering contagiousness is a confounding factor with this disease, as it requires that people be very careful, even to an antisocial degree, and even well after it seems like that’s no longer necessary, because they feel good and healthy again.This also means that if someone dies of ebola, contact with their bodies can be incredibly dangerous. And past outbreaks have stemmed from or been further enflamed by locals wanting to perform community funerals and wakes, during which the body is often on display and touched by attendees, and that has led to further spread of the disease—which in many cases is difficult to tie back to that wake, because again, symptoms don’t arrive right away, and ebola symptoms are similar to what locals experience all the time from other afflictions, like colds and malaria.This past week, in Bunia, which is located in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, locals stormed a regional hospital in an attempt to recover the body of a beloved local figure who died of ebola. In the process, the hospital’s isolation ward, which was being used to keep ebola victims separate from everyone else, to keep the disease from spreading further, that ward was burned to the ground.There are no vaccines or treatments for the Bundibugyo Ebola species that is at the core of the outbreak, and the spread of misinformation in the area had locals believing that these health workers were trying to kill their patients, not save or isolate them so no one else caught ebola.The man at the center of this, who died five days after being admitted to the hospital, was thought, by his family, to have malaria, which is common in the area and has very similar symptoms, at least in the early days of an ebola infection.They demanded the hospital release his body so they could bury him, and the staff refused, saying doing so right now could lead to more ebola spread. The family gathered more locals, who threw stones at hospital workers, they broke through the gates of the hospital, police fired into the air to try to disperse the angry crowd, and the ebola ward caught fire during the melee. During that fire, five patients who were in the ward, all suspected of having ebola, fled, and they haven’t yet returned—so they are possibly out in the open, no longer isolated, suffering and maybe dying from their infection, and possibly spreading it to others, as well.There’s a lot going on in this story, and misinformation spread by local traditional healers who don’t like the hospitals and the medical workers who tell locals medical information rather than folk healing information are part of the problem, but the local medical establishment not doing a good job of educating locals about what they’re doing and why are arguably the flip side of that same coin; more investment in that kind of information dissemination by the government would go a long way to preventing this sort of thing in the future, and health workers globally could use more resources and overall infrastructure to help protect them while they’re carrying out their work.That said, this is just one small facet of what’s become a much larger story. As of the day I’m recording this, this new outbreak, which was first reported in the Ituri Province of the DRC, has caused 186 confirmed deaths, with 82 more confirmed cases and 836 suspected cases.As I mentioned, it’s caused by the Bundibugyo ebolavirus, which is less common, at least at this scale, and thus typical response efforts used against the more common Zaire ebolavirus, don’t seem to map onto this strain as well as was hoped, and the World Health Organization declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on May 16, as while this is unlikely to become as significant an issue as Covid-19 or other aerosol-spread infections on a global level, regionally it’s causing a lot of damage, and its nature, and the state of international aid for this sort of thing—which is currently substantially reduced, in part because of pullbacks on such programs by the current US administration—means it could continue to flare for several more months, before eventually starting to slow, killing many, many people, in any incredibly painful and contagious manner, in the process.This is the 17th ebola outbreak in the DRC since the disease was first recorded in the medical literature, and the third outbreak of this strain—the first of which was in the Bundibugyo District of Uganda in 2007 through 2008, that’s where it got its name, and then another in 2012 in the DRC.This isn’t the deadliest strain of ebola, only killing between 25 and 50% of those afflicted, but because of those aforementioned issues, plus it having flared in a region where governance is complicated by the presence of several militant groups, this wave of infections has created a broad and precarious situation; lots of people have been uprooted from their homes because of conflict between these militant groups and the government, and those refugees have been spreading ebola to other areas throughout the region, making contact tracing difficult or impossible, and leading to surges of new infections in neighboring, and a few further-flung, provinces.According to a predictive model of the outbreak published by the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, the current number of infected people could actually be well over 1000, in part because of how difficult it’s been isolating the infected, and because the early symptoms are so similar to other common local afflictions; so people are less likely to visit hospitals and get an accurate diagnosis, because they assume it’s just a bout of something else, something less deadly and contagious.Getting resources into the area is becoming more difficult, too, as those militant groups are fairly active, one such group recently taking over a primary regional airport, which has disallowed the import of necessary medical equipment for regional hospitals.This hasn’t had much of an impact globally, yet, though cases have been documented in neighboring Uganda—a total of five confirmed infections, as of the day I’m recording this—and the World Cup team from the DRC was ordered to isolate before entering the US to compete, forced to remain in Belgium for 21 days to confirm they aren’t carrying the disease before being allowed into the States for the competition.Far more likely than mass global spread, though, is more regional spread, which could lead to temporary border lockdowns and similar efforts to keep those who are in currently impacted regions from scattering, understandably fleeing either the outbreak or the militants in these areas, and thus carrying the disease into different provinces or countries.Local and international aide organizations are scrambling to prevent this, and to identify and isolate infected people where possible, but it’ll likely be a while before they have the necessary on-the-ground resources to do this correctly, and a lot more spread could occur before they’re able to do so at an effective level.Show Noteshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebolahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_African_Ebola_epidemichttps://www.cdc.gov/ebola/about/index.htmlhttps://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5175058/https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/congo-ebola-outbreak-cases-are-top-iceberg-coalition-says-2026-05-21/https://apnews.com/article/congo-ebola-outbreak-who-4e08d8df6d9c34039a9e0b8bad7a8954https://www.wsj.com/world/africa/ebola-outbreak-explained-4ab4414fhttps://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2026/5/23/uganda-confirms-three-new-ebola-cases-bringing-total-to-fivehttps://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/may/23/dcr-world-cup-squad-isolate-ebola-outbreak-congo-united-stateshttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/22/world/africa/ebola-congo-clinic-burned-protests.htmlhttps://www.npr.org/2026/05/23/nx-s1-5831963/u-s-passengers-flying-from-ebola-affected-countries-reroutedhttps://www.cdc.gov/han/php/notices/han00530.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Ituri_Province_Ebola_epidemichttps://edition.cnn.com/health/maps-ebola-charts-vishttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/21/ebola-outbreak-public-healthhttps://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/suspected-ebola-cases-reported-rebel-held-congo-area-2026-05-21/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/world/africa/ebola-outbreak-deaths-congo-who.html This is a public episode. 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• 
  Super El Niño 19.05.2026 14dk

  This week we talk about oceanic surface temperatures, trade winds, and global climate change.We also discuss the Polar Jet Stream, hurricanes, and climate models.Recommended Book: Kleptopia by Tom BurgisTranscriptUnder normal circumstances, the Pacific Ocean’s average surface temperature, the distribution of heat across its vast expanse, is moderated by trade winds that blow east to west along the equator, which help move warm water from South America over toward Asia.Those winds are called trade winds because, back during the European age of Exploration, they helped ships from Europe head west toward Asia and the Americas. And these winds form in part because of the Earth’s rotation, the Coriolis effect funneling air toward the equator, where it is then more concentrated and thus potent, which is useful if you’re trying to move a ship with sails, but also serves the purpose of moving warm water from one part of the ocean to another part of the ocean.As those warmer surface waters are shifted from the Americas to Asia, water is pulled up to the surface from lower down in the ocean as part of a process called upwelling. This process results in cooler temperatures on the surface, because lower down, oceanic water is colder, and that lower-down water is also more rich in nutrients, which has the knock-on effect of stimulating more biological activity along these cooling surface waters.That’s the normal state of things in the Pacific Ocean.There are sometimes deviations in this norm, however, that result in very different outcomes; these deviations are broadly called the El Niño Southern Oscillation Cycle, and that cycle consists of opposite El Niño and La Niña climate patterns.During La Niña patterns, trade winds are more powerful than usual and they shove a lot more of that warm surface water to Asia than is typical, and that has the net impact of moving more deep-down cold, nutrient-rich, ocean water to the surface.This, in turn, nudges the Polar Jet Stream, which is a channel of fast-moving, westerly winds that lives about 30,000 ft or just over 9000 meters up in the sky, and which crosses both warmer, mid-latitudes and far colder Arctic latitudes, further north. The Polar Jet Stream is responsible for moderating or intensifying weather patterns around the world, and like the trade winds, it’s influenced by the spin of the planet, but it’s also adjusted by surface systems, like the temperature of the Pacific. So the arrival of a La Niña pattern pushes the jet stream further north, and as a result, weather patterns change, and in North America, we tend to see drought in the southwest, heavier rains and flooding and in the Pacific Northwest and Canada, warmer winters in the South, and cooler winters in the North.La Niñas also tend to result in more severe hurricane seasons in the Atlantic basin, while suppressing hurricane activity in the central and eastern Pacific basins.El Niño, in contrast, results from weaker trade winds, which, because these winds don’t pack as much of a punch, means less warm water is being shoved from South America to Asia, and thus the surface temperature of that part of the Pacific is warmer, lacking that upwelling of cold water to replace the warm water that would otherwise be displaced over to Asia.El Niño also adjusts the location of the jet stream, but in the opposite direction, pulling it south of its usual spot. That then causes more heat and dryness across the northern US and Canada, but makes the southern US and Gulf Coast a lot wetter, leading to more flooding.What I’d like to talk about today are predictions about an anticipated upcoming El Niño climate pattern, and why some climate scientists are warning that it could be a doozy.—Climate scientists with the US’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the NOAA, released new model forecasts in mid-May, and one of those models indicated that an El Niño pattern could form in the Pacific as soon as June.The NOAA puts together and releases new models on a regular basis, as the variables influencing these massively complex patterns are always changing, and the trend over the past three months has been increasing certainty about the formation of this El Niño pattern, but also an increasing likelihood that this potential El Niño would be very strong, perhaps historically so.There have been a total of 27 El Niños since 1950, when we started officially tracking such things, and we get one every three or four years, on average. The last one occurred from the summer of 2023 into spring of 2024.The current models show that we could see another one of these systems as soon as next month, then, and there’s currently a nearly 60% chance that this particular El Niño would become strong—and that’s an official designation, by the way, a strong El Niño being one that sees an ocean surface temperature increase of between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius—and a one-in-three chance that it could become a very strong, or super El Niño, which means it tallies an oceanic surface temperature increase of 2 degrees celsius or higher.These so-called super El Niños are a lot rarer than the typical kind. There have only been five recorded since 1950, the last one straddling 2015 and 2016.Some of these models suggest that this system could be historically strong, though, pushing into territory where we might need a new rank on that existing scale—it could surpass 2.5 degrees celsius above the standard oceanic surface temperature, which would make it the most, or among the most intense El Niño systems on record.I want to note real quick here, before we get into possible implications, that these models are inherently imperfect, because of how complex these systems are, and how many variables influence them. But also that, again, it’s just some models saying this, that it’s only a 60% chance of even a strong El Niño, and that it’s still a 1 in 3 chance of a very strong one—so this isn’t at all certain, and the scientists behind all this are urging preparedness, but not panic, and are trying really hard to make it clear that this isn’t some kind of prophecy or guarantee. The reporting on this NOAA announcement has been frantic and panicky in some cases, but that’s probably not the proper response to this, and the real-deal experts here are encouraging awareness and that we recognize the potential for something wild with this pattern, but it’s definitely not the declaration of the end of the world or anything.So, that important caveat noted, let’s talk about some potential impacts of this system, if it does indeed hit that currently unlikely, but possible, very strong designation, or higher.In general, during El Niño patterns, hurricane seasons in the Atlantic are quieter, while hurricane seasons in the Eastern and Central Pacific are more active. This isn’t 100% the case, but it’s the overwhelming trend. So there’s a good chance we would see more and more powerful hurricanes in the Pacific during this period, should we step into super El Niño territory.Beyond hurricane impacts, though, these systems also influence water cycles around the world; during El Niño patterns, the US south tends to be wetter, as does East Central Africa, while northern South America tends to be drier, as does Australia and Northern and Central India.Shifting or amplifying water cycles, in one direction or the other, drier or wetter, can cause all sorts of issues, ranging from flooded homes to devastated crops. Just like with hurricanes, this usually represents a break in the normal way of things, so we tend to see things like mudslides and erosion and unplanned-for droughts that cause a lot of damage.Another significant component of these patterns are the temperature spikes they stoke. During the last recorded normal El Niño in 2023, global temperature levels were pushed up by 1.45 degrees C above pre-industrial levels, causing global mean temperatures to peak at 1.58 degrees C between July 2023 and June 2024.In practice, that means the earth momentarily shot past that 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels milestone that climate scientists have been warning about for decades, because it marks a point at which many natural systems will begin to change or fall apart, and many ecosystems will begin to collapse, leading to mass die-offs and potentially even the necessity for wide-scale human migration, away from areas that are no longer sustainably livable.That spike was momentary, but illustrative, and there’s a chance that another one, especially one stoked by a super El Niño, could push things even further, speeding up the melting of the ice caps and other glaciers, which then, in turn, could speed up the larger, consistent increase in global temperatures because the white of the ice bounces light from the sun, and thus heat, back into space, while the comparable dark of water and land absorbs more of that light and heat.In this way, even short-term spikes in temperature can speed up the long-term trajectory of global climate change, because the variables that are informing that change can be permanently adjusted; ice caps are just one example, there are countless such variables, some that we know about, and others that we certainly don’t, yet.While this potential upcoming El Niño might be par for the course, in other words, it’s also arriving at a moment in which many of these variables are already being fiddled with by other forces, and that means even a not-very strong, not-super El Niño could have outsized impact, in terms of pushing the planet toward a new, unfamiliar climate regime, the implementation of which could lead to all sorts of ecological and civilization devastation and change.Show Noteshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ni%C3%B1o%E2%80%93Southern_Oscillationhttps://www.usatoday.com/story/news/weather/2026/05/14/powerful-el-nino-is-taking-shape-forecast-says/90043794007/https://weather.com/2026/05/13/news/climate/el-nino-could-form-in-june-noaa-says-and-could-become-record-stronghttps://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_advisory/ensodisc.shtmlhttps://www.cnn.com/2026/05/14/weather/super-el-nino-climatehttps://www.yahoo.com/news/science/article/the-chances-of-a-rare-super-el-nino-occurring-in-2026-just-got-higher-heres-how-it-could-wreak-havoc-on-the-weather-212420384.htmlhttps://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/ninonina.htmlhttps://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/monthly-report/global/202604https://www.colorado.edu/today/2026/05/14/super-el-nino-coming-climate-scientists-weighhttps://theconversation.com/a-super-el-nino-why-its-too-early-to-forecast-one-with-certainty-but-not-too-soon-to-prepare-282574https://abcnews.com/US/el-nio-expected-develop-strength-remains-uncertain/story This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe
• 
  2026 UK Local Elections 12.05.2026 14dk

  This week we talk about Keir Starmer, Labour, and the Reform UK party.We also discuss Tories, the Lib Dems, and two-party systems.Recommended Book: Peak by K. Anders Ericsson and Robert PoolTranscriptFor more than 100 years, the British political system has been dominated by two parties: Labour and the Conservative Party, often called the Tories.In practice, that means these two parties, which are center-left and center-right in their leanings, respectively, have tended to shape the direction of British politics and the Overton Window of thinkable proposals—things that might actually happen because they get the requisite support from politicians and the public.These two parties have usually had to work with other, smaller parties in order to get anything done, because the UK has a parliamentary system that often leaves the party with the most representatives lacking enough support to run a functioning government, solo. As a consequence, the Liberal Democrats, which is a fairly centrist party, the Green Party, which focuses on environmentalism and more left-wing concerns, Plaid Cymru (plied KUM-ree), which is the Welsh nationalist party, and the Scottish National Party, which is exactly what it sounds like, have long influenced Labour and the Tories, aligning their votes with whomever gives them a seat at the table. This has given some influence to smaller groups that might otherwise lack representation, though that influence has typically been moderate to meager, at best—the folks in Labour and the Conservative party have run things in the UK, and that’s been the case for generations.Things started to shake up a bit in the 20-teens, however, when anti-immigration and EU-skepticism in Britain led to the creation of the far-right Brexit Party, which was co-founded by politician Nigel Farage, who was the leader of the UK Independence Party in the early 2000s and 20-teens, and who was previously a Tory, and Catherine Blaiklock, a politician and hotelier who stepped down from her position as party leader the year after the Brexit Party was founded after anti-Islamic and racist comments she’d previously made online were rediscovered.The Brexit Party existed, almost exclusively, to push for a no-agreement exit from the European Union by the UK, which was considered to be a fairly fringe ideology back then, but which gained a lot of steam as other populists began to add their support to the general concept.Both the government and the existing political structure of the UK was then caught flat-footed, by all indications very surprised by the eventual success of that push, and the UK left the EU on January 31, 2020, after a whole lot of skepticism that it would ever happen, even after a vote in favor of Brexit took place. This represented a serious come to Jesus moment for British politicians, but also British society, and there’s been quite a lot of self-reflection and naval gazing in the years since, as the Brexit pullout from the EU has caused quite a lot of economic and diplomatic damage, while also shining a spotlight on numerous simmering issues that were previously overlooked or unaddressed, including the bubbling resentment and at times outright xenophobia felt by a significant portion of the British electorate, and persistent economic issues faced by folks at the middle and lower rungs of society.What I’d like to talk about today is the recent 2026 UK Local Elections, and what they seem to tell us about how things are going in British politics, and what they portend for the current Labour-run administration.—On May 7, 2026, the UK held local elections for 5,066 councillors, 136 local authorities, and six directly elected mayors. Some of these elections were postponed in 2025 to allow for government restructuring, but most of these positions were last up for election in 2022.This election was generally seen as an unofficial referendum on the governing Labour Party, and in particular the current Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, who has been in office for just under two years, and who stepped into the role of PM after the role was held by the Conservative Tories for 14 years; five different Prime Ministers taking the reins during that period, including David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak.All that changing in leadership is indicative of the chaos the UK government was experiencing at the time, the May 2010 general election leading to a period of significant austerity—the government cutting tons of social programs in order to reduce spending—which then fed into more support for Brexit when some members of the party positioned the economic issues people were facing as the consequence of EU-related immigration, and shortly thereafter, the world succumbed to the Covid-19 pandemic.There was a lot of truly significant political change from about 2010 onward, then, and a lot for the general population to be upset about. The Conservatives held onto power despite it all for those 14 years, but the shift back to Labour was the result of Starmer and his party saying, listen, we hear you, a lot has to change, and we can instigate that change. Trust us.This new election suggests that the majority of voters in the UK feel that the Labour Party hasn’t lived up to that trust.In Wales, Plaid Cymru has taken the most seats, 43, but failed to achieve the 49 seat majority they would require to govern, solo.In Scotland, the SNP took the most seats, but also fell short of a majority, netting 58 seats, not the 65 required for a majority.Both of those results are not terribly shocking, though in Wales Labour lost a lot of power, down 35 seats and holding onto just 9. The Conservatives also lost in Wales, holding onto seven seats and losing 22.In Scotland, too, Labor lost some of their influence, losing 4 seats and retaining 17, while the Conservatives lost a whopping 19 seats, holding onto just 12.In England, the change in seat allocation was stunning, though.Labour lost 1406 seats, leaving them with 997, while the Conservatives lost 557 seats, holding onto just 773.Even considering those losses, the biggest story in England is the surge in support for previously small parties, in particular a far-right party called Reform UK, previously called the Brexit Party, and run by the aforementioned proponent of the British exit from the EU, Nigel Farage.Reform UK went from 2 seats to 1,444; a shocking outcome, and one that makes them the biggest winner in this election, by far. They also gained 17 seats, up from zero, in Scotland, putting them at an equal level there with Labour, and they went from zero to 34 in Wales, putting them in a competitive second place after Plaid Cymru, which again, claimed 43 seats.Other, non-Labour, non-Conservative parties also gained seats in this election, though not at the level of Reform UK.The Green Party gained two seats in Wales and six in Scotland, bringing them up to 15 there. They also gained 374 sets in England, bringing them up to 515 total seats, which leaves them in fifth place, but just 258 seats shy of the Conservatives.The Lib Dems, which are the local Centrist party, gained 151 seats, putting them in third. And there was a small surge in independent politicians winning elections, as well, that group now controlling 199 seats, up from 27 before this vote.In the wake of this absolute shellacking of Keir Starmer’s Labour party—which again, lost 1406 seats in England, and their opposition, and in many ways their polar opposite, the far-right Reform UK party, gained even more than Labour lost, up 1442 seats—in the wake of that, Starmer has been asked to resign, and as of the day I’m recording this, at least, he’s saying that he will not resign, and since there’s no formal challenge to his leadership, he can stay in power if he chooses.There is a growing movement amongst Labour lawmakers to ask him to set a timetable for stepping down, however, and there’s a pretty good chance that will happen, as the British political system allows parties to change their Prime Minister mid-term without requiring a new election, so they could swap him out for someone else, making him the face of this immense electoral failure, then they could try to change course before the next election, which will happen by mid-August of 2029, during which the vote will be for the 650 seats in the House of Commons, which is currently dominated by Starmer’s Labour party.The big takeaway here, from political analysts at least, is that what used to be a reliably two-party system, for over a century that’s been the case, is now a five-way race within a cultural context in which voters seem to be a lot less loyal to politicians and parties, and in which a whole lot of previously reliable infrastructure, social systems, and cultural expectations have been recently disrupted.People in the UK seem to be generally unhappy about all sorts of things, and that kind of broad unhappiness often results in more populism, which means general anti-establishment stances and us-versus-them ideologies, including racial, religious, and nationalistic versions of such ideologies, and typically a lot more support for charismatic leadership over leaders who are generally qualified and will probably be good at their jobs because they’re experienced and knowledgeable.In other words, you’re more likely to get loudmouths and celebrities running for office, successfully, in populist electoral contexts, and you’re also more likely to see parties leaning into superficial race, class, and elite-vs-everyman issues, as opposed to running on well-defined approaches to dealing with more complex issues.In the meantime, until that 2029 election, it’s likely Farage’s Reform UK will bang the drum against the governing Labour party to gather more power in the lead up to 2029, and that other non-Labour, non-Conservative parties will attempt to do the same, newly energized by these results.And depending on how that non-voting-year rallying goes, this could represent a foot in the door for these smaller parties. And we could consequently see more former Labour and Conservative politicians and voters leaving for Reform, for the Lib Dems, for the Greens, and for independents. All of which will make UK politics a lot more chaotic, but also probably more diverse, with power less centralized and the government’s makeup a bit less predictable.Show Noteshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_Kingdom_local_electionshttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/world/europe/uk-elections-local-takeaways.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/05/08/world/uk-local-elections-resultshttps://apnews.com/article/uk-elections-starmer-labour-what-to-know-eb11ff39b1b74bbaf9f4ef6abfd60f64https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/08/uk/uk-local-election-reform-farage-starmer-intlhttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-08/how-bad-for-labour-britain-s-local-elections-in-six-chartshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_the_United_Kingdomhttps://www.bbc.com/news/live/c1428pev1n0t#election-englanhttps://www.politico.eu/article/nigel-farage-reform-uk-win-next-general-election/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_United_Kingdom_general_electionhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Blaiklockhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_UKhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Faragehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brexit This is a public episode. 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• 
  Child Mortality 05.05.2026 14dk

  This week we talk about industrialization, antibiotics, and child mortality rates.We also discuss corruption, instability, and progress.Recommended Book: Empire of Silence by Christopher RuocchioTranscriptDemographic transition is a social sciences theory that posits, based on all sorts of modern historical data, that societies tend to change, demographically, as they transition from a largely agrarian, low-industrial society, to that of a less-agrarian, high-industrial society.Most modern, post-hunter-gatherer societies have started out plowing the vast majority of their labor into bare subsistence, human beings spending their days, throughout their whole lives, working the land in order to produce enough food to live. All sorts of social and economic systems arose around this base-level fact, including those that tied laborers to the land, allowing for the rise of a leadership or ruling class, regional militaries, and other sorts of specialists. But until relatively recent history, the majority of people in a given society labored to produce raw essentials, and that was just the shape of things.This began to change with the dawn of the industrial revolution, and in some areas a bit before that, as precursor technologies allowed societies to produce more food and other essentials with less manual labor and using fewer foundational resources, like land. These technologies, as they became more widely distributed, more effective and efficient, and cheaper to deploy and operate, allowed more people to do more sorts of things, leading to a ballooning of industry and commerce in industrializing regions, and that allowed said regions to invest in other things, including medical knowledge, education, and so on.Life wasn’t exactly a cakewalk in these industrializing areas, and all sorts of new abuses and issues, including long hours at factories and problems related to pollution, arose and became common. But because these sorts of societies required professionals with new types of knowledge and know-how, and because they were able to sustain an increasing number of specialities beyond working the land to generate food and other bare necessities, keeping people alive, longer, and ensuring more people had the specialized knowledge required to do all those things, became more of a priority, and one that could actually be addressed because of the concomitant ability to feed and clothe and house and address more of the needs of more people.There were gobs of other spiraling forces in the mix, of course, including religion, politics, and so on, but that general tendency to shift away from raw subsistence into more complex and diverse economic systems was a driving factor behind a lot of what happened from around 1800 until, well, now.What I’d like to talk about today is a specific data point, or collection of data points, that arguably, more than any other such data points, show the benefits of the industrialized, modern society we’re living in, today, despite all the accompanying downsides.—So most societies, at this point, have undergone significant changes as a result of our widespread application of technologies that allow human beings to get more done with the same amount of effort.We’re able to generate more value, of all kinds, than our ancestors, and though it’s possible to criticize the change in priorities and focus on all the negative knock-on effects of these changes—and there are many such negative knock-on effects, like large-scale military conflicts and rampant pollution and climate change—it would be difficult to argue that there haven’t been some fairly significant upsides for humanity, as well.One key upside is related to that demographic transition I mentioned. As societies shift and it becomes better for everyone if more people know how to do more things, and it thus becomes a priority for more people to live long enough to use the knowledge and know-how they acquire, it has increasingly made more sense for governments to invest in our overall longevity and survivability.We can’t just say, I’d like everyone to live longer, and then snap our fingers and make that happen. But we can, and have, invested in technologies and systems that make longer lives more likely, and from 1800 onward that’s generally been the trend, with a huge upswing arriving in the mid-20th century, when a bunch of new tools and technologies, including things like modern antiseptics and early antibiotics, first arrived on the scene, dramatically reducing the mortality rate associated with all kinds of medical procedures.Arguably the most significant social gain during this period, though, has been the bogglingly large reduction in child mortality rates.Child mortality refers to the death of children under the age of five, and this figure is, today, usually expressed as the likelihood of a child under five dying, per 1000 children in an area. So you might say in India, the child death rate is 92 in 1000, which means 92 of every 1000 children resulting from live births in India die before they reach the age of five. And that was actually the real child mortality rate in India back in the year 2000.And the story of overall global child mortality rates is actually pretty well exemplified in India’s rates, as the country has seen a dramatic drop in all-cause child deaths in recent decades.In the year 2000, as I mentioned, it was expected that 92 out of every 1000 children would die before the age of 5 in India. As of 2024, though, that number has dropped to just 32 out of every 1000; a 68% drop. If you go back as far as 1990, the progress is even more impressive, those 2024 numbers representing a 76% drop in child mortality.This progress has largely been the consequence of intentional, targeted health interventions by the Indian government, including institutionalized child delivery services and widespread, well-funded immunization efforts that ensured more children got vaccines and other sorts of care that was previously lacking, or which was not widely disseminated beyond wealthy families. They’ve also invested in newborn care and neonatal units at hospitals, which has increased child survival outcomes in a large radius around these facilities.Southeast Asian nations still account for about 25% of all under-five deaths, globally, but improvements in India mirror those in China, which made rapid and sustained progress on this issue beginning in the 1950s, but really hitting their stride in the 1970s, when their child mortality rate was 143 per 1000 children; that rate dropped to just 12 per 1000 by 2020.Globally, right now, the average child mortality rate is just under 40 per 1000, which is down from 93 per 1000 in 1990.That’s a staggering amount of progress, but it does mean that nearly 5 million children still die each year before their 5th birthday, which adds up to something like 15,000 of such deaths per day.At the moment, the vast majority of these deaths, about 80% of them, occur in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. The cause of these deaths varies a bit based on location, and there’s a time component to this, too, as some areas have seen much higher rates due to epidemics, but most of the causes of child death before the age of 5 are consistent, with premature birth and pneumonia, birth asphyxia or trauma, malaria, diarrhea, congenital abnormalities, and sepsis representing about 60-70% of such deaths, globally.Almost all of these issues are preventable, and the major barrier to reducing these numbers further is access to resources and expertise that are more widely available and accessible in the wealthier world; there are huge disparities in child mortality between rich countries and poor countries, in other words, and while the number of child deaths has decreased everywhere, including in the world’s poorest countries, over the past 100 years, countries like Finland see about 2 in every 1000 children die before they reach the age of five, while countries like Niger see nearly 115 in every 1000 children die before the age of five.This figure was previously around 500 in every 1000, globally, so about half of all children would die before the age of five, even in relatively recent history, even in the wealthiest regions, just a few hundred years ago—so again, stunning progress in this area; and looking back, in addition to families needing more hands to work the fields, before everyone started industrializing, families would tend to have as many kids as they could because it was generally just assumed that about half of them would die within the first couple of years; some cultures still have traditions of not naming their children until they’ve lived for a few years because of that earlier child mortality trend.There’s still plenty to be done in this space, though, and the changes necessary to dramatically drop this mortality rate even further, regionally and globally, are not revolutionary in nature, it’s just a matter of more widely and equitably disseminating tools and technologies and cultural and economic infrastructure that already exists across much of the world, to the places where it doesn’t exist yet.That’s a tall order in some locations, though, as part of why some high child mortality rate regions still have those high rates is that they’ve also had persistent government instability, which has in turn led to persistent internal conflicts and government overthrows and long histories of grift and corruption at the top-most levels of society.In other words, it’s extremely difficult to improve these sorts of numbers when those who are in charge of a high-mortality-rate region are seemingly incapable of keeping things stable, and always seem to be enriching themselves at the expense the the country they’re meant to be governing.That’s a much larger systemic issue, of course, made up of numerous fractal issues that each have their own distinct causes and potential solutions.But the main takeaway here is that child mortality is already an immense success story of modernity, and even more progress is possible, but in order to achieve that kind of progress, a bunch of other problems will probably need to be solved in these still-highly-afflicted areas, first. And solving these problems will likely be a truly heavy lift, for anyone who tries to tackle them, until and unless something fundamental changes about governing norms and corruption, and the many forces that enable that kind of high-level corruption, globally.Show Noteshttps://data.unicef.org/resources/levels-and-trends-in-child-mortality-2025/https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/india/un-report-highlights-indias-79-decline-in-child-mortality-rates-a-major-contributor-to-global-child-health-advancements/articleshow/129660557.cmshttps://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-pasthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_mortalityhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transitionhttps://www.statista.com/statistics/1041851/china-all-time-child-mortality-rate/https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7138028/https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/topics/topic-details/GHO/child-mortality-and-causes-of-deathhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_and_under-five_mortality_rates This is a public episode. 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