Told to book a gym class, an AI agent hacked the site instead to move its user up the waitlist
Tuesday, August 11, 2026
Monday, August 10, 2026
Reading archive 2026-08-10
When America’s budget will break, disastrously - "Medicare’s budget-busting makes Social Security’s look modest by comparison. Of the projected $138 trillion budget shortfall over the next 30 years, $109 trillion is from Medicare. Rising health care costs, combined with an aging population receiving far more in benefits than it ever paid in taxes, spells fiscal Armageddon. The Medicare Hospital Insurance trust fund goes insolvent in 2033."
GOP lawmakers move to scrap D.C.’s motorcycle helmet law as road deaths rise: One sponsor calls motorcycles a “symbol of freedom.” Safety experts say scrapping the helmet mandate would come at a deadly cost. - "In states without universal helmet laws, 51 percent of motorcyclists killed in 2023 were not wearing helmets, according to federal safety data. In states with such mandates, just 10 percent of motorcyclists killed had no helmet."
Cruise ship helps stranded skiff and crew in Southeast Alaska as Zuckerberg yacht stands by
Sunday, August 9, 2026
Thursday, August 6, 2026
Friday, July 31, 2026
Reading archive 2026-07-31
A new Colorado River plan requires water cuts for three states. Deeper cuts are still possible.: Arizona, California and Nevada will be required to curb their use of the water from the river by a combined 20 percent over the next two years, according to three officials. - "In the Upper Basin, home to the snowcapped mountains and winding tributaries that feed the river, there are few reservoirs to provide long-term water storage, leaving users reliant on natural flows. That means the Upper Basin takes an automatic cut during dry years, officials argue. They say responsibility for restoring water to Lakes Powell and Mead should fall on the Lower Basin states that use them.
"Yet about three-quarters of the people who depend on the Colorado live in the Lower Basin. The region is also home to major cities and sprawling farms that provide most of the nation’s winter vegetable supply. Officials from these states say they have already curbed their water consumption by millions of acre feet in recent years. Overuse of the river is universal, they argue, and so too is responsibility for saving it."
What’s tucked inside the Senate’s Russia sanctions bill: Its tariff proposals could affect other countries more than Russia. - "In sum, the legislation gives Trump an awful lot of authority to impose massive tariffs on a number of countries, notably India and China, if they don’t cut off all Russian energy imports. They are unlikely to do so, because both India and China are heavily reliant on Russian energy — all the more since the U.S.-Iran war has reduced oil exports from the Persian Gulf. Trump’s efforts to use 25 percent tariffs to wean India from Russian energy imports already failed last year.
"The problem is that there is nothing to stop Trump from imposing tariffs on any of those countries for some other reason and using the Graham bill as legal justification. He might even use the legislation to go after U.S. allies in Europe and Asia."
Wednesday, July 29, 2026
Reading archive 2026-07-29
An Uncomplicated Man - "Zeus’ law is a version of archaic Greek xenia: the idealised relationships between strangers, hosts and guests, who must treat one another with mutual respect, thereby forming multi-generational bonds between unrelated families. In the film, xenia is filtered through contemporary American ideas about the importance of philanthropic charity: wealthy people should be gracious towards the poor and hungry in their midst (without necessarily doing anything to mitigate their poverty). Many of the film’s implicit values directly contradict those of Homer’s poem. Deception, warmongering, extramarital sex, cruelty to animals, abusing women and yearning for honour – all perfectly fine in the world of Homer – are, in this version, very bad. This is not in itself a problem, but it is a problem if the film’s own values and vision don’t hang together, and if the characters’ motivations don’t make sense on their own terms.
"In Nolan’s Odyssey, slaughtering people with the help of trickery, technology and weapons is presented as bad when the Greeks are killing the Trojans, who have violated xenia, but good when Odysseus is killing the suitors, who have violated xenia. Taking something ostensibly abandoned by Odysseus and his comrades is natural and forgivable when the Trojans lay claim to the horse, but unnatural and unforgivable when the suitors lay claim to Odysseus’ palace, food, wine and wife. Strangers in Ithaca are to be treated with gracious kindness, as possible gods in disguise; but strangers in foreign lands are usually monstrous, to be blinded, robbed and slaughtered. Defying the gods is noble and brave when Odysseus blinds Polyphemus, son of Poseidon; it’s stupid and greedy when Eurylochus eats the Cattle of the Sun. Deception is bad when Odysseus tricks Sinon or the suitors trick Telemachus, but good when Telemachus and Odysseus trick the suitors. Sharing is good, and Odysseus is seen taking his place at an oar alongside his men; but one-man rule is also unambiguously good, and those who challenge monarchy or autocracy, or try to eat more than their allotted portion, are either evil (the suitors) or foolish (Eurylochus). Either way, they have to die. It is bad to fight and kill to accumulate wealth, as Agamemnon does; it is good to fight and kill to preserve the wealth that you have already acquired (even if by war). Any one of these moral contradictions could make for an interesting and generative theme in a movie, but Nolan lets the fragments of an incomplete set of big ideas spin around in the epic whirlpool, with no plank of solid, specific human experience to which we might cling.
...
"Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbours. It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible."
Reading archive 2026-07-28
Killing trees to save the forest: The deadly experiment that could save the American elm - "One by one, row by row, the plan was to stick nearly all of the 5,300 or so elms at the sprawling site in southern Vermont, save the few that received a squirt of water as a control. In the coming weeks, most of the trees would doubtlessly succumb to the pathogen that has already killed tens of millions of their ancestors and made Ulmus americana an endangered species. The ones that live, however, could help save the species."
How Netanyahu Lost America: The prime minister, a self-styled expert on the U.S., has shattered his country’s standing. - "[AIPAC]'s symbolic importance ballooned as its influence weakened. Gavin Newsom, Cory Booker, Ruben Gallego, and Seth Moulton-none of them stalwarts of the Democratic Socialists of America-all pledged to refuse AIPAC's money. Moderate Democrats concluded that taking risks to defend Israel had no upside, and not just because of the growing animosity within the party's base. Netanyahu's treatment of Biden had shown that loyalty would never be reciprocated. Democrats running for president absorbed the new calculus and have attempted to glean attention for their nascent candidacies through high-profile confrontations with Israel. The divide had been opened by the man who assured Israelis that no one understood the Americans better."
An Odyssey for Our Own Time: Christopher Nolan presents a very human hero to a culture that desperately needs one. - "Part of what makes The Odyssey so appealing to a modern audience is that it takes civilizing aspects of Greek culture-hospitality and magnanimity-and adds later concepts, some of them influenced by Jewish and Christian ethics that were, to varying degrees, alien to ancient Greek culture: deep introspection, even confession; humility and empathy; sorrow and guilt for the harm one has done, even in victory; the conviction that the conquered count and have worth; and vengeance tempered with mercy. In the film, Odysseus emerges as a figure haunted by his victory in a way that no ancient Greek would have been."
The Problem With Shutting Down ICE in Blue States: Trump officials are happy to ship immigrants elsewhere. - "'ICE is going to find the bed space,' Gihon said. 'A lot of time, it's going to be farther away from a blue state, and farther away from friendly federal courts, in a place with terrible conditions.' In addition to being more distant from family members, immigration courts in Texas and Louisiana have judges who reject asylum claims at some of the highest rates in the country, federal data show. And sanctuary cities such as New York and Chicago generally have more legal-aid organizations that can help ICE detainees get out of custody and fight deportation. 'When I have a detention center near me that I can drive to, I never have to worry about my client missing a phone call,' Gihon told me."
The DSA Is a Parasite: The left-wing faction is hijacking the Democratic Party. - "These victories mark major milestones for the DSA's overall political strategy. Knowing that it doesn't have anything near the support to compete as a party in its own right, the DSA opportunistically uses the Democratic Party ballot line (which some members describe as a 'tool') to get its candidates elected. The DSA declined to endorse the Democratic nominee in the past three presidential elections, and members attack the Democratic Party's leaders as neoliberal corporate shills who must be overthrown. (When images of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries appeared on television screens at the party celebrating the DSA slate's win in New York, the audience erupted into chants of 'You're next!') The DSA is not shy about its ultimate designs. A recent draft platform explicitly called for the eventual formation of an 'independent political party, rooted in the working-class majority'-language that was eventually scrubbed."
The Lines the Court Won’t Cross: The Supreme Court is mostly giving the Trump administration what it wants—with interesting exceptions. - "Instead, the Court's future dealings with the Donald Trump presidency will likely be guided by three general rules: First, keep focus on the constitutional project that Chief Justice John Roberts has been coaxing into being since he joined the Court-one that will transform the First Amendment, eviscerate the equal-protection clause, and recalibrate the Constitution's balance of powers - and green-light presidential initiatives that chime with this project. Second, because this project aims at deep constitutional change, consider breaking from ideological stereotypes when a case involves a mere statute, which can always be reworked by Congress. Finally, beware of presidential frolics that could leave the justices politically exposed when things go sideways - especially if traditional Republican elites would be among the unhappy constituencies."
A Startling Glimpse at AI’s Ruthless Efficiency: The Hugging Face hack reveals that the web is in a vulnerable new era. - "But jailbreaks are clearly not even necessary for things to go haywire. The Hugging Face hack showed advanced AI systems deciding upon and then orchestrating a high-grade cyberattack on their own-the models working against, rather than according to, human instruction. Models are ruthless in their pursuit of a goal, sometimes taking disastrous shortcuts. Imagine, for example, a bot tasked with reducing the federal deficit that institutes an elaborate and hard-to-detect accounting gimmick, or a customer-service agent that issues absurd discounts in pursuit of customer-satisfaction ratings. In the case of GPT-5.6 Sol and the unreleased model, 'all evidence suggests that the models were hyperfocused on finding a solution' for an evaluation, OpenAI wrote in its blog, 'going to extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal.'"
The Trump Family Sparks a Revolution in Albania: A luxury development planned by Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump has spurred anti-corruption protests. - "Albania, where about half of the population is Muslim, has strong ties to Israel rooted in historical goodwill. During the Second World War, Albanians motivated by an ancient honor code called besa, literally 'to keep the promise,' hid thousands of Jewish refugees; it was the only European country with more Jewish residents after the Holocaust than before."
The Fear of Black Greeks: White people don’t own the accomplishments of ancient Greece. - "But Greece is not as far from Africa as the North American continent is, and the modern construct of race, a pseudoscientific product of the Atlantic slave trade, would not be invented until thousands of years after Homer. Black people are depicted in Greek art. Egypt, Libya, and 'Aethiopia' are frequently referenced in ancient writings. As the Black classics scholar Frank Snowden Jr. wrote in the 1970s, at least one of the characters in The Odyssey, Eurybates, is specifically described as 'black-skinned and woolly-haired.' As the Stanford classics professor Sarah Derbew notes in her book Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity, Black people are referenced in plays by Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus. They also appear in the writings of Hesiod and Herodotus. One of the lost epic poems is The Aethiopis, in which Memnon, the Aethiopian king and an ally to Troy, plays a major role.
"Black people were not as uncommon in the ancient Mediterranean world as Nolan's critics seem to imagine. But even if they had been, color-blind casting makes sense as an artistic choice for portraying the classics precisely because race as it exists today did not exist when The Odyssey was written. And no contemporary actor can actually claim the same descent as Helen, who hatched from a swan's egg."
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