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Governments tax labor at much higher rates than capital for what used to be good reasons: labor is less mobile, making such taxes easier to collect, and capital investments tend to boost human productivity and wages, meaning that taxes on labor indirectly capture the upside from capital spending. But if machines start to replace humans rather than complement them, levies focused on labor may fail to capture revenues from AI-generated growth, leaving governments without the resources needed to help the losers in AI disruption. Meanwhile, heavy labor taxes add to companies’ incentives to replace workers with machines, accelerating displacement and driving up unemployment. If the AI industry’s own projections of mass job displacement prove even half true, taxes on labor that accelerate firings will cause voters to revolt against the entire AI project. ~Sebastian Mallaby

Trump has threatened new economic sanctions on Iran in a tacit admission that his bombing war hasn’t brought Iran to capitulate to his masculine dominance. It’s not clear how these sanctions will relieve the stranglehold Iran holds on the Strait of Hormuz. It’s more likely that they’ll increase the cost of food and gas in the US. “This week the   news broke   that the price spread (“crack”) between the price of a barrel of crude oil and the price refiners want to be paid to produce a refined barrel rose above $100. This statistic translates into a warning that gasoline and diesel prices will remain high for some time to come. That is bad news for Western economies. When you go to the grocery store, there is food to buy there because a truck running on diesel shipped it over. No diesel, no food. Or at least pricey diesel, expensive food. Trucks run on diesel, and some   70% of commodities  shipped in the US are transported by truck. High diesel prices mean high  ...

Stalinism is one way of achieving industrialization like cannibalism is one way of achieving a high-protein diet. ~Robert Conquest

There’s a lot of controversy surrounding Flock cameras. The cops say they help catch crooks. The civil libertarians say big brother is watching you. Some camera operators are using them to spy on girlfriends. Turns out that retail stores have been using them to reduce “shrinkage,” aka shoplifting. But digital surveillance comes at a price. “ Sainsbury’s has paused the use of AI face scanning in one of its stores after a customer was wrongly identified as a shoplifter and ejected from the shop.   “I was embarrassed, mortified even, and felt quite humiliated and powerless,” Matt Arnold, 46, said of his ordeal.   “The comedy promoter was buying supplies in the store in East Dulwich, in south-east   London , for a standup event at Dulwich Hamlet football club when, after scanning his items and a Nectar card, he was approached by two managers who told him he could not be served owing to an earlier incident. He was then asked to leave and they tried to escort him from the store...

“ President Donald Trump has declared the Strait of Hormuz as US territory in a new post on Truth Social.   “Sharing a bizarre map of the region with a large blue circle over Hormuz, the picture declared the vital shipping route as “US territory”.” Putin just needs to grab a map, draw a circle around Ukraine and label it “Russian territory.” Think of all the lives that would have been saved if he’d done that four years ago. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/iran-us-war-live-trump-oman-hormuz-peace-nuclear-weapons-b3034640.html?utm_source=taboola&utm_medium=editorial-push

Democracy is not an easy form of government. It has none of the certainties of the various forms of tyranny. It demands that the governed as well as the governing make compromises, learn to to listen, and sometimes resist impulses. The champions of democracy are not the people who cling to power in its name, but those who put that greater consultation, that larger discussion, that continuing project, above themselves ~Timothy Snyder

Whisky Pete Hegseth is bleating about testosterone testing and supplementation for US servicemen. He seems to believe that testosterone augmentation means a more effective military in the age of missiles and drones. But is testosterone an unalloyed good? “This is what we're seeing in clinic,” she says. “Men will come to see us with zero sperm counts, and will often deny that they've been taking testosterone – but usually from their blood tests and their physique, it's very evident that they’re on testosterone.”   “If you give yourself testosterone […] you're telling your body, ‘I've actually got enough testosterone’,” Satchi explains. “So that signal going to your testicles to produce testosterone and sperm is switched off.” “Like Clavicular, many of these patients will have sourced their testosterone from less-than-reputable suppliers: “they're getting it from their friends at the gym,” she explains, or online – and without the input of a legitimate endocrinolo...

President Trump won’t even be straight with the country about how he’s running out of weapons – when his war has depleted well  upwards of 90%  of certain crucial munitions, as  Zeteo  has learned. When reporters have dug in on this topic, he’s huffily accused them of “ treason ,” and pledged that those responsible for leaking the information “are being hunted down” aggressively.    The staggering rate of U.S. weapons exhaustion is one of many indications of how   colossally disastrous the Iran war has been   for the American side since the very moment Trump launched the conflict in February. And the extent to which Trump has routinely ordered the Justice Department to open sprawling leak investigations and browbeat journalists underscores just how much this president is attempting to make it functionally illegal for a free American press to report on how horribly the war is going.   After all, the only thing “ treasonous ” (to use a term so ...

Trump recently claimed that he would make the Strait of Hormuz American territory. Claiming sovereignty over someplace means more that just writing your name on a map with a sharpie. “Western powers have attempted to control the Strait of Hormuz before. Basically, however, they only held it at Iranian sufferance. When, as in 1622, the Iranians determined to expel the foreigners, they proved able to do so. Nowadays they have 50,000 drones and have damaged or destroyed all 17 US bases in the region, so I don’t think trying to occupy Hormuz would be any fun. “It was known as a strategic trading port even before the age of the great maritime empires.” Marco Polo visited twice and wrote about it. “Portugal took the island of Hormuz briefly in 1507-1508, and then came back to rule it 1515 to 1622. This occupation was during the Little Ice Age and we don’t hear as much about fatal heat. Although the Portuguese were now imperial administrators, they ruled through a vassal dynasty of the kings ...

When my dad was a Naval officer in the 1950s, he was part of the team that designed the USS Saratoga, an aircraft carrier. I remember him explaining to me in excited detail about the arresting gear, the device that stopped a landing jet. He spent most of his career as a chemical engineer, so this was a bit of an excursion. Regardless, I’m confident that he possessed more engineering expertise about aircraft carrier design than failed real estate businessman Donald Trump. “ President Trump has decided that he prefers the look of the World War II era battleships where the tower is in the middle of the ship. And he is pushing the Navy (and considering ordering the Navy) to move the tower forward on the Ford class ships. This comes after Trump just a few days ago ordered the Navy to go back to steam-powered catapults (the thing that hurls the planes forward off the ship for takeoff) from the new electromagnetic catapults. He apparently wants to do this because he once talked to a catapult ...

If everyone always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but that no one believes anything at all anymore—and rightly so, because lies, by their very nature, nave to be changed, to be “re-lied,” so to speak. So a lying government which pursues different goals at different times has constantly to rewrite its own history. That means that the people are deprived not only of their capacity to act, but also of their capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please. ~Hannah Arendt  

When a columnist writes that Trump has reached a new low, the columnist is doing something that looks like moral reporting and is not. The columnist is administering the fiction that the object has an interior. The fiction says: somewhere, in there, is a person who could have chosen otherwise, and today he did not, and we register the failure. The sentence keeps the person alive on the page after nine years of evidence that there is no person on the page. The sentence has an author, and the author does not know how to describe a machine, so the author keeps writing about a man. ~Mike Brock

Businesses fail all the time in America. The owners and investors pay the price (yes, the employees too). But if the businesses are large banks that gamble with other peoples’ money, they become too big to fail and instead are bailed out by the government, a form of financial socialized medicine.   “. . .  the 2008 bailout   was a political albatross   around the establishment’s neck, seen as a rescue of the very rich and connected people who caused mass unemployment and foreclosures. Whoever was in power as this anger built would get singed by it.   “More recently,   a loud chorus   of venture capitalists and tech magnates   pressured the Biden administration   into bailing out depositors at Silicon Valley Bank. This crash, much like 2008, stemmed largely from inane financial practices, with fintech and crypto firms keeping massive amounts of cash in regular bank accounts at SVB instead of using   basic risk management practices . ...

The Citizenship Clause was indeed written to repudiate  Dred Scott , the 1857 Supreme Court decision holding that Black people could never be citizens. But the Reconstruction Congress did not swap one caste rule for a narrower one; it  extended the promise  to “every free-born person in this land.” The idea wasn’t just to retroactively protect “the babies of slaves”; it was to prospectively forestall  all  future efforts to deny citizenship based on whatever other non-sovereignty-based criteria might be politically popular in any given moment.  ~Steve Vladeck

Sound economic projections are critical in assessing investment and public policy. I try not to let the fact that I’m philosophically valanced towards Medicare for all blind me to the need for rigorous study of its likely economic impact. “ Previous research has   shown   that shifting the   United States   to a   Medicare for All   system could   save   roughly 68,000 lives and $650 billion per year, but a new   study   by experts at Yale University suggests the savings would likely be even greater on both fronts.” *snip* “We estimate that such a system would reduce national health expenditure by $1,041 billion annually,” they explained. “Sources of savings include reductions in administrative overhead, pharmaceutical prices, fraudulent billing, and avoidable emergency care. Combined with the reversal of recent retractions, universal coverage would save over 114,000 lives annually.”   “Specifically, as Sanders’ office detailed in a...

The first time I recall using a map was in boy scouts. Travel in unfamiliar places on foot, bike or car required maps for me for decades. The first time I saw GPS in action was when my brother and I were on Ride the Rockies. We were invited to dinner by a friend in Aspen. After being dropped off in town by a bus, he navigated to our host’s condo with his GPS. A couple years later, I borrowed an old car of his to drive across Colorado for a meeting. The speedometer on the car was broken, so he clamped a GPS receiver to the dashboard that gave a read-out of the speed. Now, any trip I take out of town requires Siri. It has become essential for us as newcomers in New England. I barely recall what it was like before GPS. Little Blue Dot, by Katherine Dunn, is a history of GPS. It begins in England during the Blitz, when the Royal Air Force figured out how German bombers were using ratio signals to guide Luftwaffe aircraft for nighttime bombing raids. This led to efforts to jam or spoof thos...

Big personnel news out of the White House yesterday: Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is leaving the administration. Leavitt, who had her second child in May and returned from maternity leave last month, wrote in a post that “I cannot be the best mom my two young children deserve while devoting the constant time, energy, and attention required of the White House Press Secretary.” She will remain, she said, a top outside White House adviser. Leavitt, who had already richly earned a reputation as a virtuosic, remorseless spin artist and dissembler on the president’s behalf, now gets a second one as an icon of work-life balance. Trump will find it difficult to track down a replacement with her same combination of easy, cheerful dishonesty and panache. ~Andrew Egger

Let’s hand the microphone to Garrett Graff: “ Most people think of  Jurassic Park  as a cautionary tale for science, when really it’s a cautionary tale for corporate trust and safety teams, board oversight, and regulatory compliance. The dinosaurs’ entirely predictable rampage should really be seen as a failure of the security teams and the fence builders. The mistakes we’re seeing from these frontier AI companies are similarly the failures of the fence builders. *snip* “The battle between OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind is something like if Leo Szilard, Arthur Holly Compton, and Edward Teller had each led their own competing private effort to develop an atomic bomb and thermonuclear bomb — with no government assistance or coordination, all backed instead by private equity money — simultaneously building their own competing Los Alamos-style labs and negotiating with the military about how (and if) the military could use their own proprietary individual nuclear weapons."...

And in the age of cheap drones, you can't really defend against it.  As we are seeing, it doesn't take long to deplete any missile defenses you have, and no one has missile defenses covering everything anyway.   Maybe most of these attacks won't amount to much, but sometimes... We are ruled by people who have spent their lives saying, "Mommy, he hit me back!" yet are still surprised when it happens.   ~Duncan Black  

From Medpage Today: “Speaking about the order at the Oval Office on Monday, Trump repeatedly suggested the number or timing of vaccines could play a role in rising rates of autism spectrum disorder . . .”   Uh, no. What’s been rising is the rate of ASD *diagnoses,” due to changes in classification criteria and increased awareness. There’s no evidence that the incidence of ASD is increasing and there’s no evidence that vaccines have anything to do with ASD. The rates of childhood vaccination in the US have not increased. https://www.medpagetoday.com/pediatrics/vaccines/122557?xid=nl_mpt_DHE_2026-08-10&mh=eb71348a5ff6ae370cc6759bc5dc3300&zdee=gAAAAABm4u1YoCP4y5SBTJUyUyqo9KxZhft26L1xeGdP0BzzQQN1Pb_ifR6vFqhFh-3U6Q_nU7DbA-EawzzXKxSRhMOwjrOGuOKbf7OE641eN0HfnK6eObE%3D&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Headlines%20Evening%20-%20Randomized%202026-08-10&utm_term=NL_Daily_DHE_dual-gmail-definition

Real threats do not require social influencers, since they are obvious to all. No one had to convince Americans after Pearl Harbor that the danger was great and sacrifice imperative. They saw it clearly and acted. When a modern cable news anchor reports with a smirk that the opposition is destroying this once great republic, cuts to commercial, and then returns with yet another ”crisis,” one can safely assume that, although the issue may or may not be serious, it is not existential. ~Thomas Madden

Most days I go on walks of 4-6 miles in the nearby woods. I bring my camera. I tell people that it gives me something to do with my hands. But it’s more than that. I learned the basics of photography in high school. I used many of those skills as a postdoc and well into my career as a scientist. Digital photography freed me from the darkroom.  Through all those decades, my life was dominated by the future and how to control it. Photography was a means to an end. Revisiting photography after retirement has not just taught me new skills, it’s taught me to live in the moment at a time in my life when the amount of “future” I have left is shrinking. As the professional wildlife photographer Simon d’Entremont says: “Photography doesn’t just change the pictures you make, it changes the person who makes them. Photography is a way of participating in the world instead of consuming it.” In the video link at the end, d’Entrement enumerates six ways that photography is transformative in the w...

The fact of college graduation matters far more, if you’re worried about jobs, than *which* college you attended. For most employers and most jobs, the fact that you graduated college shows that you’re a finisher. Over a four-year period, you took courses in a variety of fields and, within a narrow timetable (quarter or semester) completed all the tasks at an acceptable proficiency year over year.   “ In high school I used to OBSESS over the US News and World report college rankings, naively thinking school prestige = long-term career success.| Fast forward a decade later, I think these ranking lists are less of an indicator of the quality of education you’ll receive, and more so of the network you’ll have access to (both of your peers and alumni). So my biggest tip for soon-to-be and current college students: No matter where you go to school, surround yourself with people who give a f*ck about their future. Because the clearest indicator of long-term success is how much you and th...

I'm currently auditing an online lecture series by historian Timothy Snyder on Hitler and Stalin. The most recent lecture was on Communism. Snyder recommends that his students read The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels. It's mercifully short and the Kindle version cost 99 cents, so I read it.  As I say, it's short and cheap, so although I found it a complete waste of time and money, the damage was modest. I realize it's a manifesto, not a work of scholarship, but the polemical reliance on assertions and the poverty of evidence for them is certainly an affront to my intellect. I guess I'm not the intended audience, Then there's the fact that it didn't age well. The claim that Germany was particularly ripe for a communist revolution is risible in light of the fact that millions of German workers supported the Kaiser and later Hitler. And, there's the enormities that were the starvation, suffering and death of tens of millions in the "communist...

“ Former first lady Jill Biden  said she noticed a troubling bedtime tendency that may have foreshadowed  former President Joe Biden's  aggressive prostate cancer diagnosis: he would use the bathroom as many as seven times at night.   “Jill Biden shared the details during an interview Wednesday, Aug. 5, on SiriusXM’s “ Let’s Talk Off Camera With Kelly Ripa, ” saying she had previously raised concerns about her husband’s frequent nighttime trips to White House physicians.” In the waning months of 2017, I had to pee two or three times a night. My wife made an appointment for me with my PCP, who misdiagnosed the problem. Long story short, I found myself in the urology clinic with a Foley catheter that drained 1.2 liters from my bladder. Again, long story short, the diagnosis was benign prostate hyperplasia and I had green light laser prostate reduction surgery. Nearly nine years later, it’s all good. Guys, pay attention to your bladder (and your wife). https://www.usato...

“Ever the hype man, Musk suggested thinking of SpaceX’s satellites as robots, given that “they’re autonomous and don’t need servicing.” In the not-so-distant future, Musk mused, robots will be used to scale manufacturing on the moon. From there, moon-based robots will enable SpaceX to build a mass accelerator with solar production. Even Musk admitted it all sounded “totally nuts” but claimed that it could lead the company to scale to 1,000x the economy of Earth. From there, factories will be built, and robots “will be helpful with that,” Musk added. “It sounds super sci-fi right now, but it’s going to happen,” he said.” Don’t bogart that joint, Elon https://fortune.com/2026/08/04/elon-musk-spacex-earnings-trillion-revenue-target-capex-stock-reaction/

It seems extremely unlikely that the Trump administration will be chastened by its failure in Iran. Shamelessness has been central to Trump’s business and political success, and his reaction to setbacks is to deny objective facts and construct fantasies of achievement. The rigors of war do not seem to have persuaded him of the need for a more coherent process of policy formulation and assessment; he continues to blurt out his every whim, and a cabinet of sycophants and amplifiers is unlikely to impose discipline on an undisciplined principal. Nor can the two parts of the government that have apparently provided solid strategic judgments—the CIA and the military—salvage the process. They are advisory bodies, not policy actors, and Trump repudiates or ignores their counsel whenever it conflicts with his claims or preferences.   ~Kori Schake

When I was very young, I consumed lots of carrots. It turned my skin orange, according to my mom. “ People are touting "carrot maxxing" on social media as a natural shortcut to golden skin. "Week 6 of drinking my self-tanner," one woman  said on TikTok , downing a glass of carrot juice. “A different woman who went viral for her carrot maxxing results frequently posts  slideshows  of her before-and-after skin. In the before photos, she is very pale. After months of carrot maxxing, her face has a noticeable orange-y.   “While eating a large amount of carrots can indeed shift a patient's skin tone, it's not the same as an actual tan, doctors told  MedPage Today .”   Let’s be clear. This is not the same as Trump’s spray-painted complexion.  “Raman Madan, MD, chief of dermatology at Northwell Health's Glen Cove Hospital in New York, said that for most people it takes eating two to four large carrots or about 16 ounces of carrot juice daily for a week or mor...

Before the US/Israeli war on Iran, there was zero evidence that Iran had a nuclear weapons program. The claim that they were weeks away from a bomb were based on fabrications and projection. Was Iran enriching uranium? Yes. But the claim that it was for a weapon was a counterfactual. Remember those non-existent Iraqi WMDs? “Over his decades as Iran’s religious and government leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had consistently rejected nuclear weapons.   “Khamenei ruled that these ridiculously violent explosives, with their promise of indiscriminate killing and environmental poisoning, were simply incompatible with Islam.   “A devout Muslim might well see it that way.   “Mohammed’s “rules of war”  cited  in the [sayings of the first Caliph] include:   “Do not kill any child, woman, aged or sick person Do not destroy the villages and towns Do not spoil the cultivated fields and gardens Do not uproot, burn or cut down fruitful trees Do not destroy an inhabited...

It’s not just that people don’t want data centers in their backyards or regions. We basically know why they don’t want them. They’ll bogart all the electricity and water. Drive up rates. Wreck the environment. There’s another dimension of it though. The throughline of this age is that you’ve got these big tech platforms that can do anything they want. It is a society-driving spectacle that is there in plain sight and yet still under-appreciated. AI itself captures all of this. We’re told by its makers that it will take away everyone’s jobs, require unimaginable new supplies of energy, has a non-trivial shot at leading to the extinction of the human race … and this is the argument of its supporters! The point is that there is this very small group of men running a handful of mega tech platforms and they’re making the decisions and it basically doesn’t matter what we think. Not just you and me individually but us collectively. It’s their world. We’re just living in it. ~Josh Marshall

I’ve long felt that the Soviet Union was good for America. Sputnik provoked innovation in American schools. Shaming by the USSR on the world stage helped accelerate civil rights in the US. Fear of the USSR enforced a sort of patriotic unity of purpose in our politics. Yes, it had unhealthy effects like the Vietnam war and the support of Central and South American dictatorships, but the perceived threat and rivalry seemed to place limits on what was acceptable in domestic politics. I’m reading Thomas Madden’s “The Fall of Republics.” My interest in history has always been moored in the conviction that it can help me better understand the world I live in and where it may be headed. Today, I came across this passage: “It is an irony that the affluence and power that so enriched the Roman people also doomed their republic. Unlike previous mixed governments, the Roman Republic was never conquered by enemies. It succumbed instead to the spoils of its success, the blessings and curses of peac...

And for this change the people will be responsible. On the one hand they will think they have a grievance against those leaders who seem stingy, and on the other hand, they will be puffed up by the flattery of those campaigning for office. Stirred to fury and swayed by passion, the people will no longer consent to obey or even to be the equals of the political class, but will demand the lion’s share of power for themselves. When that happens, the state will change its name to the finest sounding of all, freedom and democracy, but will change its nature to the worst thing of all, mob-rule.   ~Polybius

I’ve seen several online pieces about the paucity of nutrition coursework in medical school. For example, this: “Nearly every week, I recommend a change in diet as a first-line treatment for type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol -- the conditions that fill American clinics and account for more death than any other factors. Yet, nearly everything I know about how to prescribe diet appropriately, I learned after medical school, on my own time. My formal training gave me only a few scattered hours on the single most powerful lever I have for preventing and reversing chronic disease.” Look, medical school is expensive and formal instructional hours are a zero-sum game. More formal instruction on nutrition means less instruction about something else. And most of that course content is forgotten shortly after the exam. As a former med school professor, I know that our students got instruction on nutrition under the title of metabolic biochemistry, for example. Verifying ...

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. got into it with CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday in an interview segment that quickly evolved into Kennedy angrily berating Bash and her network for “punishing” people during the Covid-19 pandemic.   “The segment on Sunday comes as measles outbreaks have broken out in several states, with public health officials warning that a unvaccinated communities were supercharging the spread of a disease to historic levels.” Measles is surging. Food poisoning is surging. Screw worm is surging.  Kennedy is panicking.  When you hire clowns, you get a circus. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/rfk-cnn-interview-measles-vaccines-b3026025.html

“ The Trump administration has dropped its case against a former Olympic canoeist charged in connection with damage to the Reflecting Pool, acknowledging their allegations against David “Davey” Hearn don’t hold water.   “In a filing Friday afternoon, a supervisor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, which is headed by Jeanine Pirro, wrote that officials obtained information that undermined “the evidentiary basis for the indictment” against Hearn.”   Lying is as natural as breathing for the Trump Administration.   https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-administration-drops-reflecting-pool-case-blaming-damage-botched-rcna590303

If there is a question to ask, then, it is this: Why does Musk get a pass? Why do politicians, journalists and commentators treat his far-right racist radicalism as a sideshow rather than the core of his political, ideological and industrial project, seen in everything from his deep support for Donald Trump in the United States and Restore Britain in Britain to his decision to construct a massive pollution-generating data center in predominantly Black Memphis, Tenn.   Musk spends a large part of his free time fomenting violence and spreading the same hateful ideology that motivated some of the deadliest shootings and attacks ever to happen on American soil. It is that fact, and not the cars he builds or the rockets he launches, that ought to define his place in public life.   ~Jamelle Bouie