Today's Water Cooler 2026-05-29

Patient readers, today I was hit with a cascading schedule debacle, plus travel, plus connectivity issues. This blogging thing is harder than I thought. I hope to be back in form over the weekend. In the meantime, stay tuned for orts and scraps. —lambert

Birdsong of the Day

Moar mimidae:

Waterfall Glen Forest Preserve—Poverty Prairie, DuPage, Illinois, United States. Sounds like some sort of construction in the background, in addition to: Red-winged Blackbird (Red-winged), Eastern Warbling Vireo, Northern Yellow Warbler, and Field Sparrow.

“How the Bird Eye Was Pushed to an Evolutionary Extreme” [Quanta]. “The retina is one of the body’s most energetically expensive tissues. Built from complex networks of sometimes more than 100 different types of neurons, retinal tissue consumes two to three times more energy than the same mass of typical brain tissue. That’s why most vertebrate retinas, including our own, are furrowed with dense, branching networks of blood vessels: to deliver oxygen and other ingredients for producing energy.But there’s a significant exception to this rule. Birds have retinas that mostly lack blood vessels. This may seem especially strange given birds’ exceptional vision.” More: “bird retinas don’t have some unusual adaptation for acquiring oxygen — they survive without it entirely. Instead, to bring energy to the tissue, they use a process called anaerobic glycolysis that is significantly less efficient than oxygen-powered metabolism but gets the job done.” And: “A common thread in many medical conditions is a drop in oxygen delivery to tissues, which, depending on where it occurs, can lead to scars or brain damage. Human brains can tolerate maybe a minute of total anoxia, Lewin said. That’s what makes strokes, which cut off blood and oxygen supply to parts of the brain, so devastating. By studying low-oxygen conditions in creatures such as naked mole rats and birds, scientists can gain insight into how tissues can tolerate low-oxygen conditions. ;Maybe we can get inspiration for how nature solved these problems by millions of years of natural selection,’ Damsgaard said. ‘There’s so much to be learned from these animals that are able to do something that we cannot do.”

In Case You Might Miss…

(1) “The AI Bubble”

(2) “F.B.I. Arrests C.I.A. Official With $40 Million in Gold Bars in His Home”

(3) “They just formed the biggest tech worker union in the US. They plan to rein in AI and curb layoffs”

4) “Democrats turn on Bidens’ ‘nonsense’ ahead of midterms as Jill and Hunter steal the spotlight while minority party desperately tries to turn page”

Politics

Trump Administration

“F.B.I. Arrests C.I.A. Official With $40 Million in Gold Bars in His Home” [New York Times]. “A senior C.I.A. official was arrested last week after investigators found hundreds of gold bars worth over $40 million stashed in his Virginia residence, a small fortune that he apparently brought home from work, according to court papers…. The only charge lodged against Mr. Rush is that he inflated his academic credentials and obtained military leave pay worth tens of thousands of dollars. The authorities say he falsely claimed to be a member of the Navy Reserve when he was discharged.” And buried all the way at the bottom of the story: “The court papers do not indicate why Mr. Rush appears to have kept so much gold, and $2 million in U.S. currency, in his home, or what work project would have required him to amass such wealth.” • Rush was not indicated for possessing the gold bars. Seems like the takeaway should be that for spooks, gold bars are to be had for the asking, rather like petty cash, as long as you spin a plausible story about why you need them. Still, who was the counter-party? Who did Rush promise the gold bars to, and then not deliver them? Somebody who is pretty upset right now with Rush, and with the United States (a very special case of Putin’s thesis that the United States is not “agreement-capable”). But who? Somebody in Venezuela? Iran? Ukraine? Cuba? Or — long shot — Israel, on the assumption that stuffing Bibi back in his box is better achieved through bribery than targeted assassination).

“Ex-US government official arrested after $40m in gold bars found in home” [BBC}. “Between November 2025 and March 2026, Rush made several requests to the US government ‘to obtain a significant quantity of foreign currency and tens of millions of dollars in gold bars for work-related expenses’, which he later received, court documents state. During a review, the CIA ‘was unable to locate the gold bars or significant amounts of the foreign currency;, court documents state. The government was also unable to locate ‘any record of Rush providing information to his employer regarding the disposition of the currency or gold bars that he received for work-related purposes’.” • So I guess spooks asking for — and getting! — gold bars for “work-related expenses” is so routine the CIA got careless about accounting for them? Or quote-unquote careless, I suppose—

“Gold Rush: Did CIA agent steal $40m in gold bars via work expenses?” [Al Jazeera]. “Most of the US government’s gold is held as official reserves, mainly by the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve. This is because gold is a durable, universally recognised store of value outside the banking system. Hence, it is useful in crises or wartime, when normal financial channels might break down. In some intelligence or military operations, however, gold can be used to make covert payments in environments where local banking is unreliable or where the US does not want a traceable wire or bank trail. This has fuelled long‑running theories that the CIA has used gold as a kind of ‘slush fund’ for covert or even illegal activities.” • Theories?

“Forget Becoming An Auto Journalist, The CIA’s Job Benefits Sound Way Better” [Jalopnik]. “Even with the risk of maybe, possibly getting arrested or assassinated, the benefits of working for the CIA sound so much better than anything auto journalism has to offer, you’d be a fool to consider any other career path. Because once you get past the “senior C.I.A. official was arrested last week” part of the opening sentence, you get to the “investigators found hundreds of gold bars worth over $40 million stashed in his Virginia residence.” Yeah, you read that right. Allegedly, the FBI found a pile of gold bars at this guy’s house, and all that gold was worth more than $40 million. Meanwhile, I’ve never been left alone with $40 million worth of anything, let alone allowed to take it home with me. If this is the first time you’re learning that automakers don’t actually hand out gold bars on press trips, I’m sorry. At this point, they don’t even give out thumb drives, and if any one of the drives I’ve gotten had a crypto wallet on it, I sure never found it.” • Although the thumbdrive might have had a social security database on it, as good as gold, I suppose.

* * *

“DHS Secretary Says He’s ‘Drawing Up Plans’ To Halt International Flights To Cities That Don’t Cooperate With ICE” [Mediaite]. “[Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin] then explained that DHS has been floating the idea of preventing international flights from arriving in certain cities, especially Newark, New Jersey, because of the ongoing protests at Delaney Hall, a detention facility holding up to 1,000 immigrants. He said local law enforcement is not assisting federal agents there. ‘[T]he street, it belongs to the city,’ Mullin said. ‘If it belonged to us, we would take care of it, but it belongs to the city, and they’re barricading our employees from coming in and out of the facility… Why are we processing international flights into the airport there? And we are currently, which we’re not initiating it yet, but we’re currently drawing up plans to say, listen, in these sanctuary cities where the local, radical left Democrats aren’t allowing us to do our job and enforce federal laws, then we shouldn’t be processing international flights into their cities either because they don’t want us to enforce immigration.’” • Blockading the Straits of Staten Island, eh?

“Exclusive: NSF puts new research grants to top universities on hold” [Nature]. “Internal agency documents obtained by Nature’s news team reveal that on 9 April, the NSF’s Office of Award Management (OAM), which finalizes grants and handles their finances, put limits on new funding to Duke University in Durham, North Carolina; Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Princeton University in New Jersey; and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. A note applied to these universities in an NSF database reads: “Future Awards to Organization on Hold.” Since then, little fresh funding has been made available to these institutions by the NSF.” But: “Update: On 28 May, the day after this story was published, the NSF’s OAM removed from its database the note “Future Awards to Organization on Hold” for Duke, Harvard and Yale. And a few grants for researchers at Harvard and Duke have been released, according to agency staff members who spoke to Nature.” • So somebody in the administration reads Nature?

Republican Funhouse

“Conservatives erupt after DNC lashes out at top White House official with vulgar personal attack” [FOX]. Competive pearl-clutching: “The official Democratic National Committee X account ignited a social media firestorm on Wednesday afternoon in a profanity-laden online spat with President Donald Trump’s chief policy advisor, Stephen Miller. ‘Shut up, you ugly f–’ @TheDemocrats wrote.” • Oh, come on. Here’s a screen dump from the (AI-genereated) video posted by @realDonaldTrump on Truth Social. He’s flying a plane, wearing a crown, and dropping sh*t on No Kings protesters:

Fine, whatever, but can we have some consistency?

“Donald Trump’s definition of ‘beauty’ ” [The New Statesman]. “It had been the morning of the Cherry Blossom ten-mile run, a usually festive annual occasion, for which the bridge across to Arlington is closed for traffic; now people were lying down on the pavement to photograph the iconic view from the Lincoln Memorial to America’s most important shrine to the military, the Arlington National Cemetery – for that view might disappear forever, if Trump succeeds in having his gigantic triumphal arch built. The latter constitutes visual vandalism, not so much literal destruction, as with the East Wing of the White House, which many people recall fondly as the entrance by which they visited as tourists. Meanwhile, national guardsmen are aimlessly wandering across the National Mall, some parts of which have been closed off behind gigantic signs declaring that DC is being made ‘safe and beautiful.’” • None of this is to my taste. OTOH, elections don’t turn on questons of aesthetics. Nor do “bad aesthetics” equate to fascism. The Nazis — I suppose you gotta hand it to them, hat tip Hugo Boss — had great uniforms.

Democrats en Déshabillé

“Buttigieg leads crowded 2028 Democratic field in new poll” [The Hill]. “Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is leading in new polling on a hypothetical Democratic presidential primary as the party seeks a new path after 2024 losses. An Emerson College Polling survey released Thursday found Buttigieg at the top of the pack with 18 percent support, followed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) at 16 percent. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) notched 11 percent support, while Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) and former Vice President Kamala Harris — the party’s 2024 nominee — earned 10 percent each. Another 9 percent of survey respondents backed Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D), and 18 percent were undecided. The new numbers mark a slight uptick in recent months for Buttigieg, Ocasio-Cortez and Beshear — while support for Newsom and Harris has ticked down slightly.” • Mayo Pete? Really?

“Democrats turn on Bidens’ ‘nonsense’ ahead of midterms as Jill and Hunter steal the spotlight while minority party desperately tries to turn page” [Daily Mail]. “Democrats are furious with the Biden family after both former First Lady Jill and troubled son Hunter have jumped back into the spotlight as the party desperately tries to win back Congress in the midterm elections. Jill Biden, whose memoir will go on sale next week, revealed in an interview with CBS News that she believed her husband was having a stroke during his disastrous debate performance that eventually pushed him out of the presidential race.” And so “Doctor” Biden took Genocide Joe to the Waffle House afterward? Really? More: “ ‘Is this a stroke? I felt like we were watching an AI hologram of the man we knew, and the hologram was glitching. Has he been drugged?’ she wrote, according to an excerpt obtained by the Atlantic.” Wait.”Doctor” Biden wasn’t acting as Joe Biden’s food taster? Hunter, meanwhile, has publicly discussed his long struggle with drugs in a chat with Candace Owens and emerged on X for the first time ever.” And: “”Why are we talking about this? Why are we talking about Hunter Biden? Why is Hunter Biden talking about Hunter Biden?’ Democrat strategist Pete Giangreco told Politico.” • Wny? A grift (“Doctor” Biden’s book) or revenge (as if annointing Harris wasn’t enough). Those are the only two motivations I can think of. Both are petty beyond bellief, of course.

“Clyburn’s seat survives for now as South Carolina Republicans buck Trump on redistricting” {Politico] • South Carolina politicians understand, better than national Republicans do, that keeping Clyburn is office benefits them more than his replacement could ever do. Obama, Clinton, Harris….

Religion

“Deus ex machina: Half of US Christians trust AI’s spiritual advice” [The Register]. “Who needs a minister when you have an LLM? America’s Christian population appears to have found God in precisely the place you’d expect a manifestation of the divine to be spotted in 2026: Amid AI chatbot responses. A survey of Americans published this week by Evangelical polling outfit Barna sought to discover what Christians thought about AI’s ability to serve as a spiritual mentor, and the split is surprisingly even: A full 48 percent of practicing US Christians told the organization that they trusted AI’s advice to aid their spiritual growth. Potentially more surprising than that, 34 percent said spiritual advice dispensed by an AI was just as trustworthy as what they’d get out of a flesh-and-blood pastor. That share rises, unsurprisingly, among younger Christians, with 39 percent of Gen Z respondents and 44 percent of Millennials agreeing that preachers and AI are at trust parity.” • Sycophancy might be the common thread (since if I understand the megachurch landscape, bodies in pews is the key metric). I wonder who Silicon Valley will, through ChatBots, tell “Christians” to vote for. Oh, they wouldn’t do that?

Realignment and Legitimacy

“AI tried to bury this politician — now people have actually heard of him” [The Verge]. “By the time that the Democratic primary for New York’s 12th congressional district wraps up in June, Anthropic and OpenAI will have spent millions on their battle over the political future of AI: who gets to regulate it, or who will be punished for trying to regulate it. But the real winner of their feud may be the guy they’re currently fighting over: a once-obscure New York state assemblyman, who they’ve Streisand-effected into becoming the poster child for AI safety regulation. Ever since late 2025, Leading the Future, a super PAC funded by OpenAI, Palantir, and a16z executives, has spent millions against Alex Bores, who wrote one of the first pieces of AI regulatory legislation in the country. The PAC hoped to kill his bid for the seat about to be vacated by longtime Democrat Rep. Jerry Nadler. Instead, Bores is now a front-runner in the eight-person race to become the ‘face of Manhattan,’ as New York Magazine recently put it in a cover feature. And shockingly, he pulled all this off without running a massive ad campaign. In fact, the Bores campaign told The Verge that it had placed its very first ad buy in New York on May 11th, nearly seven months after Bores entered the race and only weeks before the polls close on June 23rd. In contrast, Leading the Future, whose backers include Joe Lonsdale, Marc Andreessen, and OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, has been running attack ads against Bores since December 2025, spending an estimated total of $2.4 million according to the most recent reports.” • Lol. Media oligarchs cashing in, though!

“The Consultants Cashing In on Pro-Israel Campaign Spending” [Sludge]. “Already this midterm cycle, four major pro-Israel committees—AIPAC’s PAC, its outside spending arm United Democracy Project (UDP), the closely aligned Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI) super PAC, and the Republican Jewish Coalition’s Victory Fund—have poured nearly $50 million into congressional races nationwide. It is the third straight election cycle in which the groups have operated as a dominant financial force, swamping candidate fundraising in some contests and generating a windfall for firms staffed by former White House aides, national party strategists, and senior congressional campaign operatives. The consultants benefiting from the spending include alumni of the Reagan White House and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, veterans of Obama and Clinton presidential campaigns, former Biden advisers, and longtime media firms tied to both political parties.” • Huh. Imagine that.

Business Sentiment

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 60 Greed (previous close: 60 Greed) [CNN]. One week ago: 58 (Greed). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). • Weirdly stable….

Business: AI

‘FOMO, not ROI, is driving hyperscaler capex.’

“The AI Bubble” [No One’s Happy]. Worth reading in full, though logic these days seems pretty escapable:

But the capital expenditure being committed is not priced for a technology that is useful. It is priced for a technology that is transformative — for something approaching artificial general intelligence, arriving on a timeline measured in months rather than decades. The problem is that the underlying architecture cannot deliver that. Large language models predict the next token; they do not model the world, plan across steps, or reason about consequences. The people who built them have begun saying so publicly. Ilya Sutskever, the OpenAI co-founder whose work established the scaling hypothesis the industry runs on, said in late 2025 that pre-training scaling is ‘essentially tapped out’ and that another 100x of compute ‘won’t get a qualitative change in capability.” Dario Amodei at Anthropic predicted powerful AI ‘as early as 2026’ in October 2024. [4] By February 2026 he was saying ‘I don’t believe we’re basically at AGI’ and acknowledging that if his revenue forecast was off by a year, ;there’s no force on earth, there’s no hedge on earth that could stop me from going bankrupt.’ The commitments that underpin the industry were made against the 2024 timeline, not the 2028 one. The estimates have moved. But the money has only increased.

What the field requires, by their own account, is research — not half a trillion dollars in concrete and copper. The buildout is an answer to a question the technology has not yet resolved, built at a scale that forecloses the possibility of changing course when the research points somewhere else.

J.P. Morgan, modeling what the buildout would need to earn to clear a ten percent return on current capital expenditure, arrived at roughly six hundred fifty billion dollars per year in AI-sector revenue — the equivalent of thirty-five dollars per month, in perpetuity, from every iPhone user on earth. The current run-rate is about twenty-five billion. The gap is twenty-six-fold. Goldman Sachs’ chief economist concluded that AI had contributed ‘basically zero’ to U.S. economic growth in 2025 and observed that ‘FOMO, not ROI, is driving hyperscaler capex.’ The San Francisco Federal Reserve’s February 2026 consensus: “While GenAI and related applications are useful, they are not the innovation that spurs broad-based reorganization of the economy.”

The current architecture will not close this gap. It will not close it because the capabilities the spend assumes — autonomous reasoning, reliable multi-step planning, self-correction without human oversight — are not properties of next-token prediction at any scale. The people who built the systems have said so.

• It’s almost as if capitalism is too important to left to capitalists….

“Premium: What If…We’re In An AI Bubble? (Part 2)” [Ed Zitron, Where’s Your Ed At?]:

The thing is, demand for AI compute doesn’t have to exist for AI data centers to get built. While some have clients signed up in advance, said deals were signed so many years before construction will complete that it’s hard to guarantee that they’ll be willing — or solvent enough — to pay.

I also imagine most clients have signed contracts that have milestone dates for delivery of compute capacity. If data centers are delayed, clients likely have a contractual out, much like Microsoft does with its $17 billion compute deal with Nebius.

In any case, in a frothy debt market full of desperate speculation, these projects are being funded by the very same private credit firms that piled into SaaS companies between 2018 and 2022 under the assumption that every software company will grow in perpetuity. When due diligence is so weak in private equity and private credit that Apollo’s John Zito says that their valuations are ‘all wrong,’ it’s hard to believe that the same financiers are diligently making sure that enough revenue exists to justify these massive data center debt deals.

The same questionable attention to detail applies to venture capital, which has seen (much like private equity) its investment model slow to a crawl since 2018, with an average TVPI (total value paid in) slow to a horrifying 0.8 to 1.2x since 2018, meaning that for every dollar invested, you’re at best likely to get even money in return.

These are the very same investors telling you that every AI company is worth perpetually-growing amounts of money, that everything will work out perfectly, that somebody will work out how to make AI profitable, and that AI is both here to stay and doing incredible things, even if they can’t really explain what those things might be.

In reality, none of these people have any idea how to turn around these rotten economics.

“Pension funds confront the question of who owns AI” [Top 1000 Funds]. “Global pension funds are creating dedicated AI roles in senior parts of their organisations, in a sign that the technology’s enterprise and investment potential, alongside the governance risks it may carry, can no longer be managed through existing roles alone. In two high-profile appointments this month, Canada’s OTPP nabbed the New York-based global head of engineering at Macquarie Asset Management, Feifei Wu, as its senior managing director of investment technology and applied intelligence. Meanwhile, Australia’s largest pension fund AustralianSuper lured Microsoft’s local chief technology officer, Sarah Carney, to become its first head of AI and automation.” And: “there is little to no public evidence that any asset owner has tied AI or related metrics to their executive incentive plans. Some funds, such as CalPERS, include operational effectiveness as a part of their remuneration incentives but AI’s implementation and adoption are not yet a common performance metric for fund executives.” • Worth investing in outside, but not inside?

“Calpers unfazed by AI-driven software risks in $1.8tn private credit market” [Private Equity Insights]. “California Public Employees’ Retirement System remains confident in its private credit exposure despite rising concerns over artificial intelligence’s potential disruption to software borrowers, according to a Bloomberg report…. ‘We believe the book is diversified enough,’ Chief Executive Marcie Frost told Bloomberg Television. ‘The team is really not too concerned about the software exposure that we’re hearing a lot about.’” • Oh.

“Mystery company accidentally blew $500 million on Claude AI in a single month — failed to put usage limit on licenses for employees” [Tom’s Hardware]. “A mysterious, unnamed company is reported to have accidentally spent half a billion dollars in a single month on Claude AI after forgetting to set usage limits for Claude licenses for employees. The staggering revelation was made as part of a new Axios report that claims U.S. corporations are starting to feel the pinch of overzealous AI spending. The report claims that corporate leaders ‘are starting to question whether soaring AI spending is delivering meaningful returns,’ one of the latest twists in the ongoing arc of massive AI buildouts and spending, which has seen AI become more expensive than hiring workers in recent months. The report states, ‘An AI consultant tells Axios one of their clients recently spent half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to put usage limits on Claude licenses for employees.’ Recent reports show it’s pretty easy to rack up AI spending if you’re not watching what you’re doing, but half a billion dollars is hardly a rounding error. In April, a Google Cloud customer woke up to an $18,000 bill despite having only $7 in the budget following a security breach. Earlier in May, OpenClaw’s creator revealed they had burned through $1.3 million in OpenAI API tokens in a single month.” • It would be pretty funny if these firms had delegated accounting systems to AI.

“Pinterest Has Become Unusable” [Aftermath]. “[L]ike many others, use Pinterest to find reference images. It’s where I seek out flowers to draw, tomatoes to paint, and furniture to sketch. Lots of people—both photographers and normal people snapping photos on their phones—post anything you can think of. Often, I just open the app on my phone and paint whatever pops up. No need to even decide what to paint, something that can sometimes make it hard to even start. When I started painting again in January, I went back to Pinterest and found it overrun with AI slop. It’s continued to get worse and worse, and it’s now basically unusable. Some images are labeled as generated or modified by AI, but many aren’t. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell what’s fake and what’s not. Last night, I pulled up a photo of a beautiful flower to paint, drew a sketch, then started painting. Looking closely at the flower, I noticed something was off: the stem had a strange metal piece right under the petals. The petals weren’t right either, on a closer look. I considered for a moment to keep painting, but I couldn’t. I don’t want to paint from AI generated reference photos. A lot of other people who use Pinterest in the same way as me don’t want to either. Images that are labeled as AI or look even remotely like they could be are flooded with comments calling them AI slop, stuff people don’t want to paint. These images are lifeless. The skin of peaches are pristine, not a bruise in sight. Everything is unnaturally shiny.” • I’ve noticed the shininess with LightRoom’s AI denoiser. There seems to be no way to control it. Unlike, say the Color Mixer, there are no sliders to control the Denoiser’s parameters. I’d speculate that’s because Adobe really has no ideal how its Denoiser works.

Business: Manufacturing

“What Happens If The Battery Dies In A Car With No Manual Hood Release?” [Jalopnik]. • The manager whose engineering team made that design decision gets fired? BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA! No, of course not.

“Kia’s flagship EV has a battery problem” [The Verge]. “I first realized there was an issue with Kia’s flagship EV9 when I tried to unlock my car last year. The hulking three-row SUV was sitting on my driveway completely dead. The key didn’t work, the app connection to the car was gone, and I was already late to an appointment. Luckily, I had prepared for such a scenario, after reading about widespread 12-volt battery issues with the EV9. I managed to open the car with the manual key that Kia supplies and access the frunk to reach the 12V battery and use a booster I had purchased to jolt it back to life. Like many ICE cars, a 12V battery powers most of the low-voltage electrical systems in a vehicle, so when it dies, the vehicle is rendered useless. I called my local Kia dealership to report the problem. I was prepared for the 12V battery issues, but I wasn’t prepared for what happened next.” • “Flagship.” Gawd knows what happens with the cheaper models.

Zeitgeist Watch

“AI Writing Jobs You Should Apply to Today” [McSweeney’s Internet Tendency]. “The best Hollywood scripting models still take illogical leaps in narrative structure. Every correction you make becomes a training node for the next AI self-scripting model and also another notch in the deathbed of a once proud American industry. When you identify a hallucinated subplot or an erroneous character trait, you’re not only teaching our models which ideas work the best, but you’re squeezing the last drops of joyful imagination and wonderment from an entire generation raised on E.T. Remember, the sooner you teach our AI how to write, the sooner it’ll all be over. Flexible hours!”

“Men Are Spraying Themselves 100 Times in New Fragrance Frenzy” [Bloomberg]. “The influencer known as OverSpray Jay has become one of the top sellers of men’s fragrances on TikTok in part by offering his followers a very specific piece of advice: whatever scent they’re wearing, they should spritz themselves 100 times. His catchphrase: ‘If you ain’t shinin’, are you even applyin’?” •

Guillotine Watch

“The $687 million irony of Peter Thiel’s reported plan to ditch the US for Argentina” [Independent]. ‘People familiar with Thiel’s thinking told The New York Times that the billionaire has concerns about the direction of the United States and in particular Thiel’s long-time base of California, which is considering a controversial billionaire tax.” • The “direction” Thiel did so much to bring about.

Class Warfare

“They just formed the biggest tech worker union in the US. They plan to rein in AI and curb layoffs” [Blood in the Machine]. “As AI sweeps through the American education system and US tech workers stare down the specter of mass layoffs, thousands of IT employees across the statewide University of California system have voted to unionize. They join over 6,000 tech workers already represented by University and Professional Technical Employees (UPTE), expanding the total to 8,400 workers across the bargaining unit. That makes the new unit the largest tech worker union in the nation.” More: “[B]ut here we have a rather straightforward and obvious part of the solution: Give workers a seat at the table in formulating how to use (or not to use) the technology, and a democratic means of determining how task and labor replacement might be administrated.” • No. Put the workers at the head of the table. Have them set the agenda (because he who sets the agenda controls the outcome, as Carl Schmitt did not say).

“Monopoly Round-Up: The Rage of the Billionaires Is Coming” [Matt Stoller, BIG]. “The public is extremely angry, and they are centering their anger on AI. Seven out of ten Americans oppose data centers being built nearby. It’s not hard to see why. AI and tech CEOs seem almost proudly villainous. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei routinely says that half of white collar jobs are going to disappear because of his technology… Voters are no longer brushing these comments off. They have experience with social media and enshittification, they don’t believe in the promise of the future. And even if they did, business leaders seem to luxuriate in explaining how terrible things will soon be for the little people. So they are starting to respond with frustration…. Yet, the pushback from public opinion isn’t informing the superrich, it is angering them. They are having their various libertarian think tank people frame opposition to data centers as ill-informed or emotional. A better strategy would be to try and listen to the anger, and then modify the development of AI technology so it doesn’t terrify everyone…. But American oligarchs refuse, because doing so is part of their ideology. In fact, they react with rage at any mild attempt to impose any sort of limit on their wealth and power, or even just basic criticism. Over the next six months, and beyond, we are going to see the superrich get more defensive and embittered as the public rejects their values and views. Why do I say that? So far, the super rich have had their allies in charge of all parts of politics. But the public is gradually feeling around for a way to attack the economic elites who control their society - the Epstein Files was just the start. In the U.S., something very unusual has been happening for the last twenty years - change elections. In 2006, 2008, 2010, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022, 2024, and almost certainly 2026, voters threw out incumbents in one or both Congressional chambers, and/or the Presidency. But just the idea that someone other than an oligarch gets to have a say in *anything* will prompt a level of backlash and rage that will seem scary, and then weird, and then just dumb. Such is how an oligarchy ends, not with a bang, but with a bunch of whiny billionaires crying about taxes.” • Taxes aren’t the issue. Putting capital under democratic control is the issue. Control being the operative word. (Breaking up monopolies is laudable, a Good Thing, but not enough.)

“‘Wrench attacks’ leave crypto billionaires living in fear” [The Telegraph]. “Digital coins such as Bitcoin have made many of the industry’s participants overnight billionaires…. The kidnapping of [crypto executive David Balland] is the most high-profile example of a so-called ‘wrench attack,’ which is becoming a growing threat to crypto executives. The name derives from an internet cartoon from 2014, which envisions two goons plotting to batter someone with a wrench to get the victim’s computer password. Billions of dollars in cryptocurrency are stolen every year in cyber attacks, scams and frauds. In 2025, about $3.4bn in digital currency was stolen, according to blockchain experts at Chainalysis. But in 2026, physical assaults are on the rise. A report from Certik, a crypto security business, found there had been 34 physical attacks on industry figures in the first three months of 2026, a 41pc increase on 2025. These attacks resulted in publicly reported thefts of more than $101m in cryptocurrency. In total, last year, there were 81 publicly recorded attacks that resulted in the loss of $52m in cryptocurrency. These records, based on police reports and public news stories, are thought to significantly underestimate the problem.”

News of the Wired

I am not feeling wired today.

Plantidote of the Day

Via TH:

TH writes: “This is a wildflower that grows on the land next to our housing development. It’s a Desert Wishbone bush (Mirabilis laevis (Benth.) Curran).”

Send your plantidotes as attachments to lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [AT] protonmail [DOT] com. And if you put “Plant” or “Plantidote” in the subject line, I’ll be less likely to lose it. Gardens are fine. Gardening season approaches, at least in the Northeast! Fungi are honorary plants.