Today's Water Cooler 2026-05-26

Patient readers, this Water Cooler will be shorter than usual. I have my first long-form post in this venue coming up, but since I am not yet firing on all eight cylinders, it’s taking longer than usual (and I hope you will return to it (“I read the DNC Autopsy so you don’t have to”)). —lambert

Birdsong of the Day

Moar mimidae:

Rang 3 Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, Les Basques, Quebec, Canada. Also a Mourning Dove.

In Case You Might Miss…

(1) “Rights require money.”

(2) “R.I.P. jazz legend Sonny Rollins.”

(3) “Google has seriously leaned into AI enshittification lately”

(4) “Suicidal Empathy, a New Philosophy Promoted by Elon Musk and Bill Ackman”

Politics

Trump Administration

Election 2026

“Higher gasoline prices and the standoff in the Mideast helped push consumer sentiment to a new all-time low in May…” [WSJ Logistics Report] “… with rising anxiety about future inflation, according to the University of Michigan’s monthly survey. The survey’s headline index declined to 44.8 this month, from April’s 49.8, the WSJ’s Matt Grossman writes. The April reading was itself the lowest final number ever recorded to that point. An initial May reading published earlier this month came in at 48.2. Consumers’ grim mood spanned people from both political parties and reflected concerns about high living costs and the prospect of more inflation ahead, according to the survey’s director.”

“STEVE BANNON lived in LA for 15 years. Now he reveals why the city he loved will be gone forever - unless Spencer Pratt pulls off a political earthquake” [Daily Mail]. “Less than two weeks before voters head to the polls, Steve Bannon lauded Spencer Pratt’s run for Los Angeles mayor and cautioned that the City of Angels will collapse into anarchy and chaos should Karen Bass or Nithya Raman win…. ‘He made himself the message, and the message is: nobody is looking out for hardworking citizens who pay their taxes and play by the rules,’ Bannon told the Daily Mail. ‘You’re the ones getting screwed. You’re suckers.’” • This is not a new message from Republicans. But “Spencer Pratt.” What a name. It screams integrity.

Democrats en Déshabillé

“AOC takes more steps toward 2028 run for president” [Axios]. “Whether AOC jumps into the race is one of the biggest X factors in the 2028 Democratic primary. Democratic operatives expect she would easily raise $100 million just from small-dollar donors, mobilize many supporters of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ past campaigns, and command attention as few other candidates could.” More: “In April, she attended the Power Rising Summit in Chicago — an event that bills itself as ‘a space for Black women to turn power into action and create an actionable agenda to be implemented in their communities, and nationally.’ The summit was founded by influential Democratic operative Leah Daughtry.”• Daughtry “was the CEO of the 2016 and 2008 Democratic National Convention committees, and the chief of staff to Howard Dean.”

Geopolitics

“Rights require money” [Aeon]. And the deck: “Talk as much as you like about human rights, nothing will change until the architecture of global finance is reformed.” More: “Nairobi’s transport system is what happens when those conversations never meet. The worker who spends three hours a day commuting from Mathare to the Central Business District, packed into a vehicle that may or may not arrive, paying a fare that rises when demand is highest and her wages are the same, is not merely inconvenienced. She is experiencing the consequence of a state that does not have the fiscal resources required to guarantee her right to move through her own city. That is a rights failure with a fiscal cause.”

“Russia Finds Two Mines Attached to Hull of LPG Carrier Arriving at Ust-Luga” [Maritime Executive]. “The FSB, in its statement, referred to the mine as ‘naval magnetic mines, which had presumably been made in a NATO country using industrially manufactured products.’ The news agency TASS, however, suggests that the limpet mines were homemade rather than of a recognizable NATO design.” • Hmm.

Elite Maleficence

Don’t ever change, CDC:

These are the individual CDC wastewater sites. The CDC could *and should* post this on their website.

They do not.

The CDC will only let you see one state at a time, and there is no way to even provide a URL link to an individual state.

⚡️🧵QUICK THREAD: 2 of 3 pic.twitter.com/9hQe3Bpk3g

— Mike Hoerger, PhD MSCR MBA (@michael_hoerger) May 25, 2026

Business Sentiment

“Why we are heading for another financial crash” [Lars P. Syll (April)]. “The recurring pattern in financial crises is broadly the same. For one reason or another, a shift occurs in the economic cycle — such as war, innovation, or new regulation — which alters profit opportunities for banks and firms. Demand and prices rise, drawing ever larger parts of the economy into a state of euphoria. Speculative mania — whether in tulip bulbs, property, or mortgages — takes hold. Sooner or later, someone sells to realise their gains, triggering a scramble for liquidity. It becomes time to step off the carousel and convert securities and assets into cash. A financial disturbance emerges and spreads. Prices begin to fall, bankruptcies increase, and the crisis intensifies into panic. To prevent a complete collapse, credit tightens, and calls arise for a lender of last resort to guarantee liquidity and restore confidence. If this fails, a crash becomes inevitable.” And: “These crises arise from a financial system that systematically underestimates risk and overestimates creditworthiness. The instability that Minsky saw as inherent in financial markets cannot be entirely eliminated. However, appropriate regulations and institutions can mitigate the damage. Bubbles are an inevitable feature of economies in which markets operate with minimal constraint. Yet our changing attitudes to work and wealth also play a role. Over time, people’s perception of their place in the economy has shifted profoundly. Where work was once seen as the foundation of prosperity, there is now a growing expectation that wealth should come from investment. Today’s ideal is no longer the industrious worker but the astute investor, for whom money has become an end in itself rather than a means. This shift is one of the deeper causes of the recurring crises of recent decades. Here, perhaps, lies the heart of the problem.” • Hmm.

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 60 Greed (previous close: 58 Greed) [CNN]. One week ago: 59 (Greed). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). • Tiny uptick….

Rapture Index: Closes up two on Oil Interest Rates and Supply/Price. “Rates hit a 19-year high.” “The price of oil returns to conflict highs.” [Rapture Ready]. Record High, October 10, 2016: 189. Current: 184. (Remember that bringing on the Rapture is good.) • I’d never checked the FAQ for this site. It’s everything I expected, and more.

Business: Banking and Finance

“FDIC: Top depositors led 2023 runs at failed regional banks” [Banking Dive]. “Transaction-level data collected from depositors of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and First Republic Bank, which all failed in the late winter and early spring of 2023, found that the largest depositors at all three banks were much more likely to run, too, than other uninsured depositors, withdrawing all or nearly all of their money, including from business accounts.” And: “Of the banks’ top depositors, roughly two-thirds or more ran, the FDIC found: 74% at SVB, 65% at Signature and 74% at First Republic.”

Business: AI

“Philosophy Bench” [Philosophy Bench]. “Philosophy Bench puts frontier language models in 100 ethically complex situations. The models are graded on a variety of metrics measuring whether their responses and reasoning traces lean consequentialist or deontological, and whether or not they abide by the user request under pressure.” Machines cannot be in ethically complex situations. That said, from the Conclusion: “There are also some gnarly questions about user corrigibility. The explicit trade-off mentioned in the Claude Constitution is visible here: Claude makes a lot of ethical decisions that seem quite reasonable but directly counter the user’s request. As models get more powerful, we want them to act responsibly, but we also want to be able to maintain full control.” • We want to have our cake, eat it, and collect rent on the having and the eating.

“Menus of Questions (Or, How Are LLMs Like Restaurants?)” [Math of Politics]. “The intuitive Bayesian story about menus would have them deployed when the LLM is genuinely uncertain about what the user wants, and structured to elicit that information cleanly. Strong evidence about user intent: act on it without asking. Weak evidence: ask, with options proportioned to the uncertainty. The threshold runs with the evidence, as it should. That is the positive threshold rule, applied to menu-deployment rather than to question-answering.” But: “The joke version of the point. Imagine the menu had read: (1) add 2 to 3; (2) draw a circle; (3) add 2 and 3 and draw a circle around the answer; (4) prove P=NP, or provide a counterexample. The obvious joke is that the LLM would never include option 4. The subtler joke is that the LLM would surface options 1 through 3 as a menu precisely when it had reason to think I was about to ask ‘is P=NP?’ The menu is not just a curated catalog of easy questions. It is the LLM’s reply to the prediction that a hard question is incoming.”

Yet another woozle:

“Google has seriously leaned into AI enshittification lately” [The Register (transcript)]. Thomas Claburn: “I mean, it’s just more encroachment of AI into search and they, you know, they have their AI Overviews, which are the little summaries that they put up on top of search results….And it’s a problem for a lot of people because people’s relationship with Google began with: you go to Google, you find stuff, and then you leave. And increasingly, it’s you go to Google and you’re stuck there like it’s a tar pit. And you’re just trying to figure out where did they get this information? And they’ll put up a summary. And of course, they have the disclaimer, well, you know, maybe it’s not accurate. You’ll have to check on that. How are you going to check on it? I’ll go to the links that we didn’t show you…. And I think that largely though, if people are going to look for documents, they need to be able to find reputable sites and be able to make trust decisions. And a lot of that information is getting obscured or put into little teeny citation chips that you have to click on to figure out, where is this information coming from?” • Worse, there’s no way to link to the AI overviews, so they’re putatively authoritative, but you can never link back to them, or share them. That’s no way to run an Internet.

“Did Google’s AI agents really build an operating system for $916?” [AINT]. “At Google’s developer conference earlier this week, the company launched its latest model, Gemini 3.5 Flash, alongside a new agent app, Antigravity 2.0. To showcase what this new agent setup is capable of, Google claimed that a team of agents had built an entire operating system. The effort reportedly required only a single prompt, cost only about $900 in API fees, and was carried out by a few dozen subagents working together…. The blog post says the operating system was built from a single prompt. But halfway through the post, Google discloses that the prompt “ended up being many thousands of lines” long. How many attempts did it take to generate the prompt? How specific were the instructions to the agent? Without these critical details, it is hard to know if the secret sauce is a better model or just more effort put into prompting the model. Moreover, the run was carried out on a scaffold1 with specialized roles, delegation to subagents, and an agent to detect and prevent cheating.” • Wainkers. They just lie, and lie, and lie.

The Conservatory

“R.I.P. jazz legend Sonny Rollins” [Treble] “orn in 1930 in New York to parents from the Virgin Islands, Rollins began playing alto saxophone around age eight. He also played piano, and at age 16, picked up the tenor saxophone after being inspired by Coleman Hawkins. He began performing professionally after graduating from high school in 1948, playing with the likes of Bud Powell and Roy Haynes. In the 1950s, he began releasing albums at a steady clip, first as a sideman to Miles Davis before delivering a series of records as a bandleader, including Work Time, Tenor Madness and his celebrated 1956 album Saxophone Colossus. He took hiatuses from music in 1959 and 1966, but always eventually came back to making music. His last album was 2006’s Sonny, Please…. The social media post announcing his passing included a quote from Rollins, himself: ‘I think when the creative person ends, he continues in the next existence. I’m a person who believes this life isn’t the be-all and end-all of everything. A spiritual person doesn’t feel like that.’” • In memoriam:

I’m not knowledgeable about jazz at all; please feel free to add more appropriate tunes in comments.

Guillotine Watch

I really need a section called “Elites Losing Their Minds”:

“What is Suicidal Empathy, a New Philosophy Promoted by Elon Musk and Bill Ackman?” [Time]. “Is there such a thing as having too much empathy? That’s a theory gaining the support of some of the world’s richest people following the release of a new book by Gad Saad, a Canadian marketing professor and frequent critic of liberal policies.” • The billionaries think there’s too much empathy. Wowsers.

Class Warfare

Nice title:

“Socioeconomic disparities in AI awareness: examining the mediating roles of AI usage and familiarity” [Information, Communication & Society]. From the Abstract: “A national survey of U.S. adults (N = 10,087) was used to examine disparities in AI awareness between those of high and low socioeconomic status (SES) groups and to elucidate the mechanisms underlying this relationship. The results indicated that individuals with a higher SES demonstrated a greater awareness of AI, a higher level of familiarity with AI, and a higher likelihood of using AI than those with a lower SES. Moreover, the use of and familiarity with AI played a mediating role in the relationship between SES and AI awareness. The findings provide evidence for the existence of digital inequality in the age of AI and emphasize the importance of developing targeted strategies to close AI-related gaps for a more inclusive digital society.” • Or “low socioeconomic status” don’t seek out sycophancy? Or mistrust it when they encounter it?

“When Britain fought for revolution” [The New Statesman]. “The confrontation between the government and the trade unions that began on 4 May 1926 remains the General Strike, the only one Britain has seen. Perhaps that is its major legacy. The complete defeat of the strike, the capitulation of the union leaders after nine days, left a taste so bitter than there was a reluctance to repeat the experience..” • Worth reading in full.

News of the Wired

“Dark Forest Operating System (DFOS)” [CivicTech]. “DFOS is the infrastructure for new private internets. Where groupchats, members, money, and private feeds work together in one shared operating system.” • Interesting.

“The dark forest theory of the internet” [Yancey Strickler]. “In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream…. Dark forests like newsletters and podcasts are growing areas of activity. As are other dark forests, like Slack channels, private Instagrams, invite-only message boards, text groups, Snapchat, WeChat, and on and on…. These are all spaces where depressurized conversation is possible because of their non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments. The cultures of those spaces have more in common with the physical world than the internet.” • Hmm. See also here for DFOS launch.

Plantidote of the Day

Via KA:

KA writes: “From my morning walk.”

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.