Don’t Miss These
(1) “Iran war powers rebuke shows how Trump is increasingly boxed in” • “Rebuke” being a strong word in the Beltway.
(2) The Fed: “AI-related job loss could precede job gains.” • Who knew?
(3) “Goldman’s Solomon sees ‘more greed than fear’ in AI market” • This is how we allocate trillions capital…
(4) New acronym: AEO (AI-Engine Optimization) • Moar autocoprophagy!
Birdsong of the Day
Moar mimidae:
S Of Miami; Richmond Air Force Base, Florida, United States (1950 (!!)). Spectacular!
Politics
Trump Administration
“Iran war powers rebuke shows how Trump is increasingly boxed in” [CNN]. No doubt many wish the box were pine. More; “Ahead of a House vote Wednesday on whether to rein in President Donald Trump’s Iran war powers, Speaker Mike Johnson pleaded with Republicans to oppose it. In an interview with CNN’s Manu Raju, he repeatedly said it would be ‘dangerous’ and would sap Trump of negotiating power to cut a deal to end the war. And the thing is: Johnson had a point. Such votes signal a lack of resolve even in Trump’s own party to continue the war. But four Republicans voted for it anyway, allowing the resolution to pass 215-208 and delivering Trump one of the biggest legislative rebukes of his presidency. If the resolution were to pass in the Senate — where 50 of 100 senators have appeared to support it — Trump would be required to either withdraw troops from Iran or gain Congress’ approval for the war. The White House, which has signaled it believes the underlying law is unconstitutional, could try to ignore the resolution.”
“US House votes for measure that would end Iran war, in blow to Trump” [Reuters]. “The four House Republicans who voted for the war powers resolution were Representatives Tom Barrett of Michigan, Warren Davidson of Ohio, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Thomas Massie of Kentucky.
No Democrats voted against it. Seven House members did not vote.” • Hmm.
“House votes to limit Trump’s Iran war powers in remarkable rebuke” [CNN]. Trump: “ ‘Yesterday, in a meaningless vote, the House voted, 4 bad Republicans and all of the Dumocrats, to limit my War Powers, right in the middle of my final negotiations to end the War with the Islamic Republic of Iran,’ he wrote on Truth Social. ‘Who would do such an unpatriotic thing. They know where the negotiations stand. The Democrats are fueled by Trump Derangement Syndrome. They would rather have our Country fail than give me another, of many, victories. The four Republicans, that’s a whole other story - They’re GRANDSTANDERS! They should be ashamed of themselves.’” • I don’t think anybody believes in the “final negotiations” story. In fact, there aren’t any: The US and Iran passing notes to each other through Islamabad doesn’t constitute a negotiation, because there’s no level of trust, by definition. That said, if you buy, as I do, Colonel Wilkerson’s “arc of conflict” theory, we’re in a state of permanent war. Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and (heaven forfend) China are all flare-ups, episodes in a continuing, chronic condition, highly profitable for the entities that own the country and the government. So in the great scheme of things, “war powers” are misconceived. It’s one long war.
* * * “Trump dodges AI rules for now with latest executive order” [Axios]. • The Enemy Above yanked Trump’s choke-chain.
“Here is the Contract for Palantir’s Super API for the IRS” [404 Media]. “The IRS’s new, Palantir-powered API will make IRS data available to any app it wishes, and Palantir is working for the Criminal Investigation (CI) part of the IRS on a new system to bring together traditionally disparate systems into a single overarching one to investigate all sorts of financial crime, according to a cache of documents obtained by 404 Media.” • If anybody thinks that system will be turned on private equity, crypto, Silicon Valley stock valuations, or (bless his heart) Elon Musk, I have a non-fungible token for an image of the Brooklyn Bridge that I would like to sell them.
* * * “Programs aim to get rural North Dakotans moving, eating healthier” [NDNC]. “Several new programs coming soon to rural areas aim to reverse that by getting people moving and making healthy, whole foods more accessible. ‘What I want people to know is that moving is the most important thing we can do to stave off chronic disease, and to change the trajectory of it if you’re starting to experience it,’ said Pat Traynor, interim commissioner at ND Health and Human Services. ‘That is a huge, huge problem for us as humans, and there’s a huge cost to it over time,’ Traynor said. Of the $199 million in Rural Health Transformation Program (RHTP) grants coming to the state over the next year, a total of $3.5 million is dedicated to three programs encouraging movement, healthy eating and community cohesiveness. That includes $2.5 million for rural areas to establish community walking programs, $700,000 for piloting before-school physical education programs at schools, and another $300,000 for establishing or scaling up community garden programs.” • This actually sounds sane and good. How the heck did it happen?
Election 2024 Autopsy
“DNC’s 192-page autopsy sounds like bad therapy. Democrats still have a big problem” [FOX]. • Republican and Democrat loyalists in complete agreement. Makes you think!
Election 2026
“Tech industry wins big in California primary election with millions spent paying off” [Guardian]. “Tech billionaires have in past months thrown their full weight into politics as the industry fights regulations, taxation and promotes the unfettered [cancerous] growth of artificial intelligence.” More: “Scott Wiener, tech’s pick to replace Nancy Pelosi as senator, won the most votes and is advancing toward the midterms in November. And while votes are still being counted, it looks like Ben Allen, the industry’s choice for state insurance commissioner, could also advance. Super political action committees (Super Pacs) funded by the tech world also saw a series of wins in smaller district races for the state legislature across the state. Grow California, which has a combined $20m from crypto moguls Chris Larsen and Tim Draper, contributed millions to six local races, while also spending to oppose five candidates, according to public records. And California Leads, a Super Pac funded with a combined $10m from Google and Meta, also spent millions to support eight local assembly and senate candidates in the state. The long-term strategy for both Grow California and California Leads is to work on the state’s legislature to get their preferred candidates in place – something both Super Pacs outline on their websites. Grow California’s stated goal is to ‘rebuild a state capital’ and California Leads writes: ‘Our work is grounded in a simple idea: who serves in the State Legislature matters.’ One candidate the Super Pacs both donated heavily to was Mark Pulido, a Democrat who is running for state assembly in a small district in Orange county. He received about $2.25m from the two Super Pacs and got the votes on Tuesday to advance to a run-off against the Republican candidate in November. With the exception of one candidate, all of the races that Grow California and California Leads backed, are advancing to the November ballot.” • Names to remember.
“Struggling Regional Small Businesses Deeply Pessimistic About 2026 Prospects” [Liberty Street Economics]. “We recently updated the suite of indicators describing the performance of small businesses in the Second District (defined, for the purpose of this study, as New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut) and nationally with data from the 2025 edition of the Small Business Credit Survey (SBCS). In this post, we find that regional small businesses reported severe declines in employment and revenue growth in 2025 and became more pessimistic about growth in 2026. In contrast, small firms in the rest of the nation enjoyed stable revenues and employment in 2025 and, while they also had lower expectations of future growth, the decline was smaller in magnitude.”
Realignment and Legitimacy
“America Needs a Boring and Sane Party” [Matt Taibbi, Racket News]. “Governing better, a radical idea! Improving the financial outlook for the middle class would also help, though figuring that out a decade or two earlier might have been still better. But even these are half-steps to the obvious. Everyone on earth knows why Donald Trump gets votes, and not just from “right-wingers”: because his opponents are every bit as batshit crazy as he is, if not worse. Just look at the drama that engulfed my home state of Massachusetts in recent weeks.” • Of course the tease ends at the paywall. Is sewer socialism boring and sane enough for Taibbi? I don’t know, but somehow I doubt it.
Geopolitics
“Congress quietly moves to integrate US and Israeli militaries” [Responsible Statecraft]. “Buried in the House’s version of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) released on Tuesday, is section 224, entitled “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative.” The provision would arguably do more to intertwine the U.S. military with the Israeli military than the more than $200 billion (inflation adjusted) in military assistance Israel has received from the U.S. since its founding in 1948. Section 224 lays the groundwork for bilateral research and development, co-production of weapons, joint ventures, licensing agreements, and seemingly every manner of U.S.-Israeli military-industrial complex cooperation. The U.S. and Israel already work together heavily on missile defense, but this provision would greatly expand coordination to seemingly every area of defense tech, including AI, quantum, autonomous systems, directed energy, cyber, biotech, and many more. It also proposes “network integration” and “data fusion.” In other words, the U.S. military’s data could soon be the Israeli military’s data.” • What could go wrong?
“How Ukraine turned the tide against Russia” [The Hill]. “Ukraine appears to be gaining momentum on the battlefield in its grinding fight with Russia, regaining territory for the first time in years as it outflanks Moscow’s forces through its domination of drone warfare.” With NATO, the United States, and Silicon Valley as silent partners, of course. More: “Kyiv is now calling the next six months ‘crucial’ for it to seize the battlefield initiative, as Moscow has responded to the momentum with threats of escalation and stepped up aerial strikes.” • Zelensky revives The Friedman Unit. Cool. I don’t follow the battlefield in any detail, but you have to wonder if a less conservative Russian strategy would have prevented the Ukronazis from rising up off the mat like this (assuming the thesis of the article is correct).
“American Power” [Phenomenal World]. ” On the one hand, the United States appears as a waning hegemon, accelerating the transition away from its own unipolar era. On the other, each unprecedented shock reaffirms Washington’s unique privilege to directly reshape the world. Open any newspaper and you will be confronted by these twinned narratives. The United States is ‘forfeiting its role as the leader of the free world,’ practicing an ‘inefficient, unstable, and self-destructive’ imperialism all while ‘termites are slowly feasting away at the foundations of the dollar’s dominance’—it is ‘officially an empire in decline.’ On the other side of the ledger, a parade of extraterritorial military and economic violence coincides with blissed out financial returns, a $1.5 trillion dollar defense budget proposal, the largest IPO in history, and related dreams of a new era of AI-induced primacy. The empire is in free fall, but also hanging steady; its claim to legitimacy has been shredded, but its extreme authority prevails.” • Yeah, what we totally need is a more “effiicient” empire; “No, not that way!” being the liberal Democrat position on all such issues.
Pandemics and Public Health
Stay safe out there!
Long Covid
“The Painful Truth About Long Covid” [Wired]. “[John] Sarno’s theory is suspiciously simple: Chronic symptoms without a clear physiological origin are probably caused by repressed distress and anger. To cure them, you must let go of the belief in a physiological cause and release your repressed emotions. Strange though it may sound, the testimonials have piled up. • As this commentary makes clear, WIred should stay in its lane:
Almost all disease science begins with hypotheses. Some hypotheses are weak, some are strongly supported, some are mechanistically plausible, some are wrong. But “little more than hypotheses” makes biomedical work sound speculative and flimsy.
— tern (@1goodtern) June 3, 2026
I’m a materialist, so I’m primed for a perspective like Sarno’s. How could the “mind” and the “body” not be a mutually interacting system? [pause for “mysteries of the incarnation” discussion]. But perspective isn’t a hypothesis, let alone a mechanism (I don’t mean a mechanistic mechanism) and the purveyors of woo come nowhere near solving an extremely hard, and possibly insoluble, problem.
Business Sentiment
“Copper Tops $14,000 With Banks Calling for Even More Upside” [OilPrice.com]. “Copper is trading just above $14,000 a ton in London, roughly $500 shy of its all-time high set in January, and Wall Street thinks it has further to run…. [Goldman Sachs] slashed its global mine supply estimate by 350,000 tons, citing ongoing operational disruptions at Indonesia’s Grasberg complex and Ivanhoe Mines’ Kamoa-Kakula operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo.” And: “With Grasberg and Kamoa-Kakula both constrained through at least 2028, and tariff uncertainty keeping US stockpiling elevated, the tightness looks structural rather than cyclical. The question for the second half of the year isn’t whether supply is tight — it clearly is — it’s whether demand from China holds up enough to push prices all the way to Citi’s $15,000 target.”
“The Used Car Market Is Not Normalizing. It Is Revealing Who Was Overleveraged” [Automotive Risk Newsletter]. “The American car buyer has been financing more, borrowing longer, and carrying more payment risk into every transaction. Edmunds reported that the average amount financed for new vehicles reached a record $43,899 in Q1 2026. The average new vehicle payment hit $773. The share of new-car buyers with payments of $1,000 or more reached 20%. That should not be treated as a luxury-market footnote. That is a macroeconomic warning. When one in five new-car buyers is taking on a four-figure monthly payment, the auto market is no longer just selling transportation. It is creating a long-term claim on household income.”
Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 54 Greed (previous close: 54 Greed) [CNN]. One week ago: 60 (Greed). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). • Oooo, big drop!
Business: Banking and Finance
“Goldman’s Solomon sees ‘more greed than fear’ in AI market” [Banking Dive]. “Investors are ‘definitely in a moment where there’s more greed than there is fear,’ Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said Tuesday in an appearance at the Economic Club of New York. The comment came in the context of a massive fundraising wave connected to artificial intelligence firms in the market. Two of the world’s leading AI model generators – OpenAI and Anthropic – are gearing up for potential trillion-dollar initial public offerings. And so is Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Meanwhile, tech firms, writ large, are circling investors to raise money for data centers and other infrastructure. ‘There’s plenty of liquidity in the system if the world continues to remain as optimistic,’ Solomon said. ‘When capital’s available – if you’re capital consumptive and it’s available – take the capital.’ To emphasize the point, he added, ‘The capital is available.’ Goldman, for sure, stands to gain millions of dollars in fees, collectively, from several of the deals.” • Ka-ching.
Business: AI
“Companies Are Using Reddit to Manipulate ChatGPT and Google AI Search” [404 Media]. “The moderators of the biohacking subreddit say that peptide and hormone replacement therapy companies have been surreptitiously spamming Reddit in an attempt to get their posts scraped by AI chatbots. The strategy is an effort to systematically manipulate the answers provided by chatbots by manipulating the underlying source material that those chatbots will scrape—in this case, a popular Reddit community. In a post last week, the moderators of r/biohackers said they would be banning new posts about peptides and hormone replacement therapy (HRT) because of attempted manipulation by the companies that make, market, and sell them. r/Biohackers is a long-running subreddit about using supplements, experimental pharmacology, and other longevity or fitness-adjacent themes; peptides and HRT have become a wildly popular topic of discussion on the subreddit, especially as companies try to market them off-label or as grey-market compounds. ‘As AI search engines increasingly pull answers from Reddit, companies are using us for AEO1. On top of that, there’s been an explosion of peptide interest and AI usage flooding the sub. Together, this has put serious pressure on content quality,’ a post by the moderators read.” • Moar autocoprophy!
1 AEO: is AI-Engine Optimization, and it is an evolution of search engine optimization where brands and marketing companies attempt to create content that they hope will be scraped by large language models.
“Measuring AI Adoption among Firms: How You Ask Matters” [Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis]. “For the past two years, a number of researchers have noted a striking disconnect in the U.S. data: Worker surveys suggest that somewhere around 35% to 40% of workers use AI on the job, while the main U.S. firm survey put AI adoption among businesses at just 5% to 7%. That is a very large gap. Are workers using AI without their employers knowing? Are firms in denial about how widespread the technology has become? Or is something else going on? We think the answer is mostly the third option: measurement.” • The survey question, in this case. Handy chart:
“AI Chatbot Use and Disclosure for Mental Health Among US Adolescents and Young Adults” [JAMA Pediatrics]. N = 42 825 655. “19.2% of adolescents and young adults…. in 2025 reported having used AI chatbots for mental health advice. Among those who sought advice from AI chatbots, 42.8% did so at least monthly, and 91.7% rated the advice as somewhat or very helpful. Most adolescents reported they had not disclosed AI chatbot use for mental health advice to anyone.” And: “We also found that females were more likely to use AI chatbots for mental health advice, possibly because of a higher prevalence of mental health conditions.29 Lastly, we observed that—conditional on using AI chatbots for mental health advice—Black youth were over 5 times more likely than White youth to seek mental health advice monthly or more often. This may reflect a sense, within this population, that professionals are not as responsive to their unique needs, or else reflect reduced access to professional services.30 However, the sample size for this particular analysis was small, and follow-on investigation is warranted.” • They use it, and don’t tell anybody…
“UN Details Escalating Water, Land, and CO2 Emission Consequences” [Maritime Executive]. ME leaves “AI” out of the headilne! “According to Environmental Cost of AI’s Energy Use: Carbon, Water and Land Footprints, from the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH): “One of the most consequential dimensions of AI that remains comparatively under-examined is its environmental footprint and the justice implications that follow.” Lots of good numbers, but this one jumps out: “It notes that Google processes an estimated 5 trillion searches annually and a conventional search uses about 0.3 Wh. An AI-enhanced generative search uses up to 3 Wh, a 10-fold increase.” • Yes, the brain geniuses at Google have managed the seemingly impossible: They’ve massively increased environmental impact while simultaneously enshittifying their product!
Business: Tech
“The Underworld Market to Remove the Recording Indicator Light on Meta Glasses” [Daring Fireball]. “Joanna Stern, on YouTube: ‘People across the country are offering a service on Facebook Marketplace to disable the recording light on Ray-Ban Meta glasses. They call it “Stealth Mode.” Joanna paid $100 for the modification and went inside the growing business of turning smart glasses into covert cameras. She investigates who is doing it, whether it’s legal and what some are doing to try and stop it.’ Of course there’s a market for this. But the true chef’s kiss is that the market to find people who offer the service is on … Facebook Marketplace. Using a Meta platform to find people to hack a Meta device so you can surreptitiously record strangers. So perfectly Meta.” • Very meta indeed.
“Tesla retroactively added ‘supervised’ to FSD contracts owners signed years ago” [Electrek (via)]. “Tesla has retroactively modified ‘Full Self-Driving’ purchase agreements to add ‘supervised’ language that did not exist when owners originally bought the product. In some cases, the original documents have been made entirely inaccessible. Electrek has confirmed the issue with multiple owners. The contracts in question were signed between 2016 and early 2024, when Tesla sold the package as ‘Full Self-Driving Capability’ — with no mention of ‘supervised’ and the implicit promise of unsupervised autonomy.” • LOL.
“From $5 Attacks to Botnet-Powered Platforms: Inside the DDoS-as-a- Service Market” [Bleeping Computer]. “A comparison of two datasets of DDoS-related underground activity from the first five months of 2023 and the first five months of 2026, shows how quickly that offer has changed. What once appeared more frequently as scripts, tutorials, leaked tools, and scattered forum posts is now more often presented as a repeatable product that is easier to buy and operate.” More: “A DDoS attack attempts to overwhelm a website, application, network, or server with traffic from many sources at once. Some attacks target network capacity, while others focus on application layer resources such as login pages and APIs. The objective is usually simple: make the service unavailable, unstable, or expensive to operate. DDoS-as-a-service lowers the barrier further. Instead of building infrastructure, an attacker can pay for access to a web panel, choose a target, select a duration, and rely on someone else’s botnet, proxy network, or third-party attack infrastructure.” • Oy.
Business: Shipping
“Supreme Court Ruling Reshapes Risk for Freight Brokers” [Suppy Chain Brain]. “The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to hold freight brokers liable for negligently hiring unsafe trucking companies could reshape how freight is moved across the country, opening the door to a flurry of lawsuits, and forcing brokers to rethink how they vet carriers…. While the immediate impacts of the Supreme Court’s ruling have yet to fully take shape, what’s abundantly clear is that moving forward, freight brokers will be taking on substantially more liability as they navigate a legal minefield of safety regulations that differ from state to state. ‘Brokers are going to be subject to 50 different standards of liability, assuming they operate in all 50 states,’ says transportation legal specialist Ryan Schreiber. Freight brokers also aren’t equipped to make safety fitness determinations for trucking operators, Schreiber adds, given that their primary function is to connect shippers with available trucking capacity, not to act as safety regulators. And as he points out, brokers often rely on third-party data to assess risks they aren’t specifically trained to evaluate, while unsafe operators can still find ways to exploit gaps in the regulatory system. Those regulatory gaps have been rampant in the trucking industry for years.”
Life’s Little Ironies
“AI Grifters Are Making Anti-Data Center Slop With AI” [404 Media]. “If you want a barometer of American political concerns you could do worse than checking what spam accounts are turning into AI-generated slop on Facebook. There are now hundreds of pages with names like’Life in Texas,’ ‘History of Wisconsin,’ and ‘Life Is Idaho’ churning out dozens of AI-generated images playing into anti-data center sentiment across the country. One of the most ubiquitous styles of anti-data center slop I’ve seen is a vast tract of farm land with a message like ‘not worth giving up an inch of this to a data center’ mowed into it. The image is tailored to fit the target audience in each state.” • I suppose this will start happening in the midterms….
The Gallery
“Jackson Pollock Transformed American Art—and Was Destroyed by His Own Success” [ARTnews]. I had no idea that Pollock’s first mentor was Thomas Hart Benton. Or that he was supported by the WPA for five years (thanks, FDR). “Pollock took a performative approach to his work, putting his canvases on the floor and throwing his whole body into their facture. Defying centuries of easel tradition, he explosively channeled Abstract Expressionism’s ethos of conveying the artist’s inner life through the act of painting. Pollock’s process also linked back to a concept inherited from Surrealism: automatism, which stipulated that conscious direction in art should be subordinate to the dictates of the subconscious mind. But contrary to conventional wisdom, Pollock’s work wasn’t random. It was a kind of calligraphy that relied as much on Apollonian twists of the wrist as it did on Dionysian flings of the arm—a gestural chaos that was, in fact, carefully woven together.” More: “Pollock applied paint in layers that, as infrared photography would later uncover, contained sketchy images of humans and animals, as well as ideographs of his own invention. Pollock’s abstractions, in other words, were representational sandwiches.” • Well worth reading in full (though no mention of (the contested) indirect support of the spooks). A gallery at MOMA. And:
Jackson Pollock One: Number 31, 1950. See also Wikipedia (sorry) on Pollock’s art and fractals.
The Screening Room
“‘Backrooms’ Doesn’t Quite Capture The Weirdness Of The Originals” [Defector]. “I was introduced to the work of Kane Parsons via my YouTube algorithm. His first Backrooms video, “The Backrooms (Found Footage)”, came up on my homepage the week he uploaded it in early 2022. I remember it well because the video—impressive on its own for being slick, professional, and, crucially, scary—quickly racked up views over the course of a few days. I wasn’t familiar with the Backrooms concept, born from a 4chan thread imagining an endless series of drab and empty yellow-tinted rooms that look like abandoned ’90s conference halls.” But of the YouTubers turned feature-horror genre: “For pretty much everyone else, one finds derivative filmmaking aping certain cinematic aesthetics—notably the locked-camera, low-lit, slow-zoom, jarring and shrill horror of Ari Aster—without any real understanding as to how or why these elements work. These films appear sleek and professional with sharp digital photography, symmetrical framing, and devoted performers. But there is no real grasp of cinematic language, no instinct or learned skill for blocking or staging, and no narrative sophistication, to say nothing of the dialogue, which tends toward the overly expository and literal. The horror is derived from sudden loud sounds, abrupt cuts to a shocking image, the juxtaposition of upbeat music and disturbing imagery, and, without fail, someone’s head being smashed to a bloody pulp. This is a cinema of non sequiturs and vacuous, sometimes nonexistent, interiority.” • So, perfect for the times?
Zeitgeist Watch
“mcmodernslopcore” [McMansion Hell]. McMansion Hell is one of my favorite old-school blogs. “The McMansion never truly goes away. It merely changes shape over time. One of the shapes it currently takes is a particularly loathsome imitation of contemporary high architecture (specifically the kind of houses architects love to build for celebrities in California) executed in the most wretchedly parsimonious manner possible. It feels cheap to use the word ‘slop’ but their indiscriminate nature - the way they have no regard for why or how the things they imitate even work - allows it. Of all the building forms that could be generated with AI, this is the most likely. At any rate, behold”—
“Yes this is a real house. Yes you can buy it for $6 million.” • Really excellent, well worth reading in full. (Of course, they’re on the blogroll.)
Sports Desk
“Buying the Beautiful Game—and Beyond | Global Salon” [Global FInance (interview)]. “With the 2026 World Cup around the corner, the sports finance sector is heating up — and few advisers are at the center of more high-stakes talks than Laurie Pinto.” Here’s a true fact: “[PINTO:] The lifetime value (LTV) of a fan is important. Consulting groups estimate £100–£2,000 per fan. Manchester United has a billion fans, worth roughly $10 billion. At smaller clubs, the value of a fan is even higher; in Sunderland, stadiums are always full, rain or shine. Loyalty is much higher, affecting valuation metrics. Swansea City AFC, pre-Luka Modric and Snoop Dog, had 500,000 fans; now they claim connections to over 100 million.” • I recently approached a state of near fandom for Man City, because TikTok’s algo kept feeding my clicks. But it’s creepy to think of myself as having an “LTV.” I suppose the same calculation goes for K-Pop. “I just wanted to win this one for the fans.”
Class Warfare
“Lisa D Cook: The opportunities and risks AI presents for the economy and financial system” [Bank of International Settlements (PDF)]. ” I have been and will continue to be highly attentive to AI developments and how they will affect the labor market. We could be approaching the most significant reorganization of work in generations. Even if, in the long run, new jobs are created, I am aware that the timing of costs and benefits of AI may differ. Specifically, AI-related job loss could precede job gains. Although we do not have conclusive evidence of this occurring yet, it may still be on the horizon, and increased churn in the labor market could be anticipated. Businesses are adopting AI at an increasing rate, but many have not yet used it to change the way they organize work. Indeed, the vast majority of small business respondents in the Federal Reserve’s 2025 Small Business Credit Survey say that their labor costs have not changed as a result of AI.3 Yet, many businesses I hear from expect that AI will lead them to fundamentally change their business practices in the future.”
“Hundreds of unionized workers walked off the line at an auto-parts supplier in Three Rivers, Mich.” [Wall Street Journal Logistics Report]. “Their leverage is about 160 miles away, in Detroit: General Motors.The work stoppage at the Dauch plant—still commonly known by its former name, American Axle—halts the supply of axles and axle tubes destined for GM’s midsize and full-size pickup trucks. The WSJ’s Christopher Otts writes that if GM’s existing stockpile of the crucial parts runs out, the automaker won’t be able to make some of its best-selling and most lucrative vehicles. The situation imperils GM’s heavy-duty Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickups, as well as midsize trucks. For now, GM’s truck plants are running as normal, and the company said it was monitoring the situation. Dauch is trying to keep the Michigan plant running with a ‘skelton [sic] crew’ on nonunion contractors.” • That is, scabs.
News of the Wired
I am not feeling wired today.
Plantidote of the Day
Via AM:
AM writes: “The 3 feet of snow we got in late February seems to have benefited the plants in the backyard this spring. Most blooms we have seen on the French lavender.” What soft, lovely colors.
Kind readers, I am stilll running short (although it’s nice to see a plant randomly appear in my Inbox, as they do). 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.