Anybody who says renewable energy is a drag on the economy or a hoax is either misinformed or lying. Below are the numbers, from Financial Times.
The fossil fuel industry is fighting for its life through propaganda and bribery of public officials (which is legal in the United States). They can’t win in the end, but they may be able to obscure the truth from at least the U.S. public for a few more decades, which may take our entire planetary civilization down with them.
Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2026 is out. They sell this only as a hard copy book as far as I can tell. It’s a good cause in my view, should you choose to invest. I don’t want the hard copy cluttering up my already bursting house however. The summary on Google Books gives a few clues as to what is in there.
Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2026 includes: Project Censored director Mickey Huff’s Foreword, where he writes about the history and continued relevance of the Project, and why media literacy and press freedoms are more important than ever, as it celebrates its 50th anniversary; editors Shealeigh Voitl, Andy Lee Roth, and Mickey Huff introduction to this year’s book, discussing the siege on public knowledge in the age of Trump 2.0, envisioning an interconnected and imaginative resistance to censorship; a Déjà vu News chapter, which updates on previous year’s top stories, including how a Monsanto “intelligence center” targeted journalists and activists, journalist Abby Martin’s challenge to Georgia’s BDS “gag law,” and the Justice Department’s secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) rules; a Junk Food News section that spans from Snow White and actress Gal Gadot, to Drake versus Kendrick and the gutting of public education, not to mention Elon Musk’s chain saws, Cybertrucks, and creeping fascism, surveying the dubious reporting that’s Making America Junky Again; John Collins of Weave News discusses the Long Shadow of News Abuse in the case of Elise Stefanik, Israel, and Antisemitism; Media Democracy in Action, featuring inspiring contributions by Ryan Grim of Drop Site News, Maya Schenwar and Lara Witt of the Movement Media Alliance, Joe Lauria of Consortium News, Lauren Harper with the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and Jodi Rave Spotted Bear of the Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance; and Shealeigh Voitl and Reagan Haynie’s zine-style guide to infographics equips social media users with the tools to responsibly evaluate the content they see online and become empowered media makers.
Top stories from 2025 (which I might have reported on last year) are posted for free here. Below are a handful that caught my eye. My own thoughts in brackets.
This article is called “Cities and states are turning to AI to improve road safety“. Basically the concept is to pay private vehicle owners to install dashboard cameras which take video of street conditions and feed it into a central database. What makes it “AI” seems to be computer-assisted analysis of the videos.
This all makes sense to me, although I wonder if you just put this technology on all the public fleet vehicles out there (buses, police cars, fire trucks, public works vehicles, maybe partner with utility companies) if that would be enough.
I do like the idea of focusing more on the infrastructure itself when it comes to safety, rather than vehicles and their drivers which is essentially blaming the victim. With gradual advent of autonomous vehicles, I see a shift in attitudes towards zero tolerance of deaths and injuries. Early on, my thought was that this was unfair because human-controlled vehicles cause so many deaths and injuries and we tend to think of these as inevitable. But as I have thought about it more, the public has essentially zero tolerance for deaths and injuries on any form of public transportation, whether trains, buses, or planes. It is time we held motor vehicles and the infrastructure they are traveling on to this same standard, and the trend seems to be in that direction.
The other positive trend here is a core principle of asset management itself. We all know infrastructure is expensive and difficult to build and maintain, but it does wear out and need to be repaired and eventually replaced. Each time you do a repair or a replacement, you have a chance to upgrade at low or sometimes no extra cost. Any single piece of infrastructure lasts a long time, but there are always things wearing out here and there throughout the system. So if you have a solid vision of where you want to go and you make those repair/replace/upgrade decisions consistent with it, small changes can add up to big system change over time, and this can be done cost-effectively. We don’t need “AI” to do this necessarily, but if calling it AI helps us get over the psychological hurdle to actually make it happen, let’s go for it!
This is basically just a real estate development with no parking. It’s on a light rail line, and the main idea seems to be to embrace micromobility (bikes, scooters, autonomous taxis) for people to get around. It doesn’t seem hugely pathbreaking to me, but I think what might make it seem pathbreaking to suburban Americans is that the bikes, scooters, human beings, and cars are not in conflict with each other. This is so simple, and yet so pathbreaking. It’s also pathbreaking because it’s in greater Phoenix. We assume this can’t be done in American cities because when we choose to devote most of our space to car maneuvering and car storage, there is not also room for the bikes, scooters, and human beings.
Recessions have become more rare in recent decades, and you have to leave it to the Economist to suggest that this might be a bad thing. Well, the Economist and Joseph Schumpeter, who is my personal favorite economist.
Joseph Schumpeter, an Austrian economist, argued that they provoke “creative destruction”. Failing firms leave the market, capital decamps to more promising technologies and workers move to more productive jobs. The result is short-term pain and long-term gain. Schumpeter did not argue that politicians should deliberately engineer downturns. But nor did he think they should try to prevent them. “Depressions are not simply evils, which we might attempt to suppress,” he wrote. They represent “something which has to be done”.
In my many grade-school years of American history (which seemed to be the only kind of history I ever got, unless you count that one year of Virginia history I had to take), I remember my eyes glazing over when hearing about “the panic of 18XX”. Where “XX” represents pretty much any odd numbered year during that century. It just seemed to be a wild and woolly time with no central banks, regulation, or consumer protections. Lots of people got rich, and lots of people lived in what we used to call “third world” conditions.
It makes sense to me that businesses should not be overly insulated from the consequences of the risks they take, while ordinary people mostly should. So this points to not a lot of bailouts for inefficient industries, coupled with robust social insurance like unemployment and disability. In the U.S. though, what I see is big business capturing the government and successfully insulating itself from the consequences of risk taking, which suppresses competition and Schumpeter-esque innovation. We do sort of seem to get the unemployment thing right though, when push comes to shove, which worked out pretty well during the pandemic. People who were employed when the pandemic hit seemed to do okay. People who were not employed fell through the cracks of course, as they tend to do in our system. And if they turned to drug or alcohol abuse, they fell even further due to our lack of universal health care.
So my quasi-libertarian prescription here, which I think Schumpeter and even Hayek might approve of, is to let the companies compete and innovate, or die. Let them hire and fire at will. But workers need to be protected by robust unemployment, disability, health care and child care programs. The government needs to raise and then redistribute revenue to do this, but everybody comes out ahead in the aggregate except a few fat cats at the top who would rather use their wealth and power to rig the system in their favor than have to compete and innovate. Recessions are also the time to double down on infrastructure, research and development, education and training funding which underpin long-term productivity growth and innovation of an advanced economy. I think Schumpeter’s ghost would love that!
“The Line” is essentially an attempt to realize the “ribbon arcology” concept from Science Fiction in real life. Design and construction are underway, although ambitions are already being scaled back and aspirational timelines extended, as tends to happen with visionary projects. This Financial Times article takes a somewhat sneering negative tone, in my view. My thought is that a linear project gives you the ability to plan/design/construct in phases, scale up and down, and change timelines as economic conditions and technologies change during its construction. It has been referred to as “multi-generational”, so the fact it hasn’t been built in the first few years after it was conceived does not constitute failure, in my view. Still, I doubt it is particularly fun to work on a project like this, and I especially wouldn’t want to be a in a high-profile responsible position on the project.
Such was the gravity-defying spirit of Neom — the vast mega-project with The Line at its heart — that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman hoped would redefine life in the kingdom and beyond. The chandelier was just one part of The Line, a 500 metre-tall mirror-glass structure running 170km across the sand and designed to house 9mn people: a city built into a wall higher than the Empire State Building.
Of course, I am particularly interested in the transportation, water, energy, and food aspects. If you build something linear like this, how do you avoid problems with bottlenecks or breakdowns somewhere in the middle affecting the entire system?
I like this post on reading and memory from Horace Bianchon.
…the value of reading lies less in retention than in integration. A good book tweaks your internal models and you begin to see a familiar problem in a new frame. You revise the assumptions behind a mental shortcut or you absorb a phrase that becomes part of your vocabulary of thought.
I read for two reasons. First, it’s my favorite leisure activity, one of the only times I achieve the “flow state” that is the key to happiness in the moment for me. But second, yes, it is about tweaking my “internal mental model” of the world. Over time, that will change how I perceive and react to the world and the small and large decisions I make and ultimately how I live my life. I am a different person than I was 5 or 10 years ago, and I will be a different person 5 or 10 years from now (unless I’m dead), and that is largely from those tweaks to my mental model of the universe I am part of. Because that mental model of the universe IS the universe for me. We are each living side by side and interacting with each other within our unique mental models of the universe. Now, I would argue that for practical human purposes, we should assume that there IS such a thing as objective reality, even if we can’t measure or agree with perfect clarity on what it is. We can keep searching for it and approaching it, and some of our mental models are going to be a lot closer to the true reality than others.
I admit to being ignorant of this. I know the Oval Office is in the West Wing of course. Yahoo has a rundown of the East Wing. The main thing it seems to have housed is official offices of first ladies over the years. But not Hillary Clinton, who insisted on being in the West Wing, or Melania Trump, who doesn’t seem to do office-y things. And there was also a theater with a really big TV where presidents and guests could watch movies and the Super Bowl. But given how busy I am as a normal middle aged working parent, I can’t imagine presidents are often able to sit down and dedicate a 2-3 hour chunk of time to watching a movie or sporting event.
The east wing “colonnade” was essentially a hallway.
The iconic outdoor photos we often see of world leaders are typically taken in the outdoor West Wing colonnade.
There are also the east and west porticos, which are basically covered porches. Photo captions online seem to mix up the porticos and colonnades at times.
I hear people “questioning the value of a college degree” in the media. Sure, education is getting more and more expensive at a time when wages seem to be stagnating and there is some uncertainty whether career prospects for today’s graduates will be similar to those of past generations. But the numbers say (paying to study and not work for four years and) getting a degree is still a much better investment than not getting a degree and going right to work after high school. Sure, you could borrow the cost of four years of college and bet it on cryptocurrency or the Super Bowl, and you might come out ahead, but you might also come out living a short life under a bridge somewhere. You could also train as, say, an electrician and probably have a decent income and successful career, but you would still probably do better in the long run as an electrical engineer.
Anyway, this is from the Financial Times, which I still seem to have residual access to from my own recent student career.
To determine whether recent graduates are having an especially tough time in 2025’s low-hiring environment, the comparison we should make instead is with others who recently entered the labour market for the first time, regardless of age. A newly job-seeking graduate might be in their mid-twenties, but someone entering the world of work straight from high school will be several years younger.
Once we do this, it turns out that those without a degree are actually having a much harder time of it. In the US, unemployment among recent college graduates is up 1.3 percentage points from its mid-2022 low, but by almost double that among recent labour market entrants without a degree, who have seen a 2.4 point rise. This is very different to the much more modest 0.7 point rise among the frequently — but inappropriately — cited group of non-grads in their mid-twenties who are sheltered from today’s harsh hiring conditions.
But evidence for the kind of large-scale AI-driven displacement of early-career knowledge-sector jobs that would explain broad-based graduate malaise remains conspicuous by its absence….When viewed instead as a broader cooling of the labour market, in which inexperienced workers of all stripes bear the brunt (and especially those with the least skills) we don’t need to reach for such exotic explanations. The unwinding of extremely tight post-pandemic labour markets, rising input costs from inflation, tax changes and tariffs, plus the broader economic uncertainty during Donald Trump’s second term, are sufficient to explain what we’re seeing.
AI-related changes to the job market and wider economy are almost certainly coming, in my view, but we may be perceiving a causation between today’s technology and economic/political headlines that is not quite happening in real time.
Most frightening and/or depressing story: The evidence for an increasing worldwide collapse in insect diversity and abundance continues to mount. What’s that you say, you don’t actually like bugs? Well, they are the base of the food chain (after plants) and generally indicators of biodiversity and healthy ecosystems more broadly. That’s right, the proverbial “canary in the coal mine” may have actually been a cockroach. There was also news this month that another “planetary boundary” has been breached. The biodiversity one that would cover insect collapse was already breached a long time ago, and this new one has to do with ocean acidification. Only two more to go for a perfect score of 9/9!
Most hopeful story: The seems to be some mixed evidence, tainted with industry and government propaganda in my opinion, but overall there are some hopeful signs that the global transition to renewable energy is real. It may be too slow and too late to avoid consequences, but it may also avoid the worst possible consequences.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I mused about what it was like to be a child in the distant past of novels I have read, during my own youth, for my own children today, and for young adults I have interacted recently. We hear children are “anxious” and experiencing various crises, and I am not denying there is hard evidence of this, but with my own eyes I also see kids being somewhat safer, kinder, and gentler to each other than in the past. I hope it is possible to mitigate some of the negative effects of technology and other negative influences on kids today while also building on the positive trends.
