what’s new with fusion?

One thing that’s new, according to the New York Times, is massive investment in R&D by the government of China. Meanwhile in the U.S., it’s more about startups and public-private partnerships. In at least one anecdotal case mentioned in the article, top scientists from China who have been based at top U.S. universities for decades are choosing to go home. The article suggests that American firms are often the first to achieve breakthroughs, but the Chinese system is better at scaling and commercializing them.

It seems like there is an opportunity to cooperate for the greater good here, no? That is not the way the political winds are blowing at the moment, of course. At least in this case, if our countries aren’t actually cooperating, they are not competing to weaponize the technology first. This technology was weaponized more than half a century ago, of course, and the quest ever since has been to learn how to control it for peaceful purposes. Of course, the joke is always that commercial fusion is two decades away, no matter what decade we are currently in. This article declines to give a clear time table for widespread commercialization, but it talks about a “pilot plant in the 2030s and 2040s”, so yep the rolling two decade projection seems to be holding.

AI investment compared to railway boom

The blog Urbanomics has a comparison of the current AI investment concentration to the 19th century railroad investment boom in England and the United States. In this particular case, the blogger neglected to provide the original source, which he or she normally does. Financial Times and Economist are typical sources. Anyway, here are some stats mentioned:

  • Peak “railway mania” in the UK was around the 1840s, and railroad investment accounted for around half of all investment at that time.
  • Between about 1830 and 1870 in the UK, railroad investment accounted for about 20% of all investment.
  • In the US, episodic railroad investment booms occurred in the 1840s and 1870s. Railroad investment at these times was around 40% of all investment. This accounted for GDP growth of about 6-10%.
  • The brief clip actually doesn’t tell us how much of total US investment in 2025 is directed to AI. But it accounts for GDP growth of around 2%.

These are interesting numbers, but I don’t think comparing 19th century and 21st century US GDP growth is a very good comparison. That is essentially comparing a fast-growing developing country to a slow-growing advanced economy. If I had to pick one or the other to live in, I would probably go with the one that has safe drinking water, antibiotics, vaccinations, relatively painless dentistry, and air conditioning.

Prospera, Trump, Thiel and the Honduras drug trafficking pardon

The former president of Honduras, Juan Hernandez, who was convicted of drug trafficking and then pardoned by Trump, has ties to Peter Thiel and the “charter city” Prospera. I keep tabs on Prospera, as I was initially interested in the charter city idea after hearing a lecture by Paul Romer (a Nobel prize winning economist). The original concept, which was about economic opportunity, efficiency, and clarity of mission, has morphed into something far more corrupt and ugly.

This governing arrangement was organized in part by Hernández, who served two terms as president of Honduras from 2014 until January 2022. Prospera was permitted to launch the charter city after Hernández allowed for the creation of semiautonomous Zones for Employment and Economic Development, or ZEDEs. The ZEDEs were then overseen by a committee that included three of Hernández’s underlings and several American libertarian activists.

So there you have it. I am not saying this is proof that Prospera is the reason for the pardon. But what we see in the press is a lot of puzzlement that the U.S. government can be simultaneously fighting an anti-drug war on the Venezuelan government and supporting a pro-drug former Honduran government. This is logically inconsistent. On the other hand, simultaneously supporting right-wing big business interests in Venezuela (think oil contracts if not outright ownership for US corporations) and right-wing big business interests in Honduras is logically consistent (not to mention corrupt and cynical).

what’s new in the JFK files?

What’s new is evidence that James Angleton at the CIA was personally tracking Oswald, and (separately, really), extensive ties between Angleton and the nuclear proliferation project of Israeli intelligence. The historical backdrop at this time, also based on evidence, is that JFK was actively and vocally resisting said nuclear proliferation. None of which seems to be a smoking gun with fresh fingerprints, just another party with motive and opportunity.

Though Angleton insisted that the agency was inattentive to Oswald and unaware of the purpose of his activities leading up to Dallas, it has since been disclosed through unclassified JFK assassination records that Angleton personally maintained a classified 201 intelligence/surveillance file on Oswald for the four years preceding Kennedy’s assassination, strictly controlling which officials inside the CIA were permitted to see it through compartmentalization.

Angleton committed perjury before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, claiming he knew almost nothing about Lee Harvey Oswald before the shooting. In another, Angleton concealed the fact that Oswald had visited the Cuban embassy in Mexico City—a visit the CIA publicly claimed it only discovered after the assassination. As Jefferson Morley, author of The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton, explained, the  counter-intelligence chief “preferred to wait out the Warren Commission rather than explain the CIA’s knowledge of and interest in Oswald’s visit to the Cuban consulate” in Mexico…

At the very moment a U.S. president was seeking to restrict Israel’s nuclear ambitions and limit the political power of its lobby in Washington, the CIA official in control of the Oswald file was secretly sharing intelligence channels, assassination communications, and off-the-books operatives with Israel—and lying to both Congress and potentially some of his own CIA colleagues about it. The government spent 60 years redacting those facts and Americans have a right to know why.

I might ask how many agents (come on, yes, Oswald was a CIA agent/informant/collaborator of some sort) Angleton had files on. Hundreds? Thousands? or just a few? Did having a file folder with your name on it really make you special?

Our World in Data 2025 Roundup

There is so much here you could spend all of 2026 digging into the data from 2025 and not get through it. This is a pretty amazing organization! I attempted a top 10 list and only got to 7 because I lumped together some similar things.

  1. Carbon dioxide emissions in the US and other developed countries peaked around 2006 and have been falling. Meanwhile they have skyrocketed in China and India and continue to increase more or less exponentially. Per capita emissions follow similar trends. Global sales of internal combustion engine cars appear to have peaked in 2018, and are very slowly declining while sales of electric vehicles are very slowly rising. Overall, the sale of cars in general appears to have declined slightly over the past decade or so. Interesting – does this represent other forms of mobility slowly coming to the fore? The world also appears to have passed “peak air pollution” a few years ago, with the one exception being ammonia from agricultural intensification. (I am not aware of ammonia as an air pollutant being a major human health risk, other than those exposed on or near farms. It is however a critical water pollutant and the intensification bodes badly for our surface and coastal waters. There may also be a connection between ammonia and nitrous oxide as a greenhouse gas that I do not fully understand.)
  2. Two different stories show a democracy index by country for the world and GDP per capita by country for the world. The two maps look about the same. Coincidence?
  3. Does the News Reflect What we Die From? The answer is no, of course. People die from heart attacks, cancer, and strokes, while the news focuses on homicide and other violence. I understand “If it bleeds, it leads” but I have always thought if they just put the anecdotal news in the context of some running statistics, it might help people put things in context. At the same time, another story shows that death rates from heart attacks and strokes have come down dramatically over the past century or so.
  4. Men commit suicide at higher rates than women in every country studied. In the US, the ratio is about 4 to 1 (access to guns, I wonder). In South Korea, only 2 to 1 but the overall rate of suicide is one of the world’s highest. In general, women live longer than men in most countries, but the gap is shocking in Russia. The Covid-19 death rate was also shocking in Russia. Now, part of the issue is the old one where choropleth maps draw your eye to the biggest countries.
  5. Overall, the world has made striking gains in poverty reduction because rates have gone from very high to very low in East Asia and South Asia between about 1990 and 2020. (But notably, Pakistan is lumped with the Middle East rather than South Asia and I am not sure about Bangladesh.) However, the progress stalled around then and has been reversed by increasing poverty in Africa.
  6. The map of where same sex marriage is legal looks a lot like the map of democracy and per capita income. One interesting thing is that many countries recognize foreign same sex marriages even if they do not allow their own citizens to marry. Homophobic attitudes have dropped dramatically in western countries between 1984 (75% in the United States) and 2022 (28%) although they are still higher than in Europe. (The way I look at it, trans-phobia is sort of the new homophobia, now that straight-up homophobia does not represent a viable political stance. Kind of like singling out Haitian or Somali immigrants is the mutated form of racism, now that straight-up anti-black racism is mostly out of style. So ugly as these things are, you could see them as indicators of progress.)
  7. Renewable electricity generation is growing exponentially, led by solar energy.

BBC: 25 most important scientific ideas of the 21st century

BBC has a list called The 25 most powerful ideas of the 21st century (so far), picked by the world’s top thinkers. They don’t spell out science or technology in the title, but I don’t see any grand philosophical or literary analysis here. It’s not exactly clear if the list is in any order, other than maybe grouped loosely by topic. I’m just going to list a few I found interesting below, in categories:

  • Medicine: stem cells that don’t come from babies, mRNA vaccines, genome sequencing, a cure for HIV*, the HPV vaccine, contraception apps [what we used to call “the rhythm method and were cautioned not to use, but the apps now make it accurate], tissue engineering [this is growing body parts from a sample of human DNA for implant back into that same person – the article says ears, trachea, and bone have been used in patients, while kidneys and hearts are still at the research stage], psychedelic therapy
  • Environment: global warming and continuing carbon emissions, attribution analysis
  • (Information) Technology: large language models, robots that can do chemistry experiments
  • (Other) Technology: self-repairing materials
  • Physics/Cosmology: dark matter, the Higgs boson, the James Webb telescope, exoplanets, gravitational waves

* The HIV cure deserves some extra discussion. HIV can be cured, at least in some people sometimes, by transplanting bone marrow from a naturally HIV-resistant person. A bone marrow transplant is such a big deal that it would not be ethical to do it for people whose only problem is HIV(!) because other effective treatments are available. It is done for people with terminal leukemia when no other treatments are available. A few of these people have HIV, and it has been shown that their HIV can be cured. So we need to keep working on applying some of the other technologies to an HIV vaccine and/or cure.

I want to just briefly talk about the contraceptive apps. I might have heard about that but didn’t realize it had been so rigorously studied and FDA-approved. It seems so simple and yet a breakthrough, which I find heartening. I find this heartening because I would like to see our society eventually move on from the abortion debate, and the way to move on in my view is to improve technology, access and knowledge about birth control while reducing stigma. This seems to me to accomplish all those objectives without a major scientific breakthrough being required. (I am under no illusions about the politics – if technology solves an issue, people who need an issue to suit their political purposes will find or manufacture another issue.)

what to do after those holiday meals

I don’t put too much stock in online nutrition and fitness advice, but here is what at least one article (Fashion Beans) suggests in the day or two after overindulgence.

  • Day 1: Start by drinking a whole bunch of water to start flushing salt from the system. Delay caffeine intake for an hour or two (ha, no chance I would ever do this, I have my priorities.) Basically just eat protein, vegetables, and a little bit of vegetable-based fat the rest of the day (hopefully there are some of these amongst the leftovers.) Take a 10-minute walk after every meal (probably never a bad idea). Exercise, but only lightly (as defined by the fitness bro who probably wrote this post.) Give alcohol a break. Get a solid sleep (they say 7.5 hours, sounds a bit overprecise to me).
  • Day 2: Lots of yogurt and fruit and more protein for breakfast.

And that’s it. Sounds totally fine for general health advice. We know what we are supposed to do right? Sleep, exercise, vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, whole grains, protein, approved fats and oils in moderation. 0-1 alcoholic beverages per day and avoid sugar and processed foods almost entirely. Do this for a couple days and you will probably feel decent whether you behaved badly on day 0 or not, I would think. Behave badly for several days in a row, as at least I tend to do over holiday breaks and on vacation, and you might start to feel pretty crappy. So here’s the best piece of advice I can give: Do as I say, not as I do!

what’s next for (incremental improvement of commercial) AI

We normals are hearing in the media that the large language model approach to AI has run its course, that further scaling it up is prohibitive in terms of energy, and that there is an AI-hype-driven financial bubble ready to pop any moment. According to at least one blogger though, the big breakthrough happening right now is having these models “reason” internally before they give an answer.

Two of those leading engineers are: Julian Schrittwieser who helped teach AlphaGo how to play Go at a level never witnessed in human history and is now a lead researcher at Anthropic. And Łukasz Kaiser, who whilst at Google Brain, co‑authored the paper that launched the architecture now driving every major released model on “Attention is all you need”…

Kaiser, for his part, corrects time horizons. The category of work that still belongs unquestioned to humans is shrinking. He states, with a deep belief, that these AI systems will be able to do any labor task currently performed on a computer within a timeframe of five years! …

The question is not whether machines will pass some imagined threshold in the future, but what it means that they have already crossed thresholds we still debate as hypothetical. A society reacts to what it believes is true, not to what is true. When the prevailing public understanding is delayed by years, institutions are, by definition, operating in a prior decade.

We can model technological progress as a series of sequential, overlaid S-curves that have to overlap in just such a way to produce continuous exponential growth. At least some insiders are still thinking in terms of keeping this S-curve going, in a competition between companies and countries. And when we see a new technology break through into widespread public, commercial use, it has already been going in the lab for awhile. That used to be measured in decades, now it is months if these optimist insider voices are to be believed.

https://onepercentrule.substack.com/p/is-ai-on-a-new-trajectory

November 2025 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Wait, I actually had trouble coming up with a frightening or depressing story this month! It’s not because I was in a particularly good mood. Okay, I’ll go with all the terrible things identified in Project Censored’s yearly roundup of terrible things. These include PFAS, melting ice sheets, police violence, and the generally sorry state of the Native American community.

Most hopeful story: RENEWABLE ENERGY IS NOW CHEAPER THAN FOSSIL FUELS, AND ANYBODY WHO CLAIMS OTHERWISE IS EITHER MISINFORMED OR LYING. Note I said “misinformed”, because I try to be nice and “ignorant” is not a nice word. But they are synonyms. Despite the propaganda coming from the U.S. fossil fuel industry, government, and press, the renewable energy transition is happening and the fossil fuel stranded assets problem (for that industry) is real. Speaking of propaganda, Noam Chomsky is 96, still writing, and surer than ever that people don’t want war and only acquiesce to it because of the propaganda machine.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: The Tyranny of Small Decisions posits that many small but well-intentioned decisions made at inappropriately low levels within an organization can cause it to stray from its mission.

forecasting extinction risk

I agree with this article that it doesn’t make sense to start protecting species only after they become rare and threatened. Forecasting which ones will become rare and threatened in the future could make sense. Of course, serious efforts to protect, create, and connect habitats would make the most sense. The method I am familiar with, which is appeals to me most, is the geographically-based metapopulation method of Ilka Hansky. But there are some others mentioned here that are new to me, or at least unfamiliar names for concepts I might have come across.

Forecasting extinction risk for future-proof conservation decisions

Conservation prioritisation emphasises currently threatened species, but there are strong arguments for complementary, more proactive approaches based on forecasting future extinction risk for unthreatened species. Forecasting methods vary in the timescale of extinction risk estimation and include established methods such as Population Viability Analysis (PVA) and Early Warning Systems, and emerging ‘Over-the-Horizon’ (OTH) methods. We develop a framework that integrates extinction risk assessment across timescales and outlines tradeoffs between shorter- and longer-term extinction prevention goals. This framework facilitates use of extinction risk forecasting in decision-theoretic conservation prioritisation that explicitly considers alternative time horizons for extinction prevention. Considering extinction risk on extended timescales offers a future-proof approach to conservation planning that may prevent more extinctions than focusing exclusively on currently threatened species.