Today's Water Cooler 2026-05-28

Patient readers, unreasonably patient readers, today I had some schedule slippage. But I willl add orts and scraps after this posts. —lambert UPDATE Finished!

Birdsong of the Day

Moar mimidae:

Sandy Point State Reservation, Essex, Massachusetts, United States

In Case You Might Miss…

(1) “Central bank independence — a dangerous delusion”

(2) Silicon Valley oligarchs seek plutonium.

(3) “U.S. Scores Major Rare Earth Win With Greenland Deposit Deal”

(4) August Sanders’ class analysis.

Politics

Trump Administration

“Trump Accelerates Plans to Transfer Cold War-Era Plutonium to Private Companies” [NOTUS]. “The Department of Energy is reportedly in talks with five companies, including a California-based advanced nuclear technology corporation called Oklo, to offload the government’s Cold War stockpile of plutonium. Oklo has ties to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who respectively chaired and served on the company’s board of directors.” • What could OpenAI possibly want plutonium for?

“OPM proposes requiring all feds to sign an NDA” [Government Executive]. “[Office of Personnel Management (OPM)] announced its plan in a filing set for publication in the Federal Register Wednesday. In justifying the requirement, officials cited reporting in Government Executive and other news outlets disclosing controversial proposals to overhaul federal layoff and performance management rules—and internal warnings against their implementation—prior to their formal publication.” And: “According to a draft copy of the proposed NDA, feds would be required to sign a document barring them from disclosing information related to internal agency operations, personnel and procurement matters and ‘any sensitive, pre-decisional or deliberative material’ and vowing to inform their agency if they learn of others making such a disclosure.” • Oh, great. Snitches, too.

“USPS restricts nonessential spending to delay running out of cash” [Federal News Network]. • Privatization, here we come!

Republican Funhouse

“15 wild images of UFC construction towering over White House as South Lawn transformed” [Irish Star]. For example:

Democrats en Déshabillé

“Democrat blasted by left and right after softening stance on scandal-hit Maine candidate” [FOX]. “Progressive commentator Rachel Bitecofer mocked Auchincloss, a Jewish Democrat, for focusing on Platner’s tattoo resembling a Nazi design instead of discussing what she described as ‘actual policy Nazis’ in the Republican Party. ‘We need to take back the Senate, but don’t vote for the D because I want to pretend a tattoo and not positions make him a Nazi while we are facing actual policy Nazis,’ Bitecofer wrote.”

Religion

“How worship music became the soundtrack of today’s political rights” [Religious News]. “It’s just after 8:30 on a Sunday morning in Nashville, and the worship band at Woodmont Christian Church is getting warmed up. After tuning her Taylor guitar, worship pastor Andra Moran jumps into a familiar song. ‘How great is our God / Sing with me / How great is our God.’ The song has long been one of her favorites. It is easy to sing, gives people a bit of transcendence and lets them know they are not alone.” But: “[I]n recent years, ‘How Great Is Our God’ and other worship songs have been sung at conservative political events too: the Jericho March before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol; MAGA events and anti-vax revivals during COVID-19; pro-Israel protests during the Gaza war; and Charlie Kirk’s memorial.” • Cf. Matthew 6:6But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly..

“The Roberts court’s record on the First Amendment” [SCOTUSblog]. “And that outcome would fit the Roberts court’s broader First Amendment jurisprudence. Its protection of speech remains significant, but uneven. Religion has become more consistent, more prioritized, and increasingly central to the court’s constitutional identity. Since Barrett joined the court, formal religion claimants and religion-adjacent speakers have prevailed with remarkable regularity. The court may not describe this as a religious-liberty revolution. But the data points only in that direction. The future of the First Amendment is therefore likely to remain bifurcated. Speech claimants will continue to win in important areas, especially where the court sees censorship, retaliation, compelled speech, or viewpoint discrimination. Yet religious claimants will remain among the most favored litigants before the court, particularly when public benefits, religious schools, parental rights, religious conscience, and institutional autonomy are involved. St. Mary may not kill Smith. But it will likely further demonstrate why the court no longer needs to.” • So every leftist movemet is going to need a priest or a pastor?s

Realignment and Legitimacy

“Foursomes in the time of cholera” [The New Statesman]. “A woman gets engaged and promptly receives a note from another woman who claims to be intimately intertwined with her new fiancé. Scandalously, that woman is the fiancé’s own sister-in-law, and she doesn’t see why her beloved’s new betrothed should tear them apart. What if the couples – the two brothers and their wives – were to move into houses on the same street, and embrace an unconventional attitude to marriage vows?” OK… More: “We are in London’s high society, the year is 1887, and the women are married to the brothers of the Conservative politician Arthur Balfour…. This is the world of Lady Frances Balfour (née Campbell, daughter of the eighth Duke of Argyll), and Lady Betty Balfour (née Bulwer-Lytton), as told by the historian Susan Pedersen…. This is a history of the suffragist movement told through two of its most elite figures. ‘Here, the outgoing Conservative prime minister’s two sisters-in-law chide the wife of the incoming Liberal one about her husband’s root-and-branch hatred of women’s suffrage,’ Pederson notes. ‘They argue with Millicent Fawcett and Christabel Pankhurst about tactics.’” • Fascinating article, well worth a read.

Geopolitics

“U.S. Scores Major Rare Earth Win With Greenland Deposit Deal” [OilPrice.com]. “As Washington races to build a rare earth supply chain that can survive the Pentagon’s 2027 ban on Chinese-origin materials, REalloys has locked in long-term supply from one of the largest known heavy rare earth deposits in the world. The company announced last Thursday that it has signed a definitive 15-year offtake agreement with Critical Metals Corp. covering 15% of Phase 1 production from the Tanbreez project in southern Greenland, a massive heavy rare earth deposit containing Dysprosium and Terbium, the two most strategically sensitive magnet materials used in fighter aircraft, missile systems, radar platforms, drones, and advanced defense hardware. REalloys is building one of the only integrated heavy rare earth metallization and magnet production platforms in North America as Washington pushes to break its dependence on Chinese processing capacity before the Pentagon ban takes effect in only seven months.” And: “Trump didn’t manage to buy Greenland, but REalloys got its critical minerals. The strategic importance of the Tanbreez project goes far beyond scale. The Greenland deposit is one of the largest known heavy rare earth resources globally and one of the few major Western-aligned projects capable of supplying meaningful quantities of Dysprosium and Terbium outside China.”

Business Sentiment

“Consumer confidence sags; most households cut spending due to inflation” [CFO Dive]. “Consumer confidence ticked down this month as the rising price of gasoline and other goods compelled two out three households to trim spending, the Conference Board said Tuesday, citing a survey. The Consumer Confidence Index dipped 0.7 points to 93.1, eroded by a gloomier view among younger and older consumers, the Conference Board said. Optimism rose among consumers aged 35 to 54.”

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 61 Greed (previous close: 60 Greed) [CNN]. One week ago: 58 (Greed). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). • Weirdly stable….

Business: Banking and Finance

“Central bank independence — a dangerous delusion” [Lars P. Syll]. “For anyone naive enough to believe that central bank governors’ work is based on solid, evidence-based science — forget it! What this documentary convincingly demonstrates is that the work of central bank governors is little more than subtle storytelling charlatanry — and they know it themselves! In the documentary, Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett describes the work of central banks as nothing but ‘subtle charlatanry’. Even though central bank governors want to present their work as if it is based on solid science, in reality it is more about illusions and myths — something also confirmed by Sweden’s former central bank governor, Stefan Ingves, when he describes his societal role as a kind of ‘storytelling uncle’. When questioned about the central bank’s highly flawed forecasts, he responds: “The alternative would be to say that we have no idea about anything.’” • A classic Clarke & Dawe:

“California judge rules in favor of OppFi, against regulator” [Banking Dive]. “A California judge has sided with lending fintech OppFi in its case against California’s financial regulator, which since 2022 has sought to shut down OppFi’s lending program and fine the fintech for allegedly illegal interest rates….. A California judge has sided with lending fintech OppFi in its case against California’s financial regulator, which since 2022 has sought to shut down OppFi’s lending program and fine the fintech for allegedly illegal interest rates.” Yikes! More: “The DFPI alleged that though these caps do not technically apply to out-of-state banks like FinWise, the relationship between the bank and OppFi is a ‘rent-a-bank ruse’ designed to permit OppFi ‘to circumvent interest rate limits,’ and that OppFi was the ‘true lender’ of OppLoans.” And: “OppLoans, which are short-term loans that borrowers with poor credit can access through OppFi’s platform.” • So I think we can all assune that OppFi is a “rent-a-bank ruse”?

Business: AI

“Visa, Mastercard envision agentic commerce benefits” [Payments Dive]. “Visa and Mastercard are betting that agentic commerce will multiply the number of payments that consumers make for purchases by taking humans out of the equation…. The thinking goes like this: While humans may be inclined to purchase numerous items from one retailer because it’s more convenient to do one transaction, an AI-driven bot will be more likely to buy items from several merchants in multiple transactions if doing so better satisfies parameters specified by a shopper.” And: “Mastercard and Visa, as well as tech titan Google, said last month that they’re working with FIDO Alliance, an industry standards organization, to develop the mechanisms by which agents will be authenticated and enabled to transact on behalf of consumers.’ • What could go wrong>

“Leading AI models are more vulnerable to malicious prompts than vendors claim” [CIO Dive]. “AI vendors assume that their models are safe from hijacking if they can fend off a single malicious prompt at a time, but hackers are increasingly using multistage prompts to evade model defenses, Cisco said, and most models aren’t prepared for those kinds of attacks.” More: “Cisco’s evaluation of 15 leading AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Amazon and xAI ‘found that single-turn attack success rate (ASR) is not a reliable proxy for what happens when an attacker can adapt across turns,; researchers Nicholas Conley and Amy Chang wrote. Their tests revealed that AI models were much more susceptible to multi-turn malicious prompts — success rates ranged from 8% to 88%, compared with a range of 2% to 65% for single-turn prompts… Conley and Chang found that AI developers that publicly emphasized their models’ increasing power produced models with the biggest gap between vulnerability to single-turn attacks and vulnerability to multi-turn attacks. Developers whose public statements emphasized model safety had smaller disparities, suggesting a more concerted effort to minimize risks.” • Why on earth would you assume that hackers are only going to try one time?

Business: Mr. Market

“Trading volume on prediction markets has soared in recent months” [Pew Research]. “Prediction markets allow people to trade on the outcome of real-world events, from basketball games to elections. And trading volume on Kalshi and Polymarket – the two leading prediction markets – has increased dramatically since mid-2025. Combined monthly global trading volume on these platforms has risen from less than $5 billion in September 2025 to about $24 billion in April 2026, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of data from The Block, a digital assets media and information firm. For comparison, the total amount of money wagered through legal sportsbooks in the United States was around $14 billion per month in 2025, on average.” • I wonder why the sudden spike?

“‘Prediction Markets’ Come to Art Auctions: Now You Can Bet on Basquiat and Monet, Courtesy of Kalshi” [ARTnews]. “So-called prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket—sites for online gambling, though the companies say they are a form of derivatives trading—have gamified modern life to a previously unforeseen degree. Users can bet not only on events bettors have traditionally gambled on, like sports, but also on bizarrely trivial matters like whether US president Donald Trump will use the expressions ‘big beautiful bill’ or ‘rigged election’ at the annual Thanksgiving turkey pardon. They can take a position on other seemingly comical but potentially hugely consequential outcomes too, like whether the US government will confirm the existence of alien life by the year 2027. On a darker note, some successful bets on life-and-death events such as war in Iran and the abduction of former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro have raised questions about whether bettors are trading on insider knowledge.” And: “One New York art adviser, speaking anonymously, resorted to an old saw to express skepticism about the new venture’s potential for anyone not already highly clued in to the art market. ‘If you can’t determine who’s the sucker in the room,’ said the adviser, ‘it might be you. The art market thrives on opacity and information asymmetry. Prediction markets are just a more extreme version of that.’”

“Google employee charged with using insider data to rig bets on Polymarket” [Guardian]. “The US justice department has charged a Google software engineer with using insider information to rig bets tied to Google’s most-searched list on the prediction market Polymarket, earning $1.2m in profits, according to a complaint unsealed on Wednesday… The charges against Spagnuolo are part of a broader boom in the use and misuse of prediction markets, which have grown into a multibillion-dollar industry in recent years. Concerns over insider trading have led to federal agencies taking a closer look at how to regulate markets and prosecute potential use of classified information for betting purposes.” But: “[T]here is no cohesive federal framework for regulating the betting platforms. In a social media post on Tuesday, Donald Trump opposed state legislation targeting the markets and called proponents such as the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, ‘scum.’ ‘It’s a major industry and we must protect it,’ Trump posted.”” • Yes, I suppose online betting is what passes for “industry” these days.

Business: Management

“Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis” [TechCrunch]. “Tech executives, especially CEOs, are collectively suffering from delusions of AI grandeur. And at least one tech CEO has said as much out loud: Box founder Aaron Levie. ‘CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI,’ Levie wrote on X. CEOs ‘play with AI,’ develop a prototype, or generate a contract, to use Levie’s examples, and then make the leap to believing agents can do the work. But these top-level executives aren’t the people who have to review code, discover bugs, and identify calls to hallucinated libraries before software is deployed. They aren’t responsible for training AI models on a company’s idiosyncratic contract terms, nor do they have to spend days combing through contracts to find sneaky terms, as Levie indicates. In other words, Levie’s theory posits, CEOs don’t really understand processes well enough to know what really can and can’t be automated. But that lack of knowledge doesn’t stop them from acting on their beliefs.” • Surrounded by sycophants, all-in for a sychophantic technology.

The Conservatory

“A 100-year-old piano mystery has finally been solved” [Science Daily]. “For more than a century, pianists and music teachers have argued over whether a performer’s touch can actually change the tone color of a piano note — and now scientists say the answer is yes. Using a cutting-edge sensor system that tracked piano key movements at 1,000 frames per second, researchers discovered that elite pianists subtly manipulate keys in ways that listeners can genuinely hear, even if they’ve never played piano before.”

The Screening Room

“Backrooms: How 4chan ‘creepypasta’ became Hollywood horror” [The New Statesman]. “here’s a back story to Backrooms. Since 2011, a creepy photo has circulated on message boards: a slanted entrance into a large empty room, all yellow, with grotty wallpaper, carpet and floating ceiling, lit by oblong fluorescent lights, obscurely seeming to give on to other such rooms. In May 2019, an anonymous user posted it on 4chan, asking others to ‘post disquieting images that just feel ‘off’ ” as a contribution to ‘creepypasta’, a genre of frightening paranormal stories shared online. The next day, inspired by the glitchy moments in a video game when characters pass through a boundary, a fan suggestively named the phenomenon: ‘If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms…’ A hyperactive online subculture soon developed around this idea. It took five years to identify that the photo was taken in a disused furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. In that time, it had become part of a potent mythology.” • Very much like Gibson’s “the footage” in Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003).

“The Life Changing Magic of Hoarding” [The New Enquiry]. “The contemporary US is objectively extraordinary in that virtually anyone, including the extremely poor, can acquire collections of material goods of a volume unprecedented in human history. The consequences of this development have seeped through our thought and topsoil, but to visualize the significance of such expansive attainment, there is no better guide than those we are beckoned to look upon as misusers of this great power. We speak of hoarders, namely those featured in the award-winning and record-breaking A&E reality show of the same name, which began in 2009. Hoarders spanned seven seasons and survived cancellation on two different networks. Two months after the lowest point of the Great Recession, ‘austerity’ was just entering mainstream political discourse when the debut of Hoarders captivated audiences with the shocking spectacle of those whose lives exemplified the opposite.” More: “This is never an easy task. Many of the hoarders, who are largely white, working-class women, resist pathologization. But they often have clear insight into the deep-rooted traumas from which their hoarding commenced, even if they refuse to label it as such. They tell the camera about the abuse, disaster, or poverty against which their hoard has become, as one says, ‘a security blanket.’ ‘I get enjoyment out of it, and I have very little in life to enjoy,’ says a beleaguered woman whose husband bounces in and out of mental health institutions. ‘It’s nowhere near a replacement of my father, but it provides a moment of joy in a world where that’s rare,; says a mother who met her thirty-nine-year-old partner a decade ago, when she was seventeen. ‘I know I’m kind of secure because if someone tries to get to me, they would have to get through a lot of stuff,’ says a formerly unhoused man in a transitional living facility. It’s unsurprising that even the hoarders willing to admit a problem are distraught when dozens of strangers descend to strip away and destroy their psychological security blankets in front of a TV crew and national audience.” • It should not be surprising that a society devoted to capital accumulation should enourage other, more visible, but perhaps less pathological, forms of accumulation.

Zeitgeist Watch

“Life Beyond: A Review of God’s Homecoming, by N. T. Wright” [Peripatetic Pastor]. “God’s Homecoming confronts what Wright regards as a fundamental misunderstanding in contemporary Christianity: the idea that the faith is centrally about getting to heaven. In the American evangelical world, this idea is massively important. It’s often thought in such churches that the church exists to save souls. Anything else is a distraction. To this dominant take on Christianity, Wright proposes an alternative, if he is right, a more biblical alternative, a fundamental change in direction: not our going to heaven but God’s coming home to earth.” • Hmmm.

Groves of Academe

“The Great Zombification” [The New Critic]. “I do not think anyone over the age of 23, even if you are a teacher, graduate student, or professor, understands the extent to which AI usage affects every appendage of the university system. The prevalence of AI use on college campuses, particularly at ‘elite’ universities, is a cancer on our culture that threatens to turn a generation of promising young Americans into a class of drooling morons, and it will grotesquely disfigure, if not destroy, the university as an institute in every way that it is imagined — as a sacrosanct humanist project, as a moral training ground, or even as a vulgar sweatshop for job training.” A promising start. More: “Everyone knows about Ophiocordyceps unilateralis — the “zombie ant-fungus” made infamous in those Natural Geographic videos we watched in middle school. I believe I am watching the spontaneous generation of something similar. Recently, I sat next to someone in class for 10 weeks and watched, baffled, as they slowly began to turn all facets of their life over to an LLM. First, it was their homework. They used Chat to generate answers to dry problem sets while ignoring whatever was being taught up on the board. Then it was their emails. Extension asks à la Claude became coffee chat requests became “write me a nice thank you note to send my professor,” before spilling over onto fragmentary text messages, gym routines, summaries of books read for pleasure, and perhaps even a long message to send a girl. I was astonished then, but it is not hard to understand how this sort of thing happens.” • Indeed.

Class Warfare

“August Sander’s Enormous Attempt to Capture a Lost World” [The New Yorker]. “From about 1910 to around 1950, Sander sought to make nothing less than a visual catalogue of all the types and professions in Germany. He even fantasized, in a 1931 lecture, about getting a “total vision of the people on earth”—which, along with his interest in physiognomy, seems a tad sinister in retrospect. Walter Benjamin called Sander’s project “a training atlas,” probably for seeing the world in terms of status, but of course the German state would soon be interested in other kinds of provenance. Sander wasn’t the first German to use photography in the service of taxonomy.” For example:

(“Straßenbauarbeiter (Road Construction Workers),” 1927.)

“He sliced society up into seven not quite self-evident categories—the Farmer, Classes and Professions, the Skilled Tradesman, the Artists, the City, the Woman, and the Last People—and at the Yale show each of them gets a wall.” • No bourgeiosie?

‘From the Path: The Two Body Illusion” [The Math Of Politics]. “Two bodies moving under their mutual gravity are a solved problem, and have been since Newton. Each traces a conic section — for a planet around a star, Kepler’s ellipse — and the solution is closed-form and exact: tell me where the two bodies are now and how fast they are moving, and I will tell you where they will be at any moment in the future or the past, forever. The heavens, taken two at a time, are the most predictable thing there is. Add a third body and that predictability does not merely get harder to compute. It ends. There is no closed-form solution to the three-body problem.” More: “Now leave the heavens and watch a legislature choose a policy. Suppose the choice can be laid out along a single dimension — spending, from less to more — and each member has an ideal point and prefers outcomes nearer to it. Then majority rule is beautifully behaved. There is a stable outcome, the ideal point of the median member, and it defeats every rival in a straight pairwise vote. The reason is that a line has an unambiguous middle, and the member at that middle commands a majority against all comers: any proposal to move off the median is opposed by that member together with everyone on the side it moves away from, and that bloc is a majority by the very definition of where the median sits. This is the median voter theorem, and it is the two-body problem of politics: solvable, predictable, at rest.Add a second dimension — let the legislature decide not only how much to spend but how to divide it — and the median vanishes. Generically there is now no point that beats every other, no stable outcome, no core. And the instability is not mild. McKelvey and Schofield proved in the 1970s that when the core is empty, a determined agenda-setter can walk a majority from any outcome to any other by some finite sequence of pairwise votes.4 Whoever controls the order in which the alternatives come up controls where the process stops. This is not a theoretical curiosity. A rules committee, a chair deciding what reaches the floor, a leader sequencing the amendments — each holds a real version of exactly that lever. The heavens have sensitive dependence on initial conditions. The legislature has sensitive dependence on the agenda.” • Hi, Nancy! [waves].

News of the Wired

Fesshole is on Mastodon, which is nice:

Plantidote of the Day

Via MM:

MM wrote an essay:

If you are interested I took some snapshots today of things growing in the backyard. I’m near the beach in the Outer Sunset of San Francisco. They are in a folder on my website. I did a lot of weeding the past couple of weeks as the foxtail grass had gotten quite high and I found some small roses under it and it turns out that the rhodie had some leaves hiding below the weeds. Our garden is far from being a formal one, as you can see the iris are expanding and we’re happy to just have stuff that blooms in the ground or in pots on the patio, especially if the bees will come around.

There’s the Ebb Tide rose I uncovered, the tecamaria (cape honeysuckle) that is in a struggle for supremacy with a geranium (not many of the red tecamaria flowers right now, but there’s easily that many more pink geranium flowers on the back of the bush), a lilac bud, geraniums and cineraria, I think a lobelia in a small rosemary plant, princess flowers in a neighbors backyard, apple blossoms just over the fence, some orchids, a lime geranium in flower, some pinks. and some yellow aeonium flowers.

All I did was adjust exposure a bit and run smartfix and then reduce the size and convert to jpg, no cropping or other enhancements. They are just to capture what was growing.

I had to pick one (for today) and so I picked what looks to me like a beach rose (though MM will surely correct me). The kicker here is that MM sent me a link to these plants at the address I am now using — that is, not my old address at Yahoo — and so his mail sat untouched for [counts on fingers] six years. But he was courteous enough to answer when I checked in, and so here we are!

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.