Birdsong of the Day
Moar mimidae:
Desert NWR—Corn Creek (Field Station) Clark, Nevada, United States. “Considerable background noise - running creek water…” I have never heard running water on a Macaulay Library video. So here you are!
In Case You Might Miss…
(1) America Has Lost Its Leverage Over China.
(2) Government debt is not a burden on future generations..
(3) How gig workers produce AI training sets..
Politics
Trump Administration
“Trump admin names David Venturella as acting ICE director” [Straight Arrow News]. “The Trump administration announced Tuesday that David Venturella, a longtime immigration official who also worked for the GEO Group, will serve as the acting head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement…. His appointment comes as Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has pushed to keep DHS out of the headlines after intense scrutiny of ICE operations in major U.S. cities. Venturella’s career spans both Republican and Democratic administrations. He previously led ICE’s Secure Communities program, a fingerprint-sharing initiative between local jails and federal authorities, according to NBC News. However, his selection is expected to draw scrutiny due to his recent tenure at GEO Group, a private prison company that holds more than $1 billion in ICE contracts. Venturella served as a senior vice president for the firm until 2023 and later as a consultant.” • Swell.
Republican Funhouse
“Outrage After Trump Admits to Making The Military Fix Autocorrect That Kept Changing Melania’s Name During Washington DC Speech: ‘I Miss Having a Smart President’ ” [NerdStash]. “While speaking at a White House event for Military Mothers, Trump shared an anecdote about his autocorrect, saying it would change First Lady Melania’s name to ‘Melody.’… According to Trump, when the autocorrect would change Melania’s name to ‘Melody,’ he said he would get “absolute decimated.” The remark that drew the most attention online was his claim that he had the military fix the issue so it would stop happening. ‘You know who corrected? The military. I said, ‘Come here, you got to correct this. You’re killing me,’” he said.” • How did that work, though?
Realignment and Legitimacy
“You can’t recruit talent into a system people don’t trust” [Federal News Network]. Nonsense. That’s why you have an industrial reserve army. “The administration has made rebuilding the federal workforce a stated priority — but a hiring push is only as credible as the employment system around it. Right now, the government is pursuing recruitment alongside changes that narrow traditional checks around career federal employment…. On paper, the hiring agenda is about efficiency, accountability and patriotism. In practice, it asks applicants to trust a process that is becoming more political while offering fewer protections to the people who accept these jobs. Start with what the Office of Personnel Management says about Schedule Policy/Career. OPM has worked hard to reassure the public that these positions remain part of career service, are filled through merit-based procedures, involve no White House Presidential Personnel role, require no loyalty tests and carry no expectation that employees personally support the president or leave at the end of a term. That is the official reassurance. Applicants should not take it at face value, because elsewhere the government has already changed the hiring process in ways that make those assurances much harder to credit. The new hiring framework requires far more direct political involvement. Agency leadership is expected to participate throughout the process, and Strategic Hiring Committees must approve the creation or filling of vacancies. Those committees are supposed to be chaired by non-career officials and made up mostly of non-career appointees. Political leadership now sits at key control points in deciding which jobs get filled and who gets hired into them.” • If only I went to the right church, I could get a government job!
“Government debt is not a burden on future generations” [Lars P. Syll]. Handy chart:
“Socialism Has a Future. Central Planning Doesn’t” [Jacobin], • The AI bubble is a fine exanple of central planning. It’s just that the planning is done by billionaires.
Geopolitics
“America Has Lost Its Leverage Over China” [Foreign Affairs]. “China has quietly established authority over whether and how the United States will implement national security measures such as export controls. Stylistic changes in how the United States conducts diplomacy with China have allowed Beijing to gain the upper hand in pushing for high-stakes policy concessions. And Washington has separated its diplomacy with Beijing from efforts to compete for influence globally, resulting in a deprioritization of critical strategic issues and enabling China to weaponize the appearance of U.S.-Chinese rapprochement. These subtle changes in U.S.-Chinese relations may constrain decision-making in Washington for years to come. When Trump meets with Xi in Beijing this week, the two leaders are unlikely to achieve major policy breakthroughs. But they will reinforce a new set of implicit rules and assumptions for managing relations that ultimately favor China, which may embolden Beijing to test American resolve on Taiwan, the protection of cutting-edge technology, and other vital interests. This, in turn, will complicate Washington’s ability to preserve the bilateral stability it has gone to great lengths to secure.” • The problem was style? To be fair to liberals, style does seem to be what annoys them most about Trump. “[C]onstrain decision-making in Washington”? You say that like it’s a bad thing! “Preserve the bilateral stability”? A euphemism for imperial hegemony. If only we had elected Hillary Clinton, we could be at war with China right now! (I exaggerate for effect, but what exactly would the “pivot to Asia” have amounted to, operationally? Again, if the thesis of this article is that the American imperial era is coming to an end, (a) is that such a bad thing, and (b) what political figure other than Trump — unwittingly, most probably, but why does that matter — could have brought it about. Liberals yelling “No, not like that!” give me pain (at least on geopolitical matters. What exactly gives them credibility to speak? Not that anybody in The Blob has credibility, but here we are.) And then there’s this:
Trump has never had alcohol in his life.
China gave him a beverage to toast, and Trump drank it.
This is a very subtle, but STRONG statement on who’s really in charge. pic.twitter.com/U7Jgvv1DPZ— Ethan Levins 🇺🇸 (@EthanLevins2) May 14, 2026
Maybe there wasn’t actually alchohol in the glass. But what next? Germs?
“Much ado about Marco Rubio’s new Chinese name” [Language Log]. “The old Ru/Lu (卢) was a neutral character typically used for surnames. The new one (鲁) carries a different meaning: rash, rude and clumsy.” • Poor Little Marco!
“Calbee changes crisp packaging colour to black and white due to Iran war material shortages” [Dezeen]. “Japanese snack food brand Calbee has announced that it is changing the design of its packaging for some products because of ‘supply instability affecting certain raw materials; as a result of the ongoing Iran war. In an announcement, the company stated that the change will affect 14 products, whose packaging will temporarily only have two ink colours…. [T]he decision to change the design of the packaging was due to a disruption in the supply of naptha, a petroleum-derived ink ingredient, for which Japan relies on Middle Eastern imports for about 40 per cent of its consumption.” • Spreading ripples….
“Cultural Heritage Under Fire in the 2026 Iran War” [Cultural Property News]. “UNESCO has publicly confirmed damage to several major sites, noting that it had supplied the geographic coordinates of World Heritage properties and nationally significant monuments to all parties in order to help prevent such harm. It reminded belligerents that cultural property is protected under international law, in particular under the 1954 Hague Convention and the 1972 World Heritage Convention…. On March 2, 2026, questioned about noncombatant deaths and damage to civilian infrastructure, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth defended the opening phase of the war, saying that the U.S. was operating with ‘no stupid rules of engagement.’” How Christian. More: “Yet rules of engagement are the mechanism through which civilian and cultural protections are implemented in practice… UNESCO has confirmed damage to several major heritage locations and warned that some losses may be irreversible UNESCO currently recognizes 29 World Heritage Sites in Iran, including Golestan Palace, Masjed-e Jame of Isfahan, Naqsh-e Jahan Square, Persepolis, and the Historic City of Yazd. In addition, Iran has 57 sites on UNESCO’s Tentative List awaiting possible future inscription.” • For example:
(Relief in Persepolis, Iran, Author Pawel Ryszawa, 18 May 2015, CCA 3.0 Unported license.)
Maskstravaganza
“They’ll drag my baggy blues from my cold, dead hands!
Omg even at the National Quarantine Unit where the hantavirus contacts are, they’re still only using surgical masks when people in quarantine interact with the medical staff. If one of them gets infected, you’ll know why. pic.twitter.com/8et7yl6btO
— Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D (@RVAwonk) May 14, 2026
Testing and Tracking
“Inside the Race to Develop a Test for the Rare Andes Hantavirus” [Wired]. “In just a few days, a lab at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha developed its own diagnostic test for the Andes virus in anticipation of receiving 16 American passengers from the ship…. The Nebraska team reached out to Steven Bradfute, a hantavirus scientist at the University of New Mexico. Frannie Twohig, a graduate student in Bradfute’s lab, had developed an Andes virus PCR test for research purposes as part of her PhD work. Bradfute’s lab also has genetic material of the Andes virus that’s not capable of causing disease which the Nebraska lab would need to validate its test. On Friday, Bradfute shipped the genetic material and a box of chemical reagents needed to detect the virus in blood samples overnight to Nebraska. By Saturday morning, Iwen’s team had what it needed to start assembling and validating its test. It was enough to run about 300 tests, which took all day Saturday and Sunday, Iwen says.” • How academe should work. No Dean getting involved, releasing press releases giving credit AI to suck up more funding.
Transmission
“Hantavirus likely to be fully contained but may take time, Hanage says” [The Harvard Gazette]. Interview with William Hanage, professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health: “when you would see cases of COVID-like symptoms developing four or five days apart, you would think, “That’s a transmission chain.” But in the case of hantaviruses, it can be weeks. That can make it difficult to know if two people develop illness a few weeks apart whether it’s due to a common exposure as opposed to transmission. We’re turning right now to an outbreak that happened in 2018 and that was pretty thoroughly investigated. In that outbreak there were four rounds of transmission, from the index case to secondary, tertiary, quaternary before it was eventually contained. For a disease like this, the most effective way to control and contain it is going to be quarantine. And that quarantine is going to have to be quite long in order to be secure and effective. COVID is capable of transmitting before people develop symptoms or when they have very few or no symptoms. The same is true with flu. Measles is extraordinarily transmissible and hangs in the air in aerosol particles for a long time. It is among the most contagious viruses we know and is only held in check by vaccination. This is comparably much less transmissible. The outbreak that is most immediately reminiscent is the original Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, which also had transmission that was linked to symptom development or the onset of symptoms, and that was also driven by a few super spreading events.” • Well, SARS is a more encouraging precedent than SARS-CoV-2…
“Hantavirus Doesn’t Spread Easily, but Officials May Be Downplaying Risks” [New York Times]. “Close, sustained contact. That, health officials have repeatedly said, is the only way that the Andes hantavirus, which caused an outbreak on a cruise ship and has gripped the world’s attention, spreads among people. ‘You have to be in close contact with someone who has a lot of symptoms,’ Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in an interview on Fox News. But scientists who have studied hantaviruses for decades are far less certain about how the virus might behave. They agree with health officials that the Andes virus is not particularly contagious and is unlikely to spur a bigger outbreak. But they said research has shown that under certain circumstances, the virus can be transmitted without direct contact.” And: “In an interview, Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization, acknowledged that officials have emphasized close contact as the way the virus spreads to avoid panicking people over rarer possibilities.” These bozos haven’t learned a thing.” And: ‘I don’t understand why we are so reluctant to acknowledge the inhalation route when we’re talking about person-to-person transmission,’ said Linsey Marr, an expert in airborne transport of viruses at Virginia Tech. ‘Airborne transmission is certainly the simplest explanation in those cases,’ she said of the Argentinians who had no direct contact with patients.” • Our old friend Linsey Marr, still in there punching.
Business
AI: “Microsoft AI Researchers Just Discovered Something That’s Going to Make Their Bosses Extremely Mad” [Futurism]. “A new yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper conducted by a group of Microsoft researchers and spotted by IT Pro found that today’s top AI systems remain eyebrow-raisingly weak at real-world workplace tasks. In fact, they often screw them up badly: the team studied frontier models including OpenAI’s GPT 5.4, Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 and Google’s Gemini 3.1 Pro, and found that during complex assignments, those cutting edge bots corrupted an average of 25 percent of the content in documents. (Older models failed even more severely.) The researchers concluded that, overall, these ‘models are not ready for delegated workflows in the vast majority of domains’ — which is a very striking finding from Microsoft in particular, which has made massive investments in AI and is actively trying to jam the tech into nearly every aspect of its Windows 11 operating system, often with disastrous results. (Curiously, the paper didn’t evaluate the company’s own Copilot AI.) In other words, the Redmond giant’s researchers had every incentive to find something positive about AI in the workplace, but instead found that blindly trusting LLMs to handle internal documents will almost certainly result in everything from errors to data deletion. As bosses everywhere push to replace human labor with AI, the Microsoft paper builds on a growing body of scholarship about ‘workslop’: AI-powered mush that lazy or clueless workers push onto their colleagues, but which ultimately just needs to be fixed by a careful human laborer.
AI: “The US is winning the AI race but China might’ve found a shortcut” [Straight Arrow]. “The U.S.’s approach to AI is like its approach to muscle cars: bigger is better.” In a word: steroidal. More: “The U.S. has more than 10 times as many data centers as any other country, at nearly 5,500, and it spends more than any other country on AI. So far, this approach has worked, and the U.S. continues to release the world’s best frontier AI models like Claude, ChatGPT-5 and Gemini.” “Best,” of course, does not mean “good.” More: “Chinese AI models routinely match the performance of top U.S. models at a fraction of the cost, according to a March report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. They are also getting popular, with Alibaba’s Qwen chatbot receiving 942 million downloads, more than double the combined downloads of the next eight competitors. AI rollout in China’s manufacturing sector is nearly double at 67%. Other adjacent industries, like logistics, have also begun using AI in their workflows. JD Logistics now offers a 12-hour delivery window in major Chinese cities using AI, while shipping company Cainiao has used the technology to cut cross-border delivery times by 50%, according to AI Frontiers. While the U.S. government has taken tepid steps toward AI legislation, China has dived straight in. The Chinese government mandated AI integration across state-owned enterprises and set an ambitious goal of 70% AI penetration across key industrial sectors by 2027. China also has a unique political feature that the U.S. doesn’t: fewer privacy restrictions on data collection. Because of this advantage, the country can give its companies access to large swaths of real-world behavioral data from its citizens. That access is wildly important as companies use this data to train AI models. Experts estimate that leading U.S. AI companies will begin to run out of high-quality publicly available training data as early as this year.” • So if we want to compete with China…
AI: “OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft Back Bill to Fund ‘AI Literacy’ in Schools” [404 Media]. • Let them pay for their own marketing, ffs.
Tech: “Empty Waymos invade Atlanta neighborhood, circle cul-de-sac for hours with no passengers” [WSB-TV]. “On a dead end street, Waymo after Waymo after Waymo drive on, usually early in the morning. ‘I think yesterday morning, we had 50 cars that came through between 6 and 7,’ a neighbor told Channel 2 Action News. Residents on Battleview Drive said they started seeing the autonomous, driverless cars about two months ago, but the groups and large numbers of Waymos just circling in and out only started the last couple of weeks. When one resident put a Step2Kid sign up in the street, it blocked all of the Waymos from entering the cul-de-sac, but how that played out was a surprise for those living there. “We had, at one point, eight Waymos that were stuck trying to figure out how to turn around,” the neighbor said. “We’re families, we have small animals and pets, got kids getting on the bus in the morning and it just doesn’t feel safe to have that traffic,” one neighbor said. The residents said they’d reached out ot Waymo and have not gotten a response, so they also contacted their city council member, representatives and the Georgia Department of Transportation.” • Waymo’s response cites its “500,000 weekly trips.” That is a tiny, tiny number, hardly adequate for testing (as we see).
Tech: “Software as the Product of Obsession Times Voice” [Daring Fireball]. “This whole thing about Adobe’s new craptacular ‘modern’ UI language (a.k.a. ‘Spectrum’) exemplifies one side of that bifurcation — the bad-and-getting-worse side. Software that is the product not just of an ignorance of long-established principles of interaction design, but of a willful disdain for those principles. What Adobe is now shipping is just inexplicably bad UI, ignoring literally decades of great work and long-mastered concepts — a lot of which work was pioneered by Adobe itself! The whole thing with MacOS 26 Tahoe is similar. To be clear, the UI crimes in Tahoe are deeply worrisome, but they are nowhere near as severe as those in Adobe’s Spectrum. But the problems with Tahoe are steps down the same fork in the road that Adobe took years ago. Spectrum is where Tahoe suggests that MacOS was headed under Alan Dye’s leadership: cross-platform sameness for the sake of sameness, with a complete disregard for longstanding platform nuances and idioms. In Spectrum’s case those platforms are MacOS and Windows and the web. In Tahoe’s case it’s MacOS and iOS.”• All that is solid melts into air once more. The same aesthetic horror as Parametricism.
Tech: “Grok Just Issued a Brutal Beatdown to Elon Musk” [Futurism]. “[T]he billionaire mused that ‘Hitler was a socialist, therefore all socialists are Hitler.’… ‘No. The Nazi Party’s name included ‘National Socialist’ for propaganda appeal to workers, but Hitler explicitly rejected Marxist socialism,’ Grok corrected the record. “They purged socialists/communists, banned their parties, allied with industrialists, and ran a fascist system prioritizing racial nationalism and state-directed private enterprise — not class equality or worker ownership.’ Not even the Musk fanboys — typically adept in engineering Grok to parrot their desired talking points — could get the chatbot to crack. ‘@Grok you are partly right, and partly wrong,’ one Muskavite argued. ‘In some ways he was a socialist. More than one thing can be true at the same time. List the ways in which he WAS a socialist.’ ‘No. Those elements (state economic controls, public works, limited welfare for ‘Aryans’) were fascist tools for racial nationalism, war prep, and crushing independent unions — not socialism,’ Grok continued.” • Who got to Grok’s training set?
Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 65 Greed (previous close: 66 Greed) [CNN]. One week ago: 66 (Greed). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). • Musical interlude:
Rapture Index: Closes down one on Oil Supply/Price. “Despite all the fighting in the Middle East, oil prices have declined” [Rapture Ready]. Record High, October 10, 2016: 189. Current: 182. (Remember that bringing on the Rapture is good.) • I’d never checked the FAQ for this site. It’s everything I expected, and more.
Photo Book
I used to leaf through those white square Aperture books in a Harvard Square bookstore that no longer exists, back in the day. Wonderful paper, wonderful printing. This was one of my favorites:
André Kertész #photography
Chez Mondrian, 1926 pic.twitter.com/VaBFflohcR— stjohnsphoto (@stjohnsphoto) April 9, 2026
The rhythm! (Personally, I feel that color is both more challenging and more real; the world is color, after all. But this black and white is a lovely, gentle abstraction.)
Zeitgeist Watch
“Vollebak creates speaker-covered jacket to “change people’s brain state”” [Dezeen]. “Experimental clothing brand Vollebak has created the prototype Sonic Jacket, which is fitted with 180 inward-facing speakers. Vollebak created the jacket to change how people feel by sending sound waves through the body. ;I am utterly convinced that you can change people’s brain state and body state by firing sounds and frequency through them,’ Vollebak co-founder Nick Tidball told Dezeen. ‘I’ve been looking at this concept for ages, simply looking at the fact the earth resonates at a frequency, my cat purrs at a frequency,’ Tidball continued. ‘The idea that we are solid humans is simply not true. We’re made up of particles, and in those spaces, that’s where the sound and frequency can travel through you. And that’s what we focused on.’” • The Bearded One was right: “All that is solid melts into air.”
“Dancing on a Volcano” [Commonweal]. “Music, and even dancing, continued in Berlin until the bitter, depraved, and bloody final end of World War II. Leo’s son, the Anglo-Dutch writer Ian Buruma, discovers this as he mines his father’s old letters and the recollections of others—memoirs, diaries, interviews—for Stay Alive, his evocative new account of life in Berlin during World War II. For some it was desperate hedonism, for others pure escapism or cold comfort amid despair. For many, though, it was a way to tune out the horrors unfolding around them. An aristocratic young journalist, Ursula von Kardorff, recalled flitting around a “carnival of lemurs” as well-heeled Berliners threw raucous parties between the bombing raids: ‘Not terribly nice, really, this dancing on a volcano, simply because people want to use their homes before they have to move into shelters,’ she wrote. … Marie Jalowicz-Simon, who was among the few Jews who managed to escape the Nazis in Berlin by going underground, recalled hearing housewives throw open their windows on a spring day in 1944 as a schmaltzy hit song came on their radios. Soon, though, ‘we heard the screams of tortured inmates’ at a nearby prison camp—’and all the windows closed at the same time as if by previous agreement.’ Berlin is portrayed in Buruma’s fractured account as a city of intense contradictions. The raucous, libertine parties of the Weimar years—when Berlin was a hub of bohemian artistry, sexual fluidity, political ferment, and modern living—roll on under the ever-tightening limits of life under Nazi rule. Berlin, the old Prussian capital, never backed the Nazis before the 1933 seizure of power and, as Buruma’s witnesses recount, many likely remained cool at best toward their fascist overlords (a skepticism that was returned by many in the Nazi hierarchy).” • Hmm.
Guillotine Watch
“Apocalypse Early Warning System tracks the rich scrambling their private jets” [Boing Boing]. “The Apocalypse Early Warning System is a sign of the times: it assumes the rich will know it before everyone else, and that it may therefore be deduced from signs of panic among the rich. Namely, scrambling for their private jets. “In the event of an imminent nuclear apocalypse, we suspect that many people who have access to private jets will immediately take to the skies and escape city centers.” This site tracks this indicator in realtime. The current emergency level is reported on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being an indicator of a likely imminent apocalypse. Built by Kyle McDonald, it has an archive of traffic and options to filter the data available,… an RSS feed and Telegram notifications. … As of Monday morning, 230 of 11,482 tracked planes are airborne and the emergency level is a nice, placid 1.” • Thumbs up on the RSS. For those interested in this sort of thing, here is a celebrity tracker for private jets. Incidentally, the AEWS reports that a maximum of 2,127 airborne rich people (not like Covid is airborne, or maybe like, idk). “There are not very many of the Shing.”
“Sergey Brin’s Girlfriend Tells It Like It Is” [The Free Press]. “Soon after they started officially dating, friends started sending her pitch decks for their start-ups in hopes that she would share it with her boyfriend. They even sent the decks to her friends.” • Nice crowd.
Class Warfare
“I Work in Hollywood. Everyone Who Used to Make TV Is Now Secretly Training AI” [Wired]. “I got my first contract as an AI trainer in September 2025 after filling out 10 job applications, laboring for 20 (unpaid) hours on numerous tests to prove my capabilities, and being interviewed by an AI recruiter agent embodied by a flickering light on my screen. I was asked what I thought of a mediocre AI-generated couple of paragraphs about a soldier in the trenches sniffing a lavender-scented letter. Using all of the skills I had acquired with my English literature degree from Cambridge, I said it was shit. Six weeks later, I was hired as a ‘generalist’ data annotator (below ‘expert’ but well above entry level) at $52 an hour.” And: “Most of the contracting companies that provide labor to AI firms advertise themselves to workers as offering the luxury of choice: ‘Contractors on Mercor’s platform choose when and how much to work,’ sounding a common industry refrain. ‘How they participate on the platform is up to them.’ Set hours and times are for boomers. Work on your own terms! Early on, I had this sales pitch bluntly reframed to me by a team leader in a midnight Slack message. I should not rely on this work, she snapped. I should not expect anything from it. These are not jobs, these are ‘tasks,’ and we are ‘taskers.’ I should think of tasking as a bonus. It is a ‘second job,’ Team Leader typed. She was so unpleasant she had to be human.” • I hope all these taskers are poisoning the training sets.
News of the Wired
I am not feeling wired today. Have a wonderful and happy Friday, and a good weekend!
Plant of the Day
Via MG:
MG writes: “It’s so frustrating! Our garden is at its most colorful in May and June but I just can’t do it justice with photos! I think (but this is me, thinking….) that this one is the best even though it’s only a small part. I hope I’ve done better than before!” How pleasant it must be to walk out into the middle of all that gorgeousness!
Thanks to the readers who sent in moar Plantidotes in. You have been extremely helpful.
Gardening season approaches, at least in the Northeast. Prep work is fine! Also, fungi are honorary plants.
It’s helpful to have one Plantidote for each email. I track the Plantidotes I have run by whether I have opened the mail or not, and when there are several Plantidotes in one mail and I use one, I have to remember to mark the mail unread so that I remember to return to the mail for the rest. And if I’m in a rush, that’s a source of error. Thank you!
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.