In October 1979, a top-secret CIA intelligence report featured the first inklings in the West that something unusual and disturbing had allegedly taken place in the Soviet Union several months earlier.
In April of that year, patients started appearing at hospitals in the industrial city of Sverdlovsk, now known as Yekaterinburg, in the Ural region of the Soviet Union. They were showing symptoms of what doctors first thought to be an unusually virulent and deadly form of pneumonia. It wasn’t.
The outbreak that ultimately killed more than 60 people was in fact caused by anthrax spores that had been accidentally released from a Soviet biological weapons facility. How exactly this happened is still unknown.
Officially, neither the facility nor the Soviet bioweapons program was supposed to exist; a few years earlier, Moscow, along with Washington, had ratified a landmark international treaty prohibiting biowarfare work. When US officials publicly raised questions about the incident at Sverdlovsk, the Soviet government denied any biological weapons research was taking place, blaming the outbreak on contaminated meat. It wasn’t until 1992, after the fall of the Soviet Union, that Russian President Boris Yeltsin acknowledged that the incident was the result of a covert bioweapons program.
How is it possible that a bioweapons accident that killed dozens was kept secret for decades, even in the Soviet Union? As the Washington Post reporter David E. Hoffman writes in The Dead Hand, his history of the Cold War arms race, the answer lay in the nature of the weapons themselves: “Biological weapons were the ultimate challenge for spies, soldiers and scientists.”
Unlike a missile silo, easily distinguishable from the air, a laboratory where bioweapons are being developed doesn’t look that different from a benign medical laboratory. Unlike nuclear warheads, which leave clear radiological traces in their silos and are unmistakable in their use, a weaponized pathogen and the outbreak it would cause could be difficult to discern from a naturally occurring one, giving any attacker plausible deniability.
The mystery surrounding these weapons is just as much a problem today as it was during the Cold War. Putting aside the still politically fraught question of whether Covid-19 escaped from a Chinese lab or, like most outbreaks, jumped from animals to humans naturally, the bigger problem is the simple fact that we may never know for certain.
“What the pandemic tells us is that nobody can do attribution,” said Drew Endy, professor of biological engineering at Stanford. Intelligence agencies have determined that Covid was not a deliberately engineered bioweapon, but the confusion about its origins does suggest that if an even more virulent, intentionally designed pathogen were to be unleashed, it might be very difficult to say for certain who was behind the attack, or even whether it was an attack at all.
This kind of plausible deniability could make using such a weapon more attractive to attackers. Biowarfare is only set to become a bigger threat in the coming years if, as many experts predict, artificial intelligence makes it easier, cheaper, and faster to develop new biological compounds, including weaponized pathogens far more sophisticated and deadly than the anthrax that killed dozens in Sverdlovsk 46 years ago. That’s why Endy, a pioneer in the field of synthetic biology — the construction of new biological systems or deliberate alteration of existing ones through genetic manipulation — argues that new forms of detection are desperately needed for this new threat landscape.
“When the Iron Curtain came down, we found it useful to have geospatial intelligence to see what was happening on the other side regarding nuclear weapons,” he told Vox. “Today, there’s a molecular curtain. The stuff that’s invisible, that we can’t see, is all around us and could be harmful. And we don’t really do that kind of intelligence.”
The technologies that could allow adversaries to create ever more dangerous bioweapons are advancing at a much faster clip than defensive measures. But at the moment when AI might be amplifying the risks of this type of weapon, it may also be emerging as the key for detecting and stopping them.
Germ war is nothing new, but the threat is changing
Biological warfare dates back at least as far as the 14th century BC, far before anyone knew that germs caused disease, when the Hittites sent diseased rams to their enemies to infect them with the dangerous bacterial infection tularemia. Every major combatant in World War II had a biological weapons research program — including the US — and Japan even deliberately unleashed germs in China.
A history of germ violence
Warfare and disease have always gone together; until the 20th century, illness was responsible for killing more soldiers than weapons in many conflicts. Even today, bullet and shrapnel wounds in the war in Ukraine have become breeding grounds for drug-resistant bacteria. The deliberate use of illness as a weapon also has a long history.
In the 14th century BC, the Hittites sent diseased rams to their enemies to infect them with tularemia, a dangerous bacterial infection still classified as a potential bioweapon by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention today. British soldiers infamously gave blankets infected with smallpox to American Indian tribes in the 18th century. During World War II, Japan’s military tested pathogens on prisoners of war in China and dropped ceramic bombs containing plague-infested fleas and grain on Chinese cities.
The United States had its own biowarfare research program starting in World War II, and testing of potential weapons, especially anthrax, expanded dramatically in the early years of the Cold War. In 1969, President Richard Nixon, facing increasing public pressure — and believing that biological agents weren’t particularly useful in a world of thermonuclear weapons — ordered the program shut down. Six years later, the Biological Weapons Convention, an international treaty banning their use, went into effect.
It’s not only states that have used bioweapons. In 1984, the Rajneeshees, a religious cult in Oregon, sickened hundreds by infecting salad bars with salmonella — the first recorded bioterror attack in US history. In 2001, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, a lone wolf perpetrator mailed anthrax to media and congressional offices, killing five people and sickening more than a dozen. Terrorist organizations including ISIS and al-Qaida have also sought unsuccessfully to acquire bioweapons.
Fear over the use of biological weapons eventually led to the ratification of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) in 1975, banning the use and development of bioweapons globally — though the Soviet program continued in secret for years later, despite Moscow having signed onto the treaty. But even more than the treaty, biowarfare has been held back by the fact that biological weapons have been difficult to develop, deploy, and — should they be used — control. But that may be changing.
New gene editing tools like CRISPR have brought down the cost and difficulty of tinkering with DNA. But the same kind of tools also can make it easier for malign actors to create designer diseases for use in warfare or terrorism.
But, says Matt McKnight, head of biosecurity at the synthetic biology company Ginkgo Bioworks, past periods of rapid scientific advancement, from chemicals in the early 1900s (poison gas), to physics in the 1930s (nuclear weapons), to computer science in the later 20th century (cyber offensives), suggest that the new confluence of AI and gene editing is almost certain to be put to violent ends.
“My assumption is that bioweapons will be used by a bad actor in this century because that would be the baseline expectation given all of human actions throughout history,” McKnight said. “And I want to reduce the likelihood that that happens.”
A recent report from the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) suggested several worrying scenarios for how AI could be used to optimize pathogens for warfare. Entirely new viruses could be designed, or modifications could be made to existing viruses to make them more resistant to existing treatments.
Kevin Esvelt, a synthetic biology researcher and director of the Sculpting Evolution group at MIT, said one of his greatest concerns was that large language models could facilitate “not just the replication of an existing natural pathogen, but building something entirely new that doesn’t occur in nature.” This means that both our natural immunological defenses and existing vaccines would be entirely unprepared for it.
How bad could it be? Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, has warned that the combination of AI and synthetic biology could allow the creation of a pathogen with the death rate of Ebola but the transmissibility of seasonal flu, causing “more than a billion deaths in a matter of months.”
This wouldn’t be a very practical weapon for anyone but a doomsday cult. But AI-enhanced engineering could also allow for viruses to be made more controllable by adapting them to only work in particular locations. More disturbingly, viruses could be tailored to attack particular populations. The CNAS report quotes Zhang Shibo, former president of China’s National Defense University and a one-time general in the Chinese military, who has speculated that new technology would allow for the development of diseases for “specific ethnic genetic attacks.”
Beyond these nightmare scenarios, AI may simply make it easier to produce existing dangerous viruses. In a 2023 experiment, a group of students at MIT used commercially available AI chatbots to generate suggestions for assembling several deadly viruses — including smallpox, which currently exists only in ultra-secure labs in the US and Russia — from their genetic material. The chatbots also suggested the supplies needed and listed several companies and labs that might print the genetic material without screening.
Concerns about scenarios like these have prompted some AI companies to incorporate new safeguards into their models — though the intense commercial and geopolitical competition to reach artificial general intelligence may erode those safeguards over time.
These advances don’t mean just anyone can grow their own smallpox today. The technical obstacles to actually constructing a disease are still formidable, even if you have the instruction manual and a very patient AI to walk you through it. But it suggests the barriers to entry are coming down.
In the past, nonstate actors like ISIS or the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo, responsible for the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, have tried to acquire biological weapons, but inevitably hit up against talent and supply limits. But advances in both AI and synthetic biology means actors with limited means will now have more tools at their disposal.
As a method of warfare, synthetic biology “just seems to favor offense,” said Esvelt, who led the MIT experiment on the use of chatbots in virus design. “There’s just a lot of ways you can attack, and it’s much cheaper to build a virus than it is to develop and distribute a vaccine.”
That’s why defense needs to start catching up to offense. When it comes to the risk of this technology being misused, Ginkgo’s McKnight argues, “You can’t regulate your way out of it. You have to be better at it. You have to be as good as the adversaries at making countermeasures.” His company is working to build one.
Peeking behind the molecular curtain
One vision of what the future of biowarfare defense might look like can be found in a tucked-away corner of a busy, sprawling lab overlooking Boston Harbor. That’s where Ginkgo Bioworks is based, and where the company, founded by former MIT scientists in 2008, designs custom microorganisms for industrial use.
Through that work, Ginkgo has developed advanced testing capability to determine whether the microscopic organisms they built work as intended. During Covid, Ginkgo’s “foundry,” as it refers to its main lab, was pressed into service processing nasal swabs and surveilling wastewater to help governments monitor community-level spread of the coronavirus and the emergence of new variants.
That work has evolved into an ongoing monitoring operation at eight international airports in the US, as well as airports in the Middle East and Africa, for evidence of potentially dangerous pathogens crossing international borders. Nasal swabs from arriving passenger volunteers as well as wastewater samples are collected from planes and sent to Ginkgo for analysis. That means the next time you use the airplane lavatory, you may be contributing to a vast database of the genetic material moving around the world
During a recent visit to Ginkgo’s foundry, I was shown a rack of thermocyclers — each resembling oversized George Foreman grills — where these wastewater samples were being subjected to a process known as polymerase chain reaction. (That’s the “PCR” that was in PCR tests during the pandemic.) The process involves heating and cooling DNA samples in order to replicate them for analysis, allowing scientists to identify genetic abnormalities that would otherwise be difficult to detect. This process can track how certain pathogens — Covid or the flu, for instance — are migrating around the world, and how they are evolving, which can help guide any public health response.
Such work would be important enough given the documented rise in naturally emerging new pathogens. But Ginkgo is no longer only looking at biological threats that emerge from nature. With the support of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), the US intelligence community’s research arm, Ginkgo has developed a tool known as ENDAR, or engineered nucleotide detection and ranking, which is specifically designed to detect artificially engineered genetic material.
This is where AI comes in. Through its cell engineering business, Ginkgo has accumulated a vast library of engineered genomes. “We engineer microbes all day, every day. And we actually use [tools] to validate that our engineering worked,” said Casandra Philipson, director of bioinformatics at Ginkgo. Just as AI tools like ChatGPT train on vast amounts of written material or images to be able to answer user prompts with uncanny accuracy, ENDAR was trained on a vast library of engineered genomes. This enables ENDAR to detect when something doesn’t look quite right.
“You can get really specific and start looking at what’s called the base pair, like very specifically every ATCG,” said Philipson, referring to the basic nucleotides that bond together to form DNA. These structures tend to evolve in predictable patterns, and the system can detect anomalies. “You can actually calculate a molecular clock and say, ‘Does its ancestry match what we would expect, given the evolutionary history?'” If it doesn’t, this could be a sign that genetic engineering has taken place.
If so, this could go a long way toward addressing the attribution problem Endy referred to. If a new virus as bad or even worse than Covid emerges, we should have a pretty good idea if it was designed that way. That can help policymakers plan a public health response, and if necessary, a political or military one.
Why we need a better bioradar
Given that its purpose is making synthetic biology easier and cheaper at scale, one could argue that Ginkgo is itself part of the problem, simply by producing the kind of tools that could, say, make designer smallpox more feasible. Still, that dichotomy is one Ginkgo appears to embrace — the foundry is decorated with Jurassic Park memorabilia, a reminder of the potential, and perhaps also the risks, of the kind of DNA tinkering the company is engaged in. (One wonders what Professor Ian Malcolm would make of the company’s confidence.)
The government has tried to reduce those risks — former President Joe Biden’s executive order on artificial intelligence in 2023 included restrictions on the purchases of synthetic DNA. But Ginkgo’s McKnight argues that given the speed of biotech innovation in multiple countries, and the benefits it can bring, “there’s no choice you can make to clamp down on all the technology.”
When it comes to the risk of this technology being misused, he says, “You can’t regulate your way out of it. You have to be better at it. You have to be as good as the adversaries at making countermeasures.”
When it comes to China, the State Department assesses more vaguely that the country has “continued to engage in biological activities with potential [bioweapon] applications” and has failed to supply sufficient information on a “diverse families of potent toxins with dual-use applications.” The writings of a number of prominent defense scholars in China, including a textbook published by the People’s Liberation Army, have identified biotechnology as a “new domain of warfare.”
Fighting an infopandemic amid a real one
McKnight believes the main takeaway from the experience of the Covid pandemic was that “America is not a biosecure nation today.” And as bad as Covid was, what’s coming could be far worse.
Covid, he said, cost the US economy trillions of dollars and “was probably the biggest factor in creating the chaos we’re seeing in our political system. [But] it wasn’t really even that bad compared to some of the potential things that are out there.”
Esvelt believes that the pandemic showed the importance of stockpiling preventive equipment like respirators, likely to be a far more effective first line of defense than vaccines — and that it should be viewed as a military priority as well as a public health one. “We’re going to lose a hot war in which our civilian support personnel are taken out by a pandemic and the adversaries are not,” he said.
AI could come into play here in a different way. We’re already seeing generative AI’s potential as a tool for creating and spreading misinformation as effectively as a virus. Epidemiologist Jay Varma recently warned of the risk of “a rogue actor using existing AI tools to simulate a bioterrorism attack that would destabilize a region or the world.” For example, Varma imagines a scenario in which an extremist group uses faked evidence of a biological attack, spread on social media, to foment a security crisis between nuclear rivals China and India.
Even without AI, rumors and misinformation ran rampant in the pandemic, eroding public trust in vaccines. And despite the intelligence community’s assessment that Covid was not a deliberate bioweapon, some politicians have continued to insinuate that it was. (The uncertainty around this is probably not helped by the ongoing confusion over whether Covid was inadvertentlyreleased from a lab doing benign research, which several intelligence agencies consider a real possibility.)
Likewise, the Russian government has spread unsubstantiated rumors that Ukraine is running labs where bioweapons are being developed with the support of the US government, a campaign that was picked up and spread by prominent US media figures, including Tucker Carlson.
All this suggests that determining a bioweapons attack is not taking place during an outbreak may be just as important an application for Gingko’s ENDAR technology as determining one is.
Despite the increasing attention being devoted to biosecurity at the government level, there’s also reason to be concerned about whether the US is moving toward becoming a more biosecure nation. The Trump administration recently canceled a $12 million grant to Harvard University for biosecurity research, despite the warnings of Pentagon officials that this would pose national security risks.
Data as disinfectant
As Hoffman writes in The Dead Hand, many of the leading Soviet biologists who worked on the country’s bioweapons program did so under the sincere impression that their counterparts in the US were doing exactly the same thing. Once the Cold War ended, they were stunned to learn that the Americans had halted their offensive program decades before. But that only shows how the distrust and competition of an arms race can obscure reality.
With the rapid pace of advances of both synthetic biology and AI today, Endy worries about a new arms race mentality taking hold. Whereas nuclear competition has, since the dawn of the Cold War, been governed by the logic of mutually assured destruction (MAD), he worries that the dynamic of biosecurity will be governed by what he calls SAD — stupidly assured destruction.
“It’s really important to be thoughtful and cautious about accusations,” he says. “If we’re not careful about how we are framing and talking about weapons programs, we get this type of geopolitical autoimmune response that leads to some really bad policy outcomes. We don’t want to go down the deterrence path” — in other words, deterring an enemy from unleashing bioweapons by having more powerful ones of our own. Instead, Endy said, “we want to go down the resilience path” — building societal defenses from biological threats, natural or artificial.
The first step of building those defenses is knowing exactly what threats are out there.
Arizona has activated one of its largest grid battery storage projects to help meet peak summer energy demand. Electrek reports: Recurrent Energy, a subsidiary of Canadian Solar, just brought its 1,200 MWh Papago Storage facility in Maricopa County into commercial operation. The big grid battery is now supplying stored electricity to Arizona Public Service (APS), the state's largest utility, in time for peak air-conditioning season. Papago is the first of three Recurrent projects with APS. Together, they'll provide 1,800 MWh of storage and 150 MW of solar power. That's enough to run about 72,000 homes for four hours and provide year-round solar for another 24,000 homes.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: For someone who says she is fighting AI bot scrapers just in her free time, Xe Iaso seems to be putting up an impressive fight. Since she launched it in January, Anubis, a "program is designed to help protect the small internet from the endless storm of requests that flood in from AI companies," has been downloaded nearly 200,000 times, and is being used by notable organizations including GNOME, the popular open-source desktop environment for Linux, FFmpeg, the open-source software project for handling video and other media, and UNESCO, the United Nations organization for educations, science, and culture. [...]
"Anubis is an uncaptcha," Iaso explains on her site. "It uses features of your browser to automate a lot of the work that a CAPTCHA would, and right now the main implementation is by having it run a bunch of cryptographic math with JavaScript to prove that you can run JavaScript in a way that can be validated on the server." Essentially, Anubis verifies that any visitor to a site is a human using a browser as opposed to a bot. One of the ways it does this is by making the browser do a type of cryptographic math with JavaScript or other subtle checks that browsers do by default but bots have to be explicitly programmed to do. This check is invisible to the user, and most browsers since 2022 are able to complete this test. In theory, bot scrapers could pretend to be users with browsers as well, but the additional computational cost of doing so on the scale of scraping the entire internet would be huge. This way, Anubis creates a computational cost that is prohibitively expensive for AI scrapers that are hitting millions and millions of sites, but marginal for an individual user who is just using the internet like a human.
Anubis is free, open source, lightweight, can be self-hosted, and can be implemented almost anywhere. It also appears to be a pretty good solution for what we've repeatedly reported is a widespread problem across the internet, which helps explain its popularity. But Iaso is still putting a lot of work into improving it and adding features. She told me she's working on a non cryptographic challenge so it taxes users' CPUs less, and also thinking about a version that doesn't require JavaScript, which some privacy-minded disable in their browsers. The biggest challenge in developing Anubis, Iaso said, is finding the balance. "The balance between figuring out how to block things without people being blocked, without affecting too many people with false positives," she said. "And also making sure that the people running the bots can't figure out what pattern they're hitting, while also letting people that are caught in the web be able to figure out what pattern they're hitting, so that they can contact the organization and get help. So that's like, you know, the standard, impossible scenario."
Did we need another reason to never touch Android again? Because that's what this is.
Starting today, Google is implementing a change that will enable its Gemini AI engine to interact with third-party apps, such as WhatsApp, even when users previously configured their devices to block such interactions. Users who don't want their previous settings to be overridden may have to take action.
An email Google sent recently informing users of the change linked to a notification page that said that “human reviewers (including service providers) read, annotate, and process” the data Gemini accesses. The email provides no useful guidance for preventing the changes from taking effect. The email said users can block the apps that Gemini interacts with, but even in those cases, data is stored for 72 hours.
An email Google recently sent to Android users.
No, Google, it’s not good news
The email never explains how users can fully extricate Gemini from their Android devices and seems to contradict itself on how or whether this is even possible. At one point, it says the changes “will automatically start rolling out” today and will give Gemini access to apps such as WhatsApp, Messages, and Phone “whether your Gemini apps activity is on or off.” A few sentences later, the email says, “If you have already turned these features off, they will remain off.” Nowhere in the email or the support pages it links to are Android users informed how to remove Gemini integrations completely.
Time for Seattle to do this. This weekend has been awful.
"California residents who lit illegal fireworks over the July 4 holiday may be in for a nasty surprise in the mail thanks to covert fire department operations," reports SFGate.
"A number of California cities, including Sacramento, have begun using drones to locate people shooting off illegal fireworks."
From Wednesday to Saturday night, the Sacramento Fire Department's special fireworks task force patrolled the streets with unmarked cars and drones, focusing on neighborhoods where they've had prior complaints. Task force officers and the drones took photos of the illegal activity, and within 30 days the property owner where the fireworks were used could receive a fine in the mail...
This year, Sacramento upped the fine to $1,000 for the first firework, $2,500 for the second and $5,000 per firework after that. If you lit a firework on city property, such as a park or a school, the fine goes up to $10,000 each. There's no limit to how many fines you can be issued... This year, a number of cities across the state announced they would be using drones to find scofflaws, among them Indio, Riverside, Hemet, Brea and towns in Tulare County...
Fox40 reported on Saturday that around 60 citations were being prepared in Sacramento, with more likely on the way as fire officials review surveillance footage.
Last year for illegal fireworks, one Sacramento-area resident received a $100,000 fine.
Sounds like getting what they voted for. Time for some frontier self reliance.
Two Alaskan lawmakers—including one Republican and one independent—just published a hand-wringing op-ed in The New York Times warning that the GOP’s latest budget reconciliation bill will throw their state into chaos. The headline? “Alaska cannot survive this bill.”
The list of horrors is long: Nearly 40,000 Alaskans will lose their health coverage, tens of thousands will go hungry as SNAP benefits are slashed, rural clinics and grocery stores will disappear, schools will be defunded, and entire communities will be left to fend for themselves.
All of it is true. And all of it is the direct result of the agenda that Alaska voted for.
GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska is scrambling to shield her state from the very law her constituents voted for.
President Donald Trump campaigned on gutting the federal government—slashing Medicaid, killing food assistance, ending clean energy tax credits, and defunding agencies that keep rural America afloat. More than 54% of Alaskans voted for him in 2024 anyway.
This isn’t new. Red states have long depended on the very federal programs that their politicians vow to destroy. When Trump cuts the Federal Emergency Management Agency, it’s the governors of red states who panic. When Medicaid is attacked, it’s rural hospitals in deep-red counties that go under. With SNAP on the chopping block, red states suffer the most. West Virginia, for example, has 16% of its population on food stamps.
And through it all, blue states keep footing the bill—only to be smeared as “socialist” for insisting that the government should actually help people.
In fact, the small-government crowd is the most dependent on assistance from the government. The same politicians who rail against handouts suddenly demand carveouts when the axe swings their way—like Sen. Lisa Murkowski scrambling to shield Alaska from the very law her constituents voted for. It’s a pattern, and it’s getting old.
In their op-ed, the authors warn that “Alaska cannot afford to lose health care funding,” citing the state’s high rates of suicide, tuberculosis, and sexually transmitted infections, along with a dire shortage of behavioral health services. The kicker? They claim that the GOP cuts “will only make these problems worse,” as if Alaska is uniquely burdened with public health crises and therefore deserves a permanent federal subsidy while voting to deny one to everyone else.
Apparently, when it’s a red state in trouble, the government needs to step in. Immediately. With cash from blue states, who get nothing but scorn in return.
The community welcome sign in Girdwood, Alaska
Alaska receives more federal money per capita than almost any other state. More than 40% of its state budget is federally funded, one-third of Alaskans is on Medicaid, and more than 70,000 rely on SNAP—about 10% of the population. That funding comes overwhelmingly from blue states like California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Washington—states that vote for a functioning government.
So, yes, Alaska is right to be scared. The bill will devastate them. But they aren’t innocent. They helped build the wrecking ball—and now they’re shocked to find it swinging in their direction. Actions have consequences.
“What is the end game here? How does it help anyone to terminate health care coverage for our most vulnerable through red tape or take away food for families who have limited to no options for gainful employment?” the op-ed says.
Great questions. You know who’s not trying to do any of that? Democrats.
If this bill passes and the lights start going out in Alaska, there will be no confusion about who flipped the switch.
The US dollar is on track for its worst year in modern history and may not be done falling yet. The greenback is down more than 7% this year and Morgan Stanley predicts it could fall another 10%. Semafor: A weaker dollar could make US exports more competitive, boosting Trump's plan to rebalance US trade, but makes imports more expensive, adding to the sting of tariffs.
The question ahead is whether the dollar doesn't just lose its value, but its role at the center of the global financial system. So far, there are few alternatives. And efforts to de-dollarize -- central banks shifting into gold, China shoveling its currency into developing nations through swap lines -- haven't meaningfully shifted the picture.
The "Stop Killing Games" movement, led by YouTuber Accursed Farms, has gained serious momentum as it pushes back against the practice of game publishers shutting down access to titles consumers have paid for. Recent milestones include a UK petition surpassing 100K signatures and an EU initiative nearing its 1 million goal. GamingOnLinux reports: In the UK, the newer petition has flown past the 100K signatures (126,066 at time of writing) needed for it to be considered for a debate in Parliament. That doesn't mean it will happen, just that it now needs to be considered by the UK government to potentially have it mentioned. A good step though, with signatures still flowing in until July 14th, showing there's demand for change.
On the EU side, things are also going well there now too. Against the needed 1 million signatures, it's now hit 977,864 (at time of writing). According to the official Accursed Farms X account, they've had reports of "non-citizens spoofing signatures on the EU initiative" so it may be a little inflated.
President Donald Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill" isn't even law yet, but it's already having negative consequences for Americans.
A hospital in rural Nebraska announced on Wednesday that it will shut its doors after more than 30 years, explicitly citing the expected cuts to Medicaid that Congress is set to pass in Trump’s bill.
“Unfortunately, the current financial environment, driven by anticipated federal budget cuts to Medicaid, has made it impossible for us to continue operating all of our services, many of which have faced significant financial challenges for years,” Troy Bruntz, the CEO of Community Hospital in McCook, Nebraska, said in a statement to a local news outlet.
Indeed, hospital associations have been warning that the massive cuts to Medicaid in the GOP's bill will decimate rural hospitals, whose patients are often Medicaid recipients. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that about 17 million people will go uninsured in the next decade because of the bill’s cuts to health care spending. The majority of those losing health care currently have Medicaid, which covers over 71 million Americans and more than 41% of births in the United States.
Pro-Medicaid activists wait to enter the House Energy and Commerce markup of the FY2025 budget resolution in Rayburn building on May 13.
For example, the American Hospital Association, a major industry group, said in a statement after the Senate passed the bill, "This legislation will cause 11.8 million Americans to be displaced from their health care coverage as they move from insured to uninsured status. It also will drive up uncompensated care for hospitals and health systems, which will affect their ability to serve all patients. It will force hospitals to make service line reductions and staff reductions, resulting in longer waiting times in emergency departments and for other essential services, and could ultimately lead to facility closures, especially in rural and underserved areas.”
A group of hospitals and health care systems in Louisiana also warned House Speaker Mike Johnson, whose district is in the state, that the bill he is shepherding through his chamber will devastate hospitals that serve his constituents.
"The impact of provisions in the United States Senate’s version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act reflects an estimated annual loss of more than $4 billion in total Medicaid funding for Louisiana healthcare providers. This will negatively impact our ability to deliver care and have devastating consequences for our state budget," they said in a letter to Johnson. "These economic consequences pale in comparison to the harm that will be caused to residents across the state, regardless of insurance status, who will no longer be able to get the care that they need."
However, rather than try to fix the bill to stave off the awful consequences, Republicans are instead lying about what it does.
Multiple GOP members have falsely claimed that the Medicaid cuts impact only people who refuse to work.
"Look, if you're able-bodied without dependents and you choose not to work, well, you shouldn't be on a public welfare program. That's the bottom line,” Republican Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland said in an interview with the right-wing propaganda outlet Newsmax, adding, “You should be off the public dole. Yes, you will lose your Medicaid coverage. Get a job and get coverage through a job if necessary.”
But able-bodied people who choose not to work are a minuscule portion of Medicaid recipients. In fact, according to health policy outlet KFF:
Among adults under age 65 with Medicaid who do not receive benefits from the Social Security disability programs, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), and who are not also covered by Medicare (referred to hereafter as “Medicaid adults”), 92% were working full or part-time (64%), or not working due to caregiving responsibilities, illness or disability, or school attendance. The remaining 8% of Medicaid adults reported that they are retired, unable to find work, or were not working for another reason.
Republicans are expected to pass Trump’s bill after House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries ends a blockbuster speech in which he’s torching Republicans for hurting the poor to pay for tax cuts that benefit the rich.
“Leadership requires courage, conviction, compassion—and yet what we have seen from this administration and co-conspirators on the Republican side of the aisle is cruelty, chaos and corruption,” Jeffries said in the speech, according to The New York Times.
Jeffries added that the GOP bill is “an extraordinary assault on the health care of the American people.”
The Roberts Court needs to be burned to the ground. There's nothing worth saving in that bunch of GOP hacks.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, left, and Chief Justice John Roberts.
There are two big winners in the Supreme Court’s most recent term.
One is social and religious conservatives. In the last two days of its term, the Court imposed heavy new burdens on public schools at the request of religious conservatives, and it rendered much of federal Medicaid law unenforceable in a case lashing out at Planned Parenthood. It heard its first major pornography case in over two decades, upholding a Texas law that seeks to limit youth access to porn. And the Republican justices handed a historic defeat to transgender Americans, permitting states to block at least some trans people from receiving gender-affirming medical care.
Four justices also voted that the Constitution requires most states to fund religious public charter schools. And Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who was recused from this case, is likely to provide the fifth vote for religious public schools in the future.
Indeed, as I’ll explain in more detail below, the Court’s Republican majority is willing to tear down major American institutions in order to advance the cultural right’s political goals.
Another winner is President Donald Trump. One year after the Republican justices ruled that Trump is allowed to use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes, these same justices continue to treat him as the special favorite of the laws.
The Court’s most high-profile Trump-related decision, Trump v. CASA, placed vague new restrictions on lower courts’ power to block Trump administration policies. This decision is defensible — the Biden administration sought a similar ruling while it was in power — but it is notable that the justices waited until a Republican was president before weakening lower courts’ power to rein in the executive.
Even before the CASA decision, however, the Court frequently blocked lower courts that ruled against the Trump administration. When lower courts block Trump’s policies, the Republican justices routinely reinstate those policies on the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket,” a mix of emergency motions and other matters that the justices consider on an expedited basis.
There was also one unexpected loser this term: the business and fiscal conservatives that have historically dominated the Republican Party. In the same week that the Court handed down most of its biggest decisions, it also rejected an attack on Obamacare. And it waved away a request to put drastic new limits on federal agencies’ power to regulate business.
So, while the Court now hands out victories to the cultural right as if it were passing out candy on Halloween, several of the GOP justices did show more moderation on the kinds of issues that preoccupied Republicans as recently as a decade ago. It was a lot to keep track of, especially given Trump’s ability to dominate the news, so here’s a quick rundown of how the Court reshaped the law during its recent term.
The Court gravely wounded key American institutions to benefit social conservatives
At least two cases this term did serious harm to institutions that millions of Americans depend upon, both in decisions that benefited cultural conservatives.
In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the Court’s Republican majority ruled that public schools must inform parents before their children are taught a lesson those parents might object to on religious grounds, and that those parents must be given an opportunity to opt their child out of that lesson.
The Supreme Court used to treat public schools with more respect.
Mahmoud arose out of a dispute over queer-themed books — Montgomery County, Maryland, approved several books with LGBTQ characters that could be used in classroom instruction. But the First Amendment prohibits discrimination among people with different religious beliefs. So, if parents with anti-LGBTQ religious views have a right to notification and an opt-out, so too does every parent who might object to any lesson on any religious ground.
This rule, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor warns in a dissenting opinion, is likely to cause “chaos for this Nation’s public schools.” Requiring every public school teacher to anticipate which lessons might implicate a parent’s religious beliefs “will impose impossible administrative burdens on schools,” especially in a nation as diverse as the United States.
In the past, courts have rejected similar lawsuits brought by parents who object to books or lessons that feature magic, women who have achievements outside the home, and include topics as diverse as divorce, interfaith couples, “immodest dress,” and “false views of death.” After Mahmoud, however, all of these parents now have a right to advance notice.
Schools that fail to predict that a lesson about a Jewish woman with a career, a Hindu husband, or an immodest wardrobe will offend a parent’s religious belief will now face very serious financial consequences. Federal law often lets the “prevailing party” in a suit about constitutional rights collect attorney’s fees from the losing party. So lawyers can hunt for parents with idiosyncratic religious views, file a lawsuit against a school, and demand payment to avoid litigation that will be even more expensive for the school district.
The Supreme Court used to treat public schools with more respect, out of concern that the Constitution should not be read to prevent such an important institution from functioning.
Like the right to free exercise of religion, the right to free speech is also protected by the First Amendment. That is why the Court held in Tinker v. Des Moines(1969) that public school students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”
But Tinker recognized that free speech should not be used as a weapon that can shut down classroom instruction altogether — if any student could get up in the middle of class and start yelling, for example, their right to free speech would destroy every one of their classmates’ right to an education.
And so Tinker also held that public school students may not engage in speech that “materially disrupts classwork or involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others.” The Court struck an appropriate balance between protecting free expression by young people, and making sure that public schools continue to produce an educated workforce that ultimately benefits every single American.
That decision stands in stark contrast to Mahmoud, which establishes that the rights of religious objectors must be advanced at all costs, even if it would mean imposing such enormous burdens on public schools that every child receives an inferior education.
A similar dynamic was in play in Medina, which pitted the GOP’s disdain for abortion providers against a federal law permitting Medicaid patients to choose their own doctors. Just as in Mahmoud, the Republican justices handed a sweeping victory to social conservatives — seemingly without any regard for how their decision would damage Medicaid.
Federal Medicaid statutes are riddled with provisions establishing who must be covered by Medicaid, how that coverage should be provided, and what minimum standards of care Medicaid patients are entitled to receive. South Carolina illegally forbade Medicaid patients from choosing Planned Parenthood as their health care provider. Rather than ordering South Carolina to comply with the law, in Medina the Republican justices effectively repealed the choice-of-provider provision.
The question of which Medicaid laws can be enforced through federal lawsuits, and which provisions are essentially worthless, is one of the most important questions in American poverty and elder law and has been litigated for decades. But two years ago, in Talevski, the Supreme Court finally settled on a clear rule that judges could apply to identify which provisions are enforceable.
If you want to know more about these many decades of litigation, I explain many of those details here. But the most important thing to know about Talevski is that it established that Medicaid laws which are “phrased in terms of the persons benefitted” and that “focus on the benefitted class” are enforceable. So, if a specific provision of Medicaid law mentions Medicaid patients, or otherwise names the individuals who are supposed to benefit from that law, it is enforceable.
The choice-of-provider provision at issue in Medina refers to “any individual eligible for medical assistance.” So it was enforceable under Talevski. Medina should have been an open and shut case.
Yet, instead of following Talevski, the Republican justices produced an incoherent opinion that does not even announce a new legal rule, beyond a vague statement that Medicaid laws are “especially unlikely” to be enforceable. Much of Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opinion in Medina fixates on seemingly random facts about the choice-of-provider provision, such as the fact that it “appears in a subsection titled ‘Contents,’” as if that’s somehow relevant to the question of whether this provision is a meaningless husk.
It is impossible to come up with a principled explanation for why, two years after Talevski, the Republican justices decided to abandon that decision and replace it with a new legal standard that renders much of federal law completely useless. But it’s certainly possible to come up with a political explanation. Unlike Medina, Talevski did not involve an abortion provider. Several of the Court’s Republicans appear to have flipped their votes between Talevski and Medina in order to lash out at Planned Parenthood.
The worst thing about the Medina decision is that the Republican justices could have come up with some good-for-this-ride-only legal reasoning that denied Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood, but that otherwise left Talevski intact. Instead, they appear to have overruled Talevski and replaced it with a vague new rule that does little more than tell lower court judges that Medicaid plaintiffs should nearly always lose.
It seems that, in order to spite Planned Parenthood, the Supreme Court stripped tens of millions of Americans of countless rights protected by federal law.
Donald Trump’s fixers
Many of the Court’s most consequential decisions were handed down on its shadow docket, a process that allows a party that lost in a lower court to seek an immediate Supreme Court order blocking that decision.
Traditionally, the Supreme Court takes months or even longer before it decides a case. With rare exceptions, a case must be heard by a trial court and at least one appeals court before the justices will even consider taking it up. And getting the justices to hear a case is a bit like winning the lottery.
Lawyers hoping the Court will review their case file over 8,000 petitions seeking such review in any given year, but the justices only grant about 60–70 of these petitions. Then, once a case is granted, that’s only the beginning of a months-long process where lawyers submit briefs, the justices review them and hold oral arguments, and then they spend months working on the final decision. Contentious suits can wait an entire year for a decision, even after the justices announce that they will hear the case.
The reason for this slow, highly selective process is that the Supreme Court has the final word on questions of US law. So if it gets a case wrong, that mistake can linger uncorrected for decades. The Court’s plodding deliberation is supposed to minimize the risk of that happening.
Beginning in Trump’s first term, however, the Court started relying heavily on a separate, much less cautious process to decide cases involving Trump and his government.
Historically, the Court’s shadow docket was used primarily for death penalty appeals, where the petitioner seeking Supreme Court review would be killed if the justices did not act very swiftly. Litigants in non-death penalty cases could seek expedited review on the shadow docket, but it was so discouraged, and shadow docket petitions were so rarely granted, that smart lawyers typically decided not to annoy the justices with them. During the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, the Justice Department sought shadow docket review about once every other year.
Now, however, whenever the Trump administration claims that it must have a Supreme Court order blocking a lower court’s decision, the Court treats that claim as an emergency that must be tended to immediately.
In Nken v. Holder (2009), the Supreme Court held that a party seeking shadow docket relief must do more than simply show they are likely to prevail if the Court hears their case on the merits. Among other things, they must also show that they “will be irreparably injured” if the justices do not immediately block the lower court’s decision.
But, as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pointed out in a pair of opinions dissenting from two shadow docket orders, the Republican justices seem to have decided that the Trump administration is exempt from Nken, as they often grant shadow docket relief to Trump even when he cannot show irreparable injury. In Social Security Administration v. AFSCME, a case about whether DOGE may access highly sensitive Social Security data, Trump’s lawyers didn’t even make an argument that his administration would experience irreparable harm without Supreme Court intervention. Yet the Republican justices intervened anyway.
The federal government’s exemption from Nken, moreover, only appears to be in effect when a Republican occupies the White House. In one dissenting opinion, Jackson pointed to several Biden-era cases where the Justice Department sought shadow docket relief from lower court orders. In some of those cases, the Court left the lower court’s injunction in place for as much as a year, before finally concluding that the injunction was illegal after the case went through the much slower, traditional appeals process.
The Republican justices, in other words, are manipulating the Court’s calendar to benefit Trump. When ordinary litigants — or a Democratic administration — seek shadow docket relief, the justices often apply the traditional rules and norms that prevent them from granting those requests. But when Trump asks the Supreme Court to do him a favor, the Republican justices swiftly oblige.
The Republican justices did abandon some fights pushed by business and fiscal conservatives
While the cultural right was one of the biggest winners in the Court’s recent term, the Republican Party’s traditional business constituency fared less well. On the final decision day of the term, the Court handed down a ruling upholding provisions of Obamacare that require health insurers to cover certain treatments, as well as a decision rejecting an aggressive attempt to limit federal agencies’ power to regulate business. Earlier in the term, a unanimous Court also rejected a suit challenging the FDA’s decision to pull many nicotine vaping devices off the market.
The Court’s Obamacare decision, known as Kennedy v. Braidwood Management, aligns with broader trends within the Republican Party. During Trump’s first term, the GOP famously tried and failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act in its entirety. Eight years later, the party has a more modest health care agenda, at least when compared to their ideas from 2017. Congressional Republicans are likely to enact deep cuts to Medicaid, but they are not pushing for full repeal of Obamacare.
Decisions like Braidwood and Medina, in other words, closely track the Republican Party’s agenda in Congress. Like their counterparts in Congress, the Republican justices voted to drastically cut back on Medicaid in Medina. But many of them voted to uphold key provisions of Obamacare in Braidwood.
The Supreme Court frequently balks at the Fifth Circuit’s decisions, but it does not do so all of the time. Just last week, for example, in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, the Court upheld a Texas law requiring pornographic websites to verify that their users are over age 18, despite a 21-year-old Supreme Court decision that struck down a nearly identical law. The Court took up the Free Speech Coalition case after the Fifth Circuit decided it wasn’t bound by that two-decade-old decision.
The best lesson to draw from cases like Braidwood, White Lion, and Consumer’s Research, in other words, is that no matter how partisan or ideological the Supreme Court may be, there will likely be other voices within the judiciary pushing the justices to go harder. These voices will even sometimes succeed, as they did in the Free Speech Coalition case.
If Trump gets to replace any members of the current Court, moreover, he could potentially replace relatively moderate justices with the kinds of judges who dominate the Fifth Circuit. No matter how bad the Supreme Court gets, it can always get worse.
I remember reading about ramjet in the 80s, glad it's finally making some progress. And of course it requires autonomous vehicles...it's not quite "raspberry jam" delta V, but it's significant.
China's Northwestern Polytechnical University successfully tested a hypersonic aircraft called Feitian-2, claiming it reached Mach 12 and achieved a world-first by autonomously switching between rocket and ramjet propulsion mid-flight. The Register reports: The University named the craft "Feitian-2" and according to Chinese media the test flight saw it reach Mach 12 (14,800 km/h or 9,200 mph) -- handily faster than the Mach 5 speeds considered to represent hypersonic flight. Chinese media have not detailed the size of Feitian-2, or its capabilities other than to repeat the University's claim that it combined a rocket and a ramjet into a single unit. [...] The University and Chinese media claim the Feitian-2 flew autonomously while changing from rocket to ramjet while handling the hellish stresses that come with high speed flight.
This test matters because, as the US Congressional Budget Office found in 2023, hypothetical hypersonic missiles "have the potential to create uncertainty about what their ultimate target is. Their low flight profile puts them below the horizon for long-range radar and makes them difficult to track, and their ability to maneuver while gliding makes their path unpredictable." "Hypersonic weapons can also maneuver unpredictably at high speeds to counter short-range defenses near a target, making it harder to track and intercept them," the Office found.
Washington is so worried about Beijing developing hypersonic weapons that the Trump administration cited the possibility as one reason for banning another 27 Chinese organizations from doing business with US suppliers of AI and advanced computing tech. The flight of Feitian-2 was therefore a further demonstration of China's ability to develop advanced technologies despite US bans.
huh, this is an interesting approach. Prefer it over an ID database
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: Tinder is mandating new users in California verify their profiles using facial recognition technology starting Monday, executives exclusively tell Axios. The move aims to reduce impersonation and is part of Tinder parent Match Group's broader effort to improve trust and safety amid ongoing user frustration. The Face Check feature prompts users to take a short video selfie during onboarding. The biometric face scan, powered by FaceTec, then confirms the person is real and present and whether their face matches their profile photos. It also checks if the face is used across multiple accounts. If the criteria are met, the user receives a photo verified badge on their profile. The selfie video is then deleted. Tinder stores a non-reversible, encrypted face map to detect duplicate profiles in the future.
Face Check is separate from Tinder's ID Check, which uses a government-issued ID to verify age and identity. "We see this as one part of a set of identity assurance options that are available to users," Match Group's head of trust and safety Yoel Roth says. "Face Check ... is really meant to be about confirming that this person is a real, live person and not a bot or a spoofed account." "Even if in the short term, it has the effect of potentially reducing some top-line user metrics, we think it's the right thing to do for the business," Rascoff said.
hint: when I can download and re-encode a movie in less time than it takes to play the ads, guess which option I'm going to take?
AMC Theatres now warns customers that movies start 25-30 minutes after the listed showtime to account for ads and trailers, "making it easier for moviegoers to know the actual start time of their film screening," reports The Verge. From the report: Starting today, AMC will also show more ads than before, meaning its preshow lineup may have to be reconfigured to avoid exceeding the 30-minute mark. The company made an agreement with the National CineMedia ad network that includes as much as five minutes of commercials shown "after a movie's official start time," according to The Hollywood Reporter, and an additional 30-to-60-second "Platinum Spot" that plays before the last one or two trailers.
AMC was the only major theater chain to reject the National CineMedia ad spot when it was pitched in 2019, telling Bloomberg at the time that it believed "US moviegoers would react quite negatively." Now struggling financially amid an overall decline in movie theater attendance and box-office grosses, AMC has reversed course, telling The Hollywood Reporter that its competitors "have fully participated for more than five years without any direct impact to their attendance."
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Because they ignore the law if it could hurt their friends. See also TikTok. It's pure fascism: the law only exists to reward friends and punish enemies. Anything else will be ignored.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has decided to let prisons and jails keep charging high prices for calling services until at least 2027, delaying implementation of rate caps approved last year when the FCC had a Democratic majority.
Carr's office announced the change yesterday, saying it was needed because of "negative, unintended consequences stemming from the Commission's 2024 decision on Incarcerated People's Communications Services (IPCS)... As a result of this waiver decision, the FCC's 2021 Order rate cap, site commission, and per-minute pricing rules will apply until April 1, 2027, unless the Commission sets an alternative date."
Commissioner Anna Gomez, the FCC's only Democrat, criticized the decision and pointed out that Congress mandated lower prices in the Martha Wright-Reed Act, which the FCC was tasked with implementing.
As state legislatures wind down their sessions, one thing is clear: for Republicans, it’s Trumpism all the way. Attacking trans people? Check. Stripping health care from the most vulnerable? Check. Cutting everything just to pay for tax cuts that benefit the rich? Check. Gleefully refusing to feed poor kids? Check.
Iowa continues its slide from being the third state to legalize same-sex marriage back in 2009 to … whatever this is now. On July 1, Iowa’s SF 418, which GOP Gov. Kim Reynolds had signed in February, went into effect. It’s basically just the transphobic President Donald Trump executive order codified into law. SF 418 removed protections based on gender identity because rolling back civil rights is all the rage for Republicans right now. The law also “defines” male and female based on what reproductive organs are present at birth. Apparently no one told Iowa Republicans about people who are intersex.
With the law change, transgender Iowans are no longer protected from discrimination in housing, employment, public accommodations, and education. Transgender women are not allowed in women’s bathrooms, shelters, or prisons. Reynolds spouted the usual anti-trans language about how codifying genital inspections into law is “necessary to secure genuine equal protection for women and girls.”
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine just signed a budget to slash Medicaid spending in his state.
Over in Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine just signed a budget that slashes Medicaid spending and kicks 800,000 residents off of health care. But hey, at least it gives $600 million to the Cleveland Browns for a new stadium. It’s all about priorities.
The budget also tees up Ohio’s move to a 2.75% flat tax by 2026, but made sure that the richest people in the state got a tax cut ASAP by lowering the top tax rate right away. Republicans love pretending a flat tax is fair when really having everyone pay the same percentage of their income is regressive and hurts middle- and low-income families the most, which is pretty much the goal here.
Missouri Republicans took a different approach, basically DOGE-ing their state budget. When GOP Gov. Mike Kehoe signed the budget, he vetoed over 200 line items, bragging that he did so “to rein in unsustainable spending.” Examples of unsustainable spending: community child care, jobs programs, science programs for grades 6-12, community college, public libraries, and urgent care for veterans. You get the picture.
These cuts are necessary, according to Kehoe, so that there is funding for “smart policies advancing our shared vision of a safer, stronger and more prosperous Missouri.” What does that look like? Eliminating the tax on capital gains, which Kehoe says will reduce state revenues by $400 million annually. That certainly doesn’t sound like a more prosperous Missouri, but it definitely will make the already prosperous even more so. The richest 5% of residents will get about 80% of the tax cut, so that’s nice for them. Not so nice for everyone else in Missouri who might like libraries or health care or jobs.
And finally, Texas. Gov. Greg Abbott hates children so much that he vetoed a line item that would have provided the state with $450 million in federal funds for feeding low-income kids during the summer. Yes, that’s Abbott saying that the state won’t even take free federal money to participate in Summer EBT, which gives lower-income families $120 per child during summer months to provide meals when children aren’t in school.
Abbott’s logic? There’s too much uncertainty about budgeting and funding at the federal level. Well, sure, but that money was already budgeted by Congress and doesn’t appear to have been DOGE-ed out of existence. It’s more likely that Abbott doesn’t want the state to have to spend the $60 million over the next two years to cover half the administrative costs as required by the law.
Most people would see spending $60 million to get $450 million as a terrific deal, but those people are not Abbott. So now roughly 3.8 million kids in Texas won’t get those summer meals. But at least when they return to school in the fall, they’ll be forced to see the Ten Commandments posted in every classroom. Too bad those mandatory 16 x 20 posters aren’t edible.
"The thing that will bankrupt this country more than any other policy is flooding the country with illegal immigration and then giving those migrants generous benefits. The OBBB fixes this problem. And therefore it must pass," Vance wrote in a post on X. "Everything else—the [Congressional Budget Office] score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy—is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions."
Not only is Vance's statement absurd as he claims that actively harming the poorest among us is not important, but his statement is also false.
The nonpartisan CBO has said immigrants actually help lower budget deficits.
"People are rightly noting that kicking millions off of Medicaid is not 'minutiae,' but the premise is wrong here too. Of the reasons to deport undocumented immigrants, federal fiscal health is one of the worst ones. CBO found they *lower* deficits by ~$1T over the next 10 years," Ernie Tedeschi, director of the Budget Lab at Yale, wrote in a post on X. "That’s because undocumented immigrants tend to pay taxes funding programs like Medicare & Social Security (despite the stereotype, most undocumented immigrants who work are above the table) but are often ineligible to receive benefits."
Democrats immediately pointed out the cruelty of Vance's tweet
"The 17 MILLION Americans you’re kicking off their health insurance aren’t 'minutiae,'" Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. Brendan Boyle, ranking member of the House Budget Committee, wrote in a post on X. "Republicans are about to force the largest loss of health care in American history — and they clearly couldn’t care less about working families."
"Ben, a disabled 14-year-old from Chesterfield, VA, isn’t 'minutiae,'" Warner wrote. "His health insurance isn’t minutiae. His future isn’t minutiae. Medicaid matters and I am fighting to protect it."
Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins have “serious reservations” about the bill.
As of press time, it is unclear whether Republicans have the votes to pass this travesty of a bill—which hurts the poor and working class in order to give tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the richest few.
Republican Sens. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Susan Collins of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, have all either said they are voting no or have “serious reservations” about the bill—enough to sink it if all four vote no.
“As I've said from the beginning, I have a lot of serious reservations about the bill,” Collins told reporters Tuesday morning. “I'm going to wait ‘til we're done, know what direction we're going in, before announcing my position.”
Republicans are trying to get Murkowski on board by making a specific carveout for Alaska that would keep the state from losing its Medicaid and food stamp benefits—while screwing everyone else.
There is also talk about trying to flip Paul to a yes by lowering the debt ceiling increase from $5 trillion to $500 billion.
However, Erik Wasson of Bloomberg News reported that Senate Majority Leader John Thune thinks he has a deal to get the bill to pass, though it’s unclear what that deal entails. As we’ve said repeatedly, never bet against Republicans caving to Dear Leader’s will.
A same-sex marriage supporter waves a LGBTQ+ Pride flag in front of the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
On Friday, the Supreme Court ruled that parents with religious objections to books with LGBTQ+ characters must be allowed to opt their children out of any public school instruction that uses those books. The decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor was handed down along party lines, with all six Republicans in the majority and all three Democrats in dissent.
The Mahmoud case highlights the Republican justices’ impatience to remake constitutional law in a more socially conservative image, especially in cases involving religion. It is certainly possible for public school instruction to violate a religious child’s constitutional rights. The Constitution, for example, forbids government institutions like public schools from coercing students into violating their religious views. As Justice Samuel Alito notes in the Mahmoud opinion, the Constitution would also forbid teachers from openly mocking a student’s faith.
But, as a federal appeals court which previously heard the Mahmoud case warned, we don’t actually know whether the Constitution was violated in this case. Although Montgomery County, Maryland, approved several books with LGBTQ+ characters for use in public schools, the lower court found that the record in this case contains no information “about how any teacher or school employee has actually used any of the Storybooks in the Parents’ children’s classrooms, how often the Storybooks are actually being used, what any child has been taught in conjunction with their use, or what conversations have ensued about their themes.”
Nevertheless, Alito handed down a fairly broad opinion which is likely to impose substantial new burdens on public schools, and he did so without waiting until the record in this case was more fully developed by lower courts. The result is that many schools may struggle to comply with the new obligations that were just imposed, and most schools are likely to exclude books that introduce queer themes or that even mention LGBTQ+ characters.
Why Mahmoud imposes a severe burden on public schools
The plaintiffs in Mahmoud include Muslim and Christian parents who do not want their children exposed to these books. And their lawyers came to the Supreme Court with an audacious request — seeking a broad decision that parents who object to any form of classroom instruction on religious grounds must be notified in advance, and be permitted to opt their child out of that instruction.
The problem with this request is that schools cannot possibly know, in advance, which religious views are held by which parents, and which books or lessons those parents might find objectionable. In the past, parents have sued school districts objecting, on religious grounds, to lessons that touch on topics as diverse as divorce, interfaith couples, and “immodest dress.” They’ve objected to books which expose readers to evolution, pacifism, magic, women achieving things outside of the home, and “false views of death.”
Courts have historically been very cautious about ruling in favor of parents who raise these sorts of objections, in part due to concerns that schools would be overwhelmed by administrative burden.
Nevertheless, the Court’s decision in Mahmoud largely embraces the plaintiffs’ request — Alito orders the school board to notify parents “in advance whenever one of the books in question or any other similar book is to be used in any way and to allow them to have their children excused from that instruction.”
Alito’s opinion does not discuss how this rule should apply to parents with more uncommon religious beliefs, but the Constitution forbids the government from treating people with idiosyncratic religious beliefs differently than people with more common beliefs. The upshot is that a school may also need to warn parents if a teacher wants to read from a Harry Potter book (because those books are about magic), or if they want to teach a lesson about a famous pacifist like Martin Luther King Jr. Schools may even need to warn parents if any of their children’s teachers are women, just in case a parent objects on religious grounds to women having achievements outside of the home.
That said, Alito’s opinion is slightly narrower than the Mahmoud plaintiffs’ proposed framework. Alito argues that the books at issue are objectionable, not just because they feature LGBTQ+ characters, but because they suggest that certain aspects of queer culture should be “celebrated.” One of the contested books is a medieval fairy tale about a prince who marries a knight. According to Alito, the book “relates that ‘on the two men’s wedding day, the air filled with cheer and laughter, for the prince and his shining knight would live happily ever after.’”
Thus, Alito claims, this book is objectionable not because it includes a same-sex wedding, but because it portrays this wedding as a good thing. Under Alito’s framework, a book that featured a same-sex wedding without portraying it as desirable might not trigger the new rule. Similarly, Alito would likely permit women to work as teachers without warning parents of their femininity, so long as the teacher does not do anything to celebrate their womanhood or suggest that being a woman who works outside the home is a good thing.
Still, schools will likely struggle to determine when they are required to warn parents of a particular lesson under Mahmoud. And schools that draw the line in the wrong place now risk being dragged into an expensive lawsuit.
Schools are likely to be reluctant to teach books with queer themes or characters
One very likely consequence of Mahmoud is that schools will be very reluctant to teach any lesson that mentions homosexuality, transgender people, or anything else that touches on queer sexuality or gender identity. Mahmoud is likely to impose a Florida-style “Don’t Say Gay” regime on every public school classroom in America.
The reason why is fairly straightforward. While it is somewhat unclear how Mahmoud applies to parents who object to fantasy novels or working women, the decision quite clearly limits schools’ ability to teach books with queer characters. Nor is it clear when a book crosses the line from merely mentioning a gay character to celebrating some aspect of gay culture. So schools that want to avoid lawsuits will need to exclude these sorts of books from their classroom altogether.
Lawyers, meanwhile, have a financial incentive to sue schools that behave more boldly. Federal law typically allows the “prevailing party” in a civil rights lawsuit to collect attorney’s fees from the losing party. And suits enforcing Mahmoud are considered civil rights cases because they arise under the First Amendment’s religious liberty provisions.
So, lawyers can search for schools that teach books with LGBTQ+ characters, find a parent who objects to those books, and then sue and demand that the school district pay their client’s bills. School districts that don’t want to be treated like an ATM for anti-LGBTQ+ lawyers, meanwhile, will only be able to avoid these lawsuits by excluding queer-themed books from the classroom entirely.
The Supreme Court, in other words, has decided that in order to accommodate one identity group — religious conservatives — schools should be hypercautious about teaching books that feature members of another identity group — LGBTQ+ people. Given the Court’s Republican majority, that decision is not a surprise. But it is likely to impose very difficult burdens.
If you have been curious about what the “viewpoint neutrality” celebrated by conservatives looks like in practice, look no further than the University of Florida Law School. That’s where one of Donald Trump’s first-term judicial appointees, U.S. District Judge John Badalamenti, rewarded an openly white nationalist and antisemitic student for writing an openly white nationalist paper arguing that the Constitution only applies to white people.
This all went down last fall when Badalamenti taught a course on originalism, or the belief that the Constitution should be interpreted based on the Founding Fathers’ “original”meaning. For his capstone paper, Preston Damsky wrote a racist screed, which you can read here if you feel up to it. This thing is not subtle, but Badalamenti still gave Damsky the “book award” when the semester ended, effectively naming him the best student in the class.
Damsky says that the Founding Fathers “unambiguously conceived of the United States as a white country.” He calls for banning all nonwhite people from immigrating to the United States, but shows what he thinks is great magnanimity by assuring us that “non-whites would still be able to visit the U.S., without becoming residents, because tourism is not immigration.” He thinks birthright citizenship should not apply to the children of noncitizens, and he believes there is an invasion at the border—and the military should be able to kill border crossers. Oh, and also, we should get rid of the 14th and 15th Amendments, just for good measure.
Here’s a taste of Damsky’s scintillating argument:
However, given that the United States was founded as a race-based nation state for the preservation and betterment of White Americans (the People), as clearly laid out in the Preamble and revealed by our history, it is difficult to see how these amendments (or at least the way they have been interpreted in the post-World War II era) do not amount to unconstitutional, revolutionary usurpations by the constituted government power.
Now, high-profile originalists know better than to be this openly racist. But if you review Damsky’s policy positions, they aren’t really all that far afield from the rhetoric being spewed by conservative judges and Trump minions.
As Madiba Dennie noted at Balls and Strikes, Trump appointee Judge James Ho thinks immigrants are an invasion and that we should rethink birthright citizenship. Not long before ascending to the bench, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett said the 14th Amendment was “possibly illegitimate.” And of course, Damsky’s rhetoric about immigrants and invasions and militarizing the border matches the hateful screeds coming out of the Trump administration right now.
Perhaps that’s why Badalamenti wasn’t troubled by the paper. If you’re already fully immersed in the ongoing conservative project to roll back rights for everyone but white people, maybe this doesn’t even register. Multiple first-term Trump appointees, for example, refused to say that Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark school desegregation case, was rightly decided.
After The New York Times broke the story about Damsky, the interim dean of the law school issued a statement that trotted out the standard conservative tropes about how upholding academic freedom and the First Amendment means protecting every student’s right to spew white nationalist drivel. Sure, maybe—but that doesn’t mean a sitting federal judge should reward it as the best paper ever. The statement also takes pains to explain that Badalamenti didn’t know Damsky was an open white nationalist and just graded the paper on its merits, and also, of course, these are not Badalamenti’s views.
It’s inconceivable that the very best paper in the class was one that literally calls for the Supreme Court to just dispose of the Reconstruction Amendments. That’s not astute reasoning or a complex legal concept; it’s just a racist popping off about how he wishes Black people never attained rights.
But the kudos Damsky received along with a “neutral” defense from the law school’s interim dean apparently emboldened him enough to open an account on the social media platform X and start posting overtly racist and antisemitic statements, alarming the students around him.
Tucked in at the end of the dean’s latest statement is also this little tidbit:
We have protected academic freedom and the student's First Amendment rights while also prioritizing the safety and security of our community. As soon as the student's conduct became threatening and substantially disruptive, in collaboration with UFPD and UF administration, the student was barred from campus. We heightened security across the college. It is important to note that the escalation in the student's conduct that led to his trespass happened three months after the book award had been announced in January.
So a white nationalist and open antisemite was allowed to be so aggressive that he was eventually barred from campus, but not before he made plenty of antisemitic posts on social media, including saying that Jewish people were the “common enemy of humanity.”
Surely the Trump administration will be all over this, threatening to pull funding from Florida as it has tried with Ivy League universities Harvard and Columbia, right?
In case you’re wondering what type of speech the University of Florida law school does find problematic and worthy of censorship, look no further than Carliss Chatman, a visiting professor. Chatman proposed a class called “Race, Entrepreneurship, and Inequality,” which the school arbitrarily renamed as just “Entrepreneurship.”
Damsky and the law school want this to be a debate about free speech and the First Amendment, but no one is saying Damsky should be punished for the paper itself. Rather, people are pointing out that it is disturbing that a federal judge found this warping of originalism, one that demands allegiance to white supremacy and contends the courts should ignore the Constitution, to be the best paper in the class.
Conservatives can tell themselves that Badalamenti was simply rewarding Damsky for the rigor of his analysis, but we all know better.
Of course, it's pure sophistry masking the political hatchet job, so wheel out Gorsuch.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, the author of the Court’s new attack on Medicaid, shakes hands with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. | Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
Federal law says that “any individual eligible for medical assistance” from a state Medicaid program may obtain that care “from any institution, agency, community pharmacy, or person, qualified to perform the service or services required.” In other words, all Medicaid patients have a right to choose their doctor, as long as they choose a health provider competent enough to provide the care they seek.
On Thursday, however, the Republican justices ruled, in Medina v. Planned Parenthood, that Medicaid patients may not choose their health provider. And then they went much further. Thursday’s decision radically reorders all of federal Medicaid law, rendering much of it unenforceable. Medina could prove to be one of the most consequential health care decisions of the last several years, and one of the deadliest, as it raises a cloud of doubt over countless laws requiring that certain people receive health coverage, as well as laws ensuring that they will receive a certain quality of care.
All three of the Court’s Democrats dissented.
Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opinion in Medina is a trainwreck of legal reasoning. It’s hard to think of a principled reason why, two years after the Court took a much more expansive approach to Medicaid law in Health and Hospital Corporation v. Talevski (2023), the Republican justices abruptly decided to reverse course. It is easy, however, to see a political reason for the Medina decision.
The plaintiff in Medina, after all, is Planned Parenthood, an abortion provider Republicans love to hate. Medina involved South Carolina’s attempt to forbid Medicaid patients from choosing Planned Parenthood as their health provider, a policy that violates federal law.
In an apparent attempt to spite Planned Parenthood, the Republican justices have now effectively repealed that law. This is not aberrant behavior from this Court’s Republican majority.
Four years ago, before the Court overruled Roe v. Wade and eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion, the justices considered a Texas law which permitted private bounty hunters to sue abortion providers and collect bounties of at least $10,000 from them. The Texas law was an obvious attempt to cut off abortion rights in violation of Roe, but five of the Republican justices joined an opinion by Gorsuch, which held that this sort of law could not be challenged in federal court because, Gorsuch claimed, abortion providers must wait until after they are hauled into court by a bounty hunter to assert their rights.
Medina fits within the same legal tradition. When a case involves abortion providers, the Court’s Republican majority is frequently willing to twist the law into any shape necessary to ensure that the abortion providers lose.
What was the specific legal issue in Medina?
A federal law known as “Section 1983” lets state officials be sued if they deprive someone of “any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws.” This is arguably the most important civil rights law ever enacted by Congress. Without it, many federal laws and constitutional provisions would be unenforceable.
Medina turns on Section 1983’s reference to “rights” protected by federal law. Past Supreme Court decisions establish that not all federal laws create a right that can be enforced under Section 1983 and so the Court has developed a set of rules to determine which laws do.
Before Thursday’s decision in Medina, the key case laying out this framework was Talevski. Talevski held that a federal law creates enforceable rights when it is “‘phrased in terms of the persons benefited’ and contains ‘rights-creating,’ individual-centric language with an ‘unmistakable focus on the benefited class.’”
Thus, before Thursday, the key question was whether a law’s text focuses on the individuals who benefit. A hypothetical federal law which provides that “no state may prevent a hungry person from eating at Taco Bell” would be enforceable, under Talevski, because this hypothetical law centers the people who benefit from it (people who are hungry). A similar statute stating that “states shall not impede access to cheap burritos” would likely not be enforceable under Talevski, because it does not mention who is supposed to benefit from these burritos.
Under Talevski, Medina is an easy case, and it should have ended in a 9-0 victory for Planned Parenthood. Here is the relevant statutory language from the Medina case:
A State plan for medical assistance must … provide that … any individual eligible for medical assistance (including drugs) may obtain such assistance from any institution, agency, community pharmacy, or person, qualified to perform the service or services required (including an organization which provides such services, or arranges for their availability, on a prepayment basis), who undertakes to provide him such services.
This law is full of the kind of “individual-centric language” demanded by Talevski. It provides a right to “any individual.” It provides that these individuals “may obtain” care from their chosen provider. And it concludes with a pronoun (“him”) which refers back to the individuals who benefit from this law.
There is simply no way to reconcile Gorsuch’s Medina opinion with Talevski.
So how does Gorsuch try to get around Talevski?
The Republican justices largely try to get around Talevski by ignoring it, or by misrepresenting what it said. Notably, the key words laying out Talevski’s legal rule — that federal laws are enforceable through private lawsuits if they are “phrased in terms of the persons benefited” — appear nowhere in Gorsuch’s opinion.
Instead, Gorsuch introduces some new principles into federal Medicaid law that are likely to confuse judges who must apply his decision to other provisions of the Medicaid statute.
In its brief, for example, South Carolina suggested that a federal law must use the magic word “right,” or it is unenforceable under Section 1983. Gorsuch’s opinion doesn’t go quite this far, but it does repeatedly point out that the provision of Medicaid law at issue in Talevski, which the Court held to be enforceable, uses this magic word in its text.
Unlike Talevski, however, Medina does not articulate a clear legal rule which lower court judges can apply to other provisions of Medicaid law. It does not even explicitly overrule Talevski. Instead, Gorsuch mostly just points to some random features of the law at issue in Medina, and then leaves readers to guess how to determine which Medicaid laws are still enforceable.
Gorsuch, for example, finds it quite significant that a different provision of federal Medicaid law allows states to exclude some providers who are convicted of a felony from their Medicaid program — a fact that is completely irrelevant under Talevski. He also notes that the provision at issue in Medina “appears in a subsection titled ‘Contents.’”
It’s hard to understand how this title is relevant. Moreover, this segment of Gorsuch’s opinion appears to conflict with the explicit text of a federal law, which states that a provision of Medicaid law “is not to be deemed unenforceable because of its inclusion in a section…specifying the required contents of a State plan.”
Gorsuch also includes an ominous line suggesting that, in the future, his Court will read Medicaid laws very narrowly: “Though it is rare enough for any statute to confer an enforceable right,” Gorsuch claims, “spending-power statutes like Medicaid are especially unlikely to do so.”
Thursday’s decision, in other words, is likely to have sweeping implications for low-income Americans’ health care, even if it was handed down solely to wound Planned Parenthood. Federal Medicaid law is riddled with provisions governing how states must operate their Medicaid programs, including requirements governing who must be covered, and rules governing patient safety. The Talevski case, for example, concerned a law which prohibits nursing homes from using psychotropic drugs “for purposes of discipline or convenience” when they are “not required to treat the resident’s medical symptoms.” Under Medina, many of these laws may now be rendered unenforceable.
It should be noted that, even under Gorsuch’s decision, there is still one possible way to enforce the law permitting Medicaid patients to choose their health providers — the federal government could cut off some or all Medicaid funding to South Carolina. Realistically, however, this remedy would only make matters worse. It does not help Medicaid patients to take away their funding, and so the federal government has historically been exceedingly reluctant to use this blunderbuss of an enforcement mechanism.
After Medina, that means that much of federal Medicaid law may effectively cease to function.
The MAGA movement has a particular vision of the ideal American family.
For starters, there are lots of kids. There’s a dad who works a manufacturing job to provide for them financially. And, according to many influential figures on the right, there’s a stay-at-home mom who holds it all together.
Prominent Republicans from Vice President JD Vance to Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri have floated policies aimed not just at boosting birth rates, a key conservative goal in recent years, but also encouraging parents to stay home with kids, as Caroline Kitchener reported at the New York Times earlier this year.
Those advocating these policies typically don’t specify which parent should stay home. But Hawley, Vance, and other Republicans have been vocal about the importance of male breadwinners and women’s childbearing and childrearing responsibilities, and within the larger MAGA project of pronatalism and manufacturing resurgence, it’s fairly clear who the stay-at-home spouse is supposed to be.
These realities raise a basic question about social conservatives’ goals: Would it even be possible to reverse decades-longglobal trends in women’s employment and convince mothers to stay at home? Pronatalist policies generally have not worked well to increase birth rates. Manufacturing jobs probably aren’t coming back. But can President Donald Trump’s allies find a way to make their goals for moms a reality?
After several weeks of speaking with experts, I have good news for Vance et al: There is an answer. You just have to give moms a million dollars.
The history of moms at work
Stay-at-home motherhood is sometimes portrayed as a natural or original state of humanity, something women began to deviate from around, say, the second wave of feminism in the 1960s. In fact, mothers have moved in and out of various kinds of work over the course of American history.
“People treat the 1950s as the conventional ideal,” said Matt Darling, a senior research associate at the policy research firm MEF Associates who has written on mothers in the labor force. But if you go back to the 1800s, most white women and their husbands worked together on farms. “The household was an economic unit,” Darling said.
As the American economy transitioned from agricultural to industrial, Darling has written, more men went to work in factories and more women focused on child care and other work in the home. Stay-at-home motherhood was never universal — Black women in the US, for example, have always worked in high numbers, with the highest labor force participation rate since record-keeping began in the 1970s, and likely before, Michelle Holder, an economics professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told me.
But in the mid-20th century, families with a male breadwinner and stay-at-home wife were more common than they are today. In 1950, 29 percent of women — 46.4 percent of single women and 21.6 percent of married women — participated in the labor force. Rather than representing a historical norm, the 1950s were one particular point in time during which a subset of American families found it most efficient for one parent to work outside the home and one to work inside it.
That point in time was also fleeting — women’s labor force participation climbed steadily from the late 1940s, peaking at 60 percent in 1999 before dropping slightly. In 2024, 57.5 percent of women were in the labor force. During the same time period, men’s labor force participation dropped steadily, from 86.4 percent in 1950 to 68 percent today.
Another plan is to change the tax code. Right now, parents get a tax credit of about $2,000 for each child they have, and an additional credit of up to $6,000 to help defray the expenses of child care. Some Republicans want to reduce the child care credit and add that money to the lump sum parents get per kid, possibly bumping it up to $5,000.
Research on increases to the child tax credit has shown a small effect on moms’ labor force participation, Darling told me. For example, the temporary expansion of the child tax credit in 2021 led to a reduction in employment among mothers with low levels of education, according to one 2024 study.
But for most mothers — even those who might like to stay home — an extra $3,000 per kid isn’t enough to counteract the powerful forces that have transformed the American workforce over the last half-century.
“Our expectations about what a middle-class life is like have changed”
Some of the most pressing forces are economic. “Our expectations about what a middle-class life is like have changed to some degree” since the 1950s, Tara Watson, the director of the Center for Economic Security and Opportunity at the Brookings Institution, told me. Houses have gotten larger and more expensive. There’s a greater expectation that kids will go to college, which also costs a lot of money. Extracurriculars like youth sports are pricier and more regimented than they once were.
If you wanted to make it easier for families to get by on one income, you’d have to make that income bigger by raising wages, some experts say.
“The federal minimum wage hasn’t been raised since 2009,” Holder told me. Raising that would exert upward pressure on low-wage jobs in general, putting more money in parents’ pockets. While Republicans have not generally supported minimum wage increases, one advocate of stay-at-home parenthood, Sen. Hawley, is sponsoring a bill that would boost the federal minimum to $15 an hour.
But there’s a catch. Some believe that the transition to dual-earner families happened not because of rising costs, but because of rising incomes. It sounds counterintuitive, but Darling has laid out the case, citing the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin. Essentially, wages began to rise in the years after WWII, especially in fields like office work that were more open to women than factory labor had been.
Rising wages gave moms an increasing incentive to work — if they stayed home, they’d be leaving more and more money on the table. (Some research also posits that women are more likely to work outside the home when their potential earnings outstrip the cost of child care.) As Darling put it to me, “it might not be worth it for me to take a job when it’s $10 an hour, but it might be worth it to me when it’s $15.”
If more women started working in part because of rising wages, then boosting wages even more might incentivize even more women to work. Instead, the only way to get more women to stay home, some say, would be to pay them to do just that.
What’s the going rate for giving up your career?
It’s not unheard of: According to the Times, Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) has introduced a bill that would pay stay-at-home parents for providing child care, an approach that’s been proposed by some liberals as well. The bill would allow subsidies that currently go to child care providers through the federal Child Care & Development Block Grant to go to family members instead.
The idea of compensating family members for providing care isn’t new, or unique to Republicans — a number of states, including New Jersey, offer payment for what’s known as family, friend, and neighbor care. But subsidy rates tend to be very low, and some family members who receive them say they’re not even enough to cover the cost of what children need (like diapers and food), let alone enough to provide someone with a living wage.
If you really wanted lots and lots of American moms to leave paid work for stay-at-home care, you’d have to pay them more — a lot more.
That’s because you’re not just replacing their income (which, in 45 percent of cases, pays the majority of bills in the household); you’re also working against 75 years of American culture.
A hundred years ago, many American women would have been very happy to take money to stay home, said Alice Evans, a senior lecturer at King’s College London who writes about gender roles across societies. Their society already idealized (white) stay-at-home motherhood and they gained prestige and status from their role as moms. Today, however, “women see success and status in having a career.”
“Are we giving them a million dollars?”
That success has been very real, and goes beyond pure economics. When American women entered the workplace, they achieved greater independence and the ability to leave bad marriages. Many found new social relationships and new sources of meaning and fulfillment. Women gained more power in society, more seats in Congress and on corporate boards, and more rights (though none of this came without struggle or backlash).
In a 2023 McKinsey report on women in the workplace, 80 percent of women said they wanted to be promoted, the same share as men. A full 96 percent said their career was important to them.
To get women to drop out of the workforce, then, the government would need to give them enough money to overcome the powerful incentives, both financial and social, that drive them to work. “Maybe if someone offered me a million, I’d stop doing my Substack,” Evans joked.
When I asked Goldin, who won the Nobel in 2023 for her work on women’s employment, whether policies like baby bonuses or larger child tax credits would convince moms to stay home, she replied, “Are we giving them a million dollars?”
What if even $1 million isn’t enough?
Obviously neither Evans nor Goldin has studied whether giving moms a check for $1 million would convince them to stay home with their kids. Even in today’s inflationary times, that number is basically a shorthand for a lot of money.
The point is, if you want mothers to give up all the benefits they get from working, you’re going to have to make it really financially attractive. And that’s expensive.
If there are about 25 million working moms in the US, giving each one a million dollars would cost the US about $25 trillion, an amount that dwarfs even the $2.8 trillion Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is projected to cost the country over the next 10 years. Costs grow even more if the $1 million is an annual payout rather than a one-time sum. Paying only moms in the labor force without offering the same sum to moms already caring for kids at home also seems unfair — including the around 9 million stay-at-home moms in the US would boost the total even further.
“There’s really no way to consider having even a fraction of those women withdraw from the labor force without it affecting the American economy”
And that’s all before we factor men into the equation. A two-parent home with a stay-at-home mom requires another person to be the sole breadwinner — according to a lot of socially conservative thinkers, that person should be a man, ideally a husband.
But that puts a lot of pressure on young men, many of whom aren’t even sure they want to get married, let alone bear the sole financial responsibility for a family, Evans pointed out. “It’s not just about giving women a million,” she said. How much would you have to pay men to go back to a 1950s nuclear family model, in which the entire burden of providing for a family rested on their shoulders?
Getting a large number of moms to quit their jobs would also have indirect costs. The 25 million mothers working today are treating patients, teaching kids, selling products, and contributing to the country’s GDP in innumerable ways. “There’s really no way to consider having even a fraction of those women withdraw from the labor force without it affecting the American economy,” Holder said.
Trump and members of his administration have at times hinted that shrinking the American economy is acceptable if it allows the country to return to its manufacturing past. But tariffs purportedly designed to bring manufacturing jobs back home (and, some hope, bring men back to their former position of dominance in families and society) have been so unpopular that the administration has had to walk many of them back. It’s hard to imagine that tanking the economy to get moms back in the home would fare much better.
There are also surprisingly popular cultural forces — think tradwife influencers — encouraging women to prioritize stay-at-home motherhood, but it’s a campaign that’s unlikely to succeed at scale, due to cultural fragmentation and the hyperpersonalization of social media. “It’s much, much harder for, say, government to change people’s values” than it might have been in the past, Evans said, “because we’re not all watching the same shows.”
There are, of course, other options for supporting American families. If policymakers wanted to help moms with the costs and challenges of raising kids, they could institute national paid leave programs, Holder said. They could also make child care more accessible and affordable.
In surveys, a significant minority of moms say the best setup for them would actually be to work part-time. If we wanted to make part-time work easier for parents, we could tackle unpredictable part-time schedules that make it hard for workers, especially at the lower end of the wage spectrum, to balance work and child care, Darling said.
All this would probably cost less than $25 trillion. But if what Republicans want is to get moms back in the home, they’re going to have to pay up. I will take my million in cash.
Broadcom is just hell bent on being the absolute worst at every turn. It's like their management was replaced by WOTC alumni.
After sending cease-and-desist letters to VMware users whose support contracts had expired and who subsequently declined to subscribe to one of Broadcom’s VMware bundles, Broadcom has started the process of conducting audits on former VMware customers.
Broadcom stopped selling VMware perpetual licenses in November 2023 in favor of pushing a small number of VMware SKUs that feature multiple VMware offerings. Since Broadcom is forcefully bundling VMware products, the costs associated with running VMware have skyrocketed, with customers frequently citing 300 percent price hikes and some firms claiming even larger increases. As a result, some VMware users have opted to keep using VMware perpetual licenses, even though Broadcom refuses to renew most of those clients’ support services.
This year, Broadcom started sending such VMware users cease-and-desist letters [PDF], telling organizations to stop using any maintenance releases/updates, minor releases, major releases/upgrades extensions, enhancements, patches, bug fixes, or security patches (except for zero-day security patches) that VMware issued since the user’s support contract ended.
Battery electrode materials need to do a lot of things well. They need to be conductors to get charges to and from the ions that shuttle between the electrodes. They also need to have an open structure that allows the ions to move around before they reach a site where they can be stored. The storage of lots of ions also causes materials to expand, creating mechanical stresses that can cause the structure of the electrode material to gradually decay.
Because it's hard to get all of these properties from a single material, many electrodes are composite materials, with one chemical used to allow ions into and out of the electrode, another to store them, and possibly a third that provides high conductivity. Unfortunately, this can create new problems, with breakdowns at the interfaces between materials slowly degrading the battery's capacity.
Now, a team of researchers is proposing a material that seemingly does it all. It's reasonably conductive, it allows lithium ions to move around and find storage sites, and it's made of cheap and common elements. Perhaps best of all, it undergoes self-healing, smoothing out damage across charge/discharge cycles.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The head of the federal government agency that oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac wants the mortgage giants to consider accepting a homebuyer's cryptocurrency holdings in their criteria for buying mortgages from banks. William Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie and Freddie, ordered the agencies Wednesday to prepare a proposal for consideration of crypto as an asset for reserves when they assess risks in single-family home loans.
Pulte also instructed the agencies that their mortgage risk assessments should not require cryptocurrency assets to be converted to U.S. dollars. And only crypto assets that "can be evidenced and stored on a U.S.-regulated centralized exchange subject to all applicable laws" are to be considered by the agencies in their proposal, Pulte wrote in a written order, effective immediately. Pulte was sworn in as the head of FHFA in March. Public records show that as of January 2025, Pulte's spouse owned between $500,000 and $1 million of bitcoin and a similar amount of Solana's SOL token. [...]
The policy change is meant to encourage banks to expand how they gauge borrowers' creditworthiness, in hopes that more aspiring homebuyers can qualify for a home loan. It also recognizes that cryptocurrencies have grown in popularity as an alternative to traditional investments, such as bonds and stocks. The agencies have to come up with their proposals "as soon as reasonably practical," according to the order. "This is a big win for advocates of cryptocurrencies who want crypto to be treated the same way as other assets are," said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin.
Currently, stock investments are treated as qualifying assets that count toward reserves that banks want borrowers to have. But assets that are more volatile, like individual stocks or crypto, may be discounted by lenders, Fairweather noted. "As long as lenders are appropriately discounting crypto based on volatility, it's fine that crypto investments count toward reserves," she said.
Danielle Hale, chief economist at Realtor.com, added: "If Fannie and Freddie are going to accept cryptocurrency as collateral, that's a strong incentive for banks to shift their practices. Because people who might otherwise have to sell cryptocurrency to qualify -- and maybe that's a deal-breaker for them now -- under this new policy, they can qualify. It sort of expands the potential pool of eligible buyers."
Psylo, a new privacy-focused iOS browser by Mysk, aims to defeat digital fingerprinting by isolating each browser tab with its own IP address, unique fingerprinting defenses, and proxy-based encryption. "Psylo stands out as it is the only WebKit-based iOS browser that truly isolates tabs," Tommy Mysk told The Register. "It's not only about separate storage and cookies. Psylo goes beyond that."
"This is why we call tabs 'silos.' It applies unique anti-fingerprinting measures per silo, such as canvas randomization. This way two Psylo tabs opening the same website would appear as though they originated on two different devices to the opened website." From the report: The company claims Psylo therefore offers better privacy than a VPN because the virtual networks mask the user's IP address but generally don't alter the data used for fingerprinting. Psylo, for example, will adjust the browser's time zone and browser language to match the geolocation of each proxy, resulting in more entropy that means fingerprints created by gathering data from silos will appear to be different.
The Mysk devs' post states that some privacy-focused browsers like Brave also implement anti-fingerprinting measures like canvas randomization, but those are more effective on the desktop macOS app due to Apple's iOS restrictions. They claim that they were able to achieve better results on iOS by using a client-side JavaScript solution. Mysk designed Psylo to minimize the information available to its maker. It doesn't log personally identifiable information or browsing data that the curious could use to identify the user, the company claims, noting that it also doesn't have customer payment information, which is handled by Apple. There are no user accounts, only randomized identifiers to indicate active subscriptions. According to Tommy Mysk, the only subscriber data kept is bandwidth usage, which is necessary to prevent abuse.
"We aggregate bandwidth usage based on a randomly generated ID that is created when a subscription is made," Mysk said. "The randomly generated ID is associated with the Apple subscription transaction. Apple doesn't share the identity of users making App Store purchases with developers." Asked whether Apple could identify users, Mysk said, "Theoretically and given a court order, Apple can figure out the randomly generated ID of the user in question. If we were to hand out the data associated with the randomly generated ID, it would only be the bandwidth usage of that user in the current month, and two months in the past. Older data is automatically deleted. "We don't associate any identifiable information with the randomly generated ID. We don't store IP addresses at all in every component of our system. We don't store websites visited by our users at all." The browser is only available on iOS and iPadOS, but Mysk says an Android version could be developed if there's enough interest. It costs $9.99 per month or $99 per year in the U.S.
Republicans in Congress aren’t doing much these days, opting to just let President Donald Trump do whatever he wants. That apparently frees them up to spend all their time launching investigations into the mental fitness of former President Joe Biden. And because this ongoing probe is clearly the most urgent issue facing America today, Trump has waived executive privilege for nine Biden aides. This means they will be forced to testify before Congress and answer whatever unhinged questions people like Sen. Ron Johnson and Rep. James Comey come up with.
President Joe Biden continues to live rent-free in Donald Trump’s head.
It’s all part of Trump’s ceaseless and pathetic attempts to undo the Biden presidency. So now there are four congressional investigations into whether Biden is old. The Department of Justice also launched an investigation, at Trump’s demand, to determine whether Biden signed things with an autopen because apparently, if he did, it’s all unconstitutional? It’s not at all clear what the goal is here, save for dragging Biden’s name through the mud to support whatever unhinged conspiracy theories Congress and the DOJ are pursuing.
Executive privilege ensures that presidents and their advisers can be candid in discussing issues without worrying that those communications will become public. This makes sense, because you do actually want a president and advisers who fully weigh multiple options and engage in frank debate. But it isn’t an absolute privilege. Congress has the power to seek information from the executive branch in the course of investigations, and since congressional Republicans are engaged in a full-court press into Biden’s mental state, they want his aides to appear before them and testify. As with Trump’s autopen theory, it’s not clear what this would achieve. Biden was president for four years, and the things he did during those four years cannot be magicked away by pretending that he wasn’t.
It isn’t that Trump doesn’t have the power to do this. Unlike so many other things he’s doing, presidents do possess the ability to waive an assertion of executive privilege made by a former president. It’s what Biden did when the Jan. 6 committee sought White House communications related to the insurrection, calling it a “unique and extraordinary” circumstance, which, well, yes. Learning how much the president and his advisers participated in the planning of an insurrection is sort of necessary.
The myriad investigations into Biden, on the other hand, are a nonsense sham. Nevertheless, Trump waived privilege for the Biden aides, saying there are “exceptional circumstances” because they are investigating whether Biden aides “concealed information regarding his fitness … and may have unconstitutionally exercised those powers themselves to aid in their concealment.”
Come on.
Unsurprisingly, Trump used to have a much more expansive view of executive privilege. He invoked it to try to prevent Congress from seeing the full Mueller report about Russian interference in the 2016 election. He tried to use it to prevent Congress from questioning former Attorney General William Barr and former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross about the Trump administration’s attempt to add a citizenship question to the census.
Even after losing the 2020 election, Trump kept trying to use executive privilege to shield his wrongdoings. In 2021, he sued the House to stop Congress from accessing White House papers about Trump’s actions and communications around Jan. 6 and to prevent the testimony of his former adviser Steve Bannon. He also claimed executive privilege to get America’s Most Malleable Judge, Aileen Cannon, to indulge his claim and appoint a special master to review the classified documents Trump illegally retained and then hid in a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago.
Executive privilege is also the basis for Trump’s refusal to even explain what the Department of Government Efficiency is. In a lawsuit brought by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics about whether DOGE is subject to the Freedom of Information Act, Trump asserted the privilege to say that even asking what kind of entity DOGE is interferes with the separation of powers. It’s a ridiculous argument, but one that the conservative majority at the Supreme Court seems fine with.
So, to recap: Determining if Joe Biden occasionally mixed up someone’s name or used an autopen is a national security crisis that demands testimony from everyone surrounding Biden. Determining if Donald Trump worked with Russia to influence the 2016 election and his level of involvement in the Jan. 6 insurrection is no big deal, and it is unfair of Congress to even ask about it. Call it executive privilege for me, but not for thee.
An email Google recently sent to Android users.
