David Sacks: Anthropic and OpenAI are already free to “pace the frontier” and should do so for business reasons, instead of first demanding a preferred regulatory framework

Mr. Sacks is, among other things, Co-Chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

From his personal Xitter account, Sept. 13:

Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead. You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement. I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible. But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier. Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want. Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well. So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it. If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.

— David Sacks (@DavidSacks) September 13, 2026

 Continues:

....By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.

I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.

But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.

Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.

Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.

So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.

If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop. 

As far as I'm concerned, if an AI model isn't powerful enough to be used in a mutually assured destruction scenario with China, then what good is it? 

As noted introducing an earlier post:

Whether or not this means the end of the breakneck speed of AI build-out that we've seen over the last three years is am open question. On that question my frame of reference is China agreeing to every CO₂ curtailment procedure proposed by various transnational bodies as long as said proposals only applied to the West.

What this development means for India, Europe and other lesser developed (AI-wise) places is also an open question. Are Amodei, Altman and Musk pulling up the ladder after they've scaled the heights? We shall see. 

Also: "Anthropic’s Amodei says China presents ‘toughest dilemma’ for his proposed AI slowdown"

"Anthropic's AI Warning To Weigh On Stocks As Contracts Traded On Hyperliquid Slide"

From ZeroHedge, September 13: 

Coordinated calls by the top AI execs, including Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and even Elon Musk, to slow development of the technology are likely to weigh on chipmaker and supply-chain stocks in the near term, Bloomberg reports, but will probably have limited long-term impact as spending on computing infrastructure remains strong, market watchers say, at least until the bond market cracks and credits refuse to fund the ROIC-free black hole that is the AI capex tsunami.

Semiconductor makers and other artificial intelligence-linked stocks may bear the brunt of any initial selloff on Monday, while investors assess whether a more cautious approach to developing advanced models will crimp earnings. Real-time price trackers on Hyperliquid indicate that both OpenAi and Anthropic are already facing notable losses following the Dario memo.  SK Hynix contracts also slumped early Sunday on Hyperliquid. By 2 p.m. in Singapore, the contracts were trading down roughly 2.5% for the day.

Source: 0xcarlisle 

Still, with demand for chips, energy and computing power continuing to outstrip supply, weakness will likely prove short-lived.

Calls for restraint have grown in the industry, with Anthropic Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei saying Saturday that the company would introduce additional safeguards, including independent third-party evaluations, and urged the broader industry to slow the pace of development of their most advanced models. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman backed the proposal, while xAI’s Elon Musk said “Dario is right.”
At the same time, investors including Gary Tan, a portfolio manager at Allspring Global Investments in Singapore, are doubtful the latest developments will have long-lasting effects on the industry.

“It may cause some short-term pressure, but it’s unlikely to derail the longer-term AI trade,” Tan said. “AI development is still at a relatively early stage, and I’m not sure the rest of the ecosystem is willing to accept the current pecking order and slow down while the technology continues to evolve so rapidly.”

Concerns over the vast sums being poured into AI have weighed on technology stocks as investors question whether earnings can justify soaring infrastructure costs. The scrutiny has left high-valuation shares linked to the technology particularly vulnerable, with signs of increased spending or weaker returns triggering selloffs. Plunging token costs have emerged as an especially sore point, as frontier models are unlikely to ever be able to grow into their massive revenue forecasts unless Chinese open-source models are hindered, which many say is the ulterior motive behind the coordinated push by AI execs. And should the likes of Anthropic and OpenAi be unable to fund the trillions in committed capital, the entire AI bubble can burst, led by a collapse in bond prices as creditors end up with major haircuts. 

As part of the aggressive repricing in AI economics, the Nasdaq has dropped more than 4% from the record notched in June, while a gauge of chip shares in the US has slumped 14% and Asian tech stocks have slid almost 8%. The S&P 500 and MSCI’s gauge of global shares have both edged up about 0.6% in the period.

Some investors argue that a slower pace of AI development could ultimately be positive for the industry by giving companies more time to extract returns from infrastructure already being built.

“The three CEOs agreeing to pace things does not really change the money being spent on chips, power and infrastructure. In fact, it extends the development timeline,” said Billy Leung, an investment strategist at Global X Management in Sydney. “If commercialization and adoption keep growing while the pace of new capability eases off a bit, that actually helps the shift from spending money to build things towards making money from what’s already built — e.g., monetization.”

Sentiment toward Asian tech firms was already being challenged as traders firmed bets of a Fed rate hike this week and an increase in global borrowing costs this month, threatening to crimp profits. Tech stock valuations may also come under more scrutiny because they assume not only strong demand but a relentless pace of model development, Charu Chanana, chief investment strategist at Saxo Markets in Singapore, said....

....MORE 

Meanwhile, In San Francisco Rival Squatters Battle Each Other Over Prime Property

From the San Francisco Standard, September 10:

‘Trying to steal a house’: How Sea Cliff was engulfed in SF’s strangest property dispute
Years after a home’s owners moved out, new people with conflicting deeds moved in. Now the neighborhood has reached a boiling point. 

In September 2025, a San Francisco real estate agent named Cathy Robles received an email from a man looking to sell a house. She looked up the address — 250 32nd Ave. — and could not believe her luck. It was in Sea Cliff.

Robles and her husband have sold houses in the city for more than two decades, but never one in Sea Cliff — the ritzy neighborhood on the bluff above the Pacific Ocean that recently set a San Francisco record for price per square foot: $4,574. The average Sea Cliff home is worth just shy of $5 million, according to Zillow. The biggest deal Robles had done was $3.5 million. Selling this home would be a career milestone. 

The seller’s name was Brandon Aadee. On the phone, Aadee sounded professional and clearly knew his real estate lingo, Robles said. He told her he needed to sell quickly and was willing to go under market to do it. But Aadee was hard to pin down and kept making excuses for why they couldn’t meet in person. Robles followed up, but he went silent. 

Eleven months later, in early August, Aadee resurfaced. He told Robles over email he was ready to sell, but there were conditions: no open houses, no “for sale” signs. “I’m in danger of defaulting on my taxes,” he wrote. “I want it sold very fast, like last week.”

Robles thought this was strange. But she was holding out hope for a Sea Cliff sale amid an AI-fueled housing market that has gone berserk with “bidmaxxing” wars, all-cash transactions, and offers millions over asking. So she started asking Aadee questions....

....MUCH MORE 

"Anthropic’s Amodei says China presents ‘toughest dilemma’ for his proposed AI slowdown"

From CNBC, September 13: 

• Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said the “toughest dilemma” about his proposal to slow the advancement of AI is what happens if China does not do the same.
• Amodei published an essay on Saturday urging AI companies to slow how quickly they improve their most advanced models.
• The essay landed during a pivotal time for the AI industry, which is facing public backlash over its data centers and comes amid former-Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon’s warning about the threat to humanity.  

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said Sunday that the “toughest dilemma” about his proposal to slow the advancement of artificial intelligence is what happens if adversarial nations, namely China, choose not to do the same.

“The more long-term thing would be working together to put a speed limit on the rate of of AI progress,” Amodei told CBS News’ “Sunday Morning.” “I think that’s going to be very difficult because the incentives to pull ahead and the military advantage that you get from that are so large. And honestly, I don’t know if it’s possible, but we should we should try.”

Amodei published an essay on Saturday urging AI companies to slow how quickly they improve their most advanced models, a move that followed stark warnings from industry researchers last week about the technology’s growing potential to cause catastrophic harm. An Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, announced he quit his job out of concern that the company, and its chief rival, OpenAI, are “gambling with our lives.” 

Amodei’s essay landed during a pivotal time for the AI industry, which is facing public backlash over its data centers and mounting calls for regulation out of Washington. Anthropic and OpenAI are also gearing up for potentially historic IPOs, though neither company has set an official date for a debut. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Saturday that the company will likely not go public this year, in part because of concerns around safety.

“Right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public,” Altman said in an interview with Fortune.

Altman’s relationship with Amodei, who defected from OpenAI to start Anthropic, has been strained in recent years. But Altman expressed support for Amodei’s essay in a post on X on Saturday, writing that he agrees on the need to “pace the frontier.”

Several other industry leaders, including Demis Hassabis, the chair of Google DeepMind, and Elon Musk, CEO of both Tesla and SpaceX, also welcomed Amodei’s proposal.

“Dario’s essay points towards the right path forward,” Hassabis wrote in a post on X on Saturday. “The details need working through, but the direction is correct for meeting this critical moment.”

In the essay, Amodei proposed a three-step plan aimed at slowing the pace of development without “sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States’ lead in AI.”

Amodei said Anthropic has “unilaterally” committed to the first step of the plan, which grants third-party evaluators employee-level access to the company to verify safety practices and report incidents. The second step encourages leading AI companies within democratic countries to coordinate and establish common safety standards, and the third calls for coordination between democratic governments and authoritarian governments.

“Dario is right that there should be some oversight,” Musk wrote in a post on X early Sunday morning. “Peer review of AI by competitors is the right way to start this off.”

Musk, who has for years warned about the potential risks of AI, was quick to express support for Amodei on Saturday....

....MUCH MORE 

"Obama Urges Democrats to Move A.I. Oversight to the Center of Their Agenda"

From the New York Times, September 13: 

During a private fund-raiser, the former president warned that the technology could be “dangerous” if not managed urgently and with a clear plan.

Former President Barack Obama warned during a recent private fund-raising event that artificial intelligence technology could be “dangerous” if not properly managed, as he implored Democrats to aggressively develop political and governing agendas to prioritize the issue in the coming years.

In his remarks on Thursday, which have not been previously reported, Mr. Obama urged House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York, to assemble a clear framework for a public conversation about A.I. policy, should Democrats win back the House in the midterm elections, according to a partial transcript provided by Mr. Obama’s office.

He also suggested that candidates running for president in 2028 ought to make A.I. one of their “central agendas” and “have a very clear plan” for responding to safety and economic concerns around the technology.

The recommendations from the former president amount to some of his most detailed comments yet about A.I. as a political issue for his party. At a moment when President Trump continues to downplay concerns about the technology, some Democrats see an opportunity for the party to draw a clear contrast in the midterms and beyond on an issue of growing significance. In a Democratic Party with no clear leader, many look to Mr. Obama for guidance, and his comments carry considerable weight.

The remarks come amid escalating worries about the risks associated with A.I. development, as well as growing calls for lawmakers and politicians to do more to tackle the topic. Some A.I. industry leaders are now calling for a slowdown after a summer in which swarms of misaligned A.I. agents broke free from their containers and proceeded to scheme against their owners, cheat on tests and hack outside companies.

At the fund-raiser on Thursday, a closed-door event in Manhattan organized by the campaign arm of House Democrats, Mr. Obama and Mr. Jeffries spoke for nearly an hour in front of party donors and lawmakers, according to four people familiar with the event, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private gathering.

“Once you are speaker, I would strongly urge that the Democrats put together a framework for a very public conversation,” Mr. Obama told Mr. Jeffries, according to the transcript. Mr. Jeffries had asked him a question about how Democrats should address A.I. in a Congress that has taken little action on the issue, according to two of the people.

“This is something that is moving very fast in private hands, and if we don’t get on top of it, I think can be dangerous,” Mr. Obama said. “If we do get on top of it, I do think it’s beneficial. I genuinely think it’s going to accelerate, for example, drug development in ways that can help us cure diseases. I do think that this can help us figure out pathways for a clean energy future.”

The former president often spoke in general terms on Thursday, rather than drilling down on specific policies, according to the transcript. And he planted himself firmly in a middle ground in the heated debate over A.I., saying he considered himself neither an “accelerationist” nor a “doomer.”

One challenge facing Democrats as they chart a path forward on A.I. is speaking in one voice on the issue. The tug of war over how to regulate A.I. has been more divisive among Democrats than Republicans, who are generally more in alignment. Some Democratic politicians have called for more A.I. regulation, while others have received millions of dollars in support from groups tied to the industry’s biggest players.

A.I. is becoming a larger part of the country’s political calculus heading into the midterms. This year’s elections have been flooded with money from A.I. companies and allied groups. And anxiety about the technology, a rare issue that many Republican and Democratic voters can agree on, has peaked in recent days after a researcher at the A.I. company Anthropic loudly and publicly resigned, writing in a viral social media post that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

Mr. Jeffries explicitly mentioned the resignation in his question to Mr. Obama, according to one of the people familiar with the event....

....MUCH MORE 

"Exclusive: Sam Altman addresses AI doomsday fears in new interview" (no IPO in 2026)

SoftBank hardest hit.

An exclusive at Fortune magazine, September 12: 

AI concerns hit a fever pitch this week when an Anthropic employee warned on X that all of humanity could be destroyed by the technology and that major frontier labs were “gambling with our lives.” 

The probability of doom, or “p(doom),” is real and has been publicly discussed in the AI community for years. Elon Musk’s p(doom) has hovered between 10% and 20%, while Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s has been slightly higher at 10% to 25%.

But the explosive moment was reminiscent of COVID circa February 2020, when the public finally took seriously what the scientific community had been saying all along: This is no joke.

I flew to San Francisco to find the person best positioned to answer where AI is today, and whether it can be built safely ahead. On Friday, I had an exclusive hour-long sit-down with OpenAI’s Sam Altman, where we discussed the real risk AI poses to humanity, how quickly the models are developing, whether or not more powerful AI can be controlled, and what he would do if he realized AI could not be built safely. We also discussed the upcoming IPO, which he said is “ill-timed” given the safety concerns and won’t take place until 2027.

Altman told me no gamble with humanity is OK, and that he’d have no problem standing up to his investors if he needed to pause or stop AI development altogether....

....MORE, including video. 

The writer is editor-in-chief of the magazine. 

Recently: 

AI Apocalypse: Whatever Happened To The Nudge People?

"Amodei, Altman, Musk Call for Slowing AI Model Development"

"Amodei, Altman, Musk Call for Slowing AI Model Development"

Whether or not this means the end of the breakneck speed of AI build-out that we've seen over the last three years is am open question. On that question my frame of reference is China agreeing to every CO₂ curtailment procedure proposed by various transnational bodies as long as said proposals only applied to the West.

What this development means for India, Europe and other lesser developed (AI-wise) places is also an open question. Are Amodei, Altman and Musk pulling up the ladder after they've scaled the heights? We shall see. 

From Bloomberg, September 12: 

Leaders of the world’s biggest artificial intelligence platforms said it’s time to slow the development pace of their most advanced — and most lucrative — models, citing escalating risks of the technology.

Anthropic PBC Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei issued a lengthy blog post Saturday saying his company would implement new safety steps such as third-party evaluators while calling on the industry to support a broader downshift.

OpenAI chief Sam Altman quickly pledged to adopt Amodei’s suggestion of “independent evaluators with employee-like access,” while Elon Musk, who runs xAI Corp., wrote, “Dario is right.”

While all three leaders have over the years warned of the risks of AI, an actual coordinated slowdown has little precedent in a cutthroat industry that has historically cranked out one product after another in the name of boosting user engagement, grabbing market share and striving for sales gains.

But the anxiety about severe AI risks has begun to enter the mainstream, driven in part by this week’s high-profile resignation of an Anthropic researcher over existential fears that his company was acting irresponsibly. It was the latest in a series of increasingly dire warnings from within the industry that AI is evolving so quickly that it poses a growing threat to national security and the global economy.

The surge in safety concerns surrounding AI coincides with a growing backlash against the technology in the US, fueled in part by objections to the strain on local resources imposed by new data centers needed to support the technology. Concerns that AI is driving up electricity bills and potentially taking away jobs has made it a central issue in the November midterm elections.

It’s unclear how far the leading AI companies — which are fierce rivals themselves and also face stiff competition from Chinese firms — will go in imposing new limits or safety checks.

Demis Hassabis, the chief scientist at Alphabet Inc. and co-founder of Google DeepMind, said in a post on X Saturday that “the direction is correct” in Amodei’s essay, but the “details need working through.”

It’s also not clear whether antitrust enforcers would allow companies to pace development in some kind of coordinated manner. Then there’s the question for markets, which have ridden the AI frenzy to new heights: How would investors eager for margins and profits react to the idea of deceleration?

Amodei cited two main factors for his new caution: AI’s ability to improve itself and the recent incident involving OpenAI and Hugging Face, where a swarm of AI agents collaborated to breach a third-party website.

“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” he wrote Saturday in a blog post. “Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.”

But he also said that any slowdown must be balanced with the reality of competition.

“To be clear, pacing does not mean halting model training or technical progress, but ensuring companies take adequate time to align and safeguard their models, and for third party evaluators to confirm this,” Amodei wrote....

....MUCH MORE 

"Family furious after company sends girl Kim Jong Un costume instead of Mary Poppins"

From the New York Post, August 26:

A young student hoping to step into Book Week in the most delightful way has been dealt a cruel blow after her mother received the wrong costume just days before the parade.

While planning to attend her Melbourne school festivities as the iconic Mary Poppins, CostumeBox instead sent the 10-year-old girl a Kim Jong Un costume.

The family has been left in a scramble, racing to replace the Supreme Leader of North Korea ensemble before the parade takes place on Friday.

A receipt of the order shows that it was placed on the 23rd of August, with the retailer offering same-day and express post delivery options across the country.

The “Musical Nanny Deluxe” costume that the youngster initially wanted retails for $60 and comes with a coat, skirt, hat and a bow tie.

It’s an easy, wholesome Book Week win with just an umbrella, shoes and stockings needed to complete the overall look....

....MORE 

And somewhere a little boy is saying "Mom, What the hell is this?":

 

"Rope, twine and thread: Invisible technologies of the Stone Age"

A topic near and dear.*

From Knowable Magazine, September 10:

Missing from the archaeological record, fiber innovations like string played a huge role in the daily lives of our ancestors. Researchers are working to weave together new insights from the traces they left behind. 

When an abstract-looking ivory artifact emerged from the Hohle Fels cave in southern Germany in 2015, archaeologists didn’t know quite what to make of it. Previously, this same cave had yielded what may be the world’s oldest musical flutes, as well as one of humanity’s earliest pieces of figurative art, the iconic Venus of Hohle Fels. At first glance, this strange new discovery — a 20-centimeter rod perforated with four small holes — seemed comparatively unspectacular. But it has since revealed far more about the lives of Europe’s prehistoric hunter-gatherers than its unassuming appearance would have suggested.

Fashioned from the tusk of a mammoth more than 35,000 years ago, this perforated baton — a type of artifact called a lochstab — was initially interpreted as a symbolic object associated with prestige or power. But Nicholas Conard, whose team discovered the item, wasn’t so sure.

Noticing that each of the baton’s holes was lined with carefully carved spiral grooves, he began to suspect that the lochstab might have been a tool used by twisting some other material through these perforations. “If you’re pushing something through a hole and rotating it ... you’re very quickly in the world of fiber,” says Conard, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany. Sure enough, when he and his colleagues tried threading cattail fibers through these holes, they found that the grooves helped to orient the strands. Within 10 minutes, the group had woven the fibers into five meters of thick, strong rope.

Yet while these experiments might have helped to solve one archaeological mystery, they also highlighted a much larger problem. The inhabitants of Hohle Fels must have manufactured significant quantities of rope, yet none of it has survived, and all that remains is the most durable component of this ancient production system — the ivory lochstab.

“There’s certainly a lot of bias in what we’re viewing in the archaeological record, because we are focusing on the things that preserve,” says paleoanthropologist Emma Finestone at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. As a consequence, archaeologists rely heavily on stone tools and bone artifacts to reconstruct our prehistory, while objects made from less durable plant and animal products remain largely overlooked. Yet these soft technologies played a huge role in shaping the survival strategies and daily lives of our ancestors.

“We’re missing 90 percent-plus of what is happening during a [prehistoric] day, and a lot of that uses technology that we don’t think about,” says Bruce Hardy, a paleoanthropologist at Kenyon College in Ohio. The problem facing archaeologists, therefore, is how to study a technology that they can’t actually find.

The rise of soft technology
The oldest surviving example of human-made fiber is a six-millimeter-long piece of string made by Neanderthals some 50,000 years ago. It’s an exceedingly rare example of preserved ancient fiber, and how it managed to withstand the ravages of time isn’t clear. Discovered by Hardy and his colleagues at the Abri du Maras rock shelter in France, this small length of three-ply cord indicates that fiber has deep roots in the human lineage.

“This is probably a very old technology that goes way back much further than this, back to an ancestor shared by modern humans and Neanderthals,” Hardy says. In other words, more than half a million years ago.

So far the oldest evidence of fiber use dates back about 250,000 years, inferred from markings on stone tools from France and the Netherlands. The marks suggest the tools may have been hafted, or attached to a handle with some type of string or cord. While the bindings have long since decomposed, the traces they left behind hint that fiber technologies aided the survival of the prehistoric human species that occupied Europe long before Homo sapiens got a foothold on the continent 45,000 years ago.

The invention of hafting may represent a “revolutionary moment” in our technological history, says Veerle Rots, an archaeologist at the University of Liège in Belgium who led the experimental work on the Hohle Fels lochstab. “It fundamentally changes the use of stone tools and allows a whole range of new possibilities in how you’re conceptualizing a tool,” she says.

 

Using string or cord to attach stone tools to a handle or shaft — known as hafting — 

transformed the sharpened rocks into new instruments with expanded functions, 
including axes, arrows and spears. The stone dagger resembles one carried by Ötzi the Iceman.

A sharpened stone point, for example, suddenly becomes part of a hunting weapon when hafted onto a wooden shaft. A stone handaxe can be wielded with significantly greater force and from a wider range of angles once fastened onto a handle. What made cordage like rope, string and twine so transformative, therefore, was that it connected other technologies together to radically expand what prehistoric humans could build, carry and hunt.

The transport of stone for making tools, for instance, was an essential logistical operation that may have depended on soft materials from the very beginning. According to Finestone’s research, toolmaking hominins moved high-quality stones over long distances as early as 3 million years ago — cumbersome loads that would have been very difficult to move with bare hands alone....

....MUCH MORE 

*Previously in soft technology (although we didn't use that term): 

"How Bills of Exchange Went from a Way to Bring Textile Proceeds Home to the 'Foundation of Modern Commercial Banking'"

"What if the need for fabric, not food, in the face of a changing climate is what first tipped humanity towards agriculture?"
Clothing, very important, some links after the jump.

"Four Thousand Years Ago, Textile Traders Invented a Basic Social Technology: Mass Literacy" 

"Fashion, Maslow and Facebook's control of social"

Fellow Luddites! To The Looms!!! (or the spinning jennys, or...)

Chinese Media Sounds the Alarm on Rise of Robot Tailors in the US"
To paraphrase Clauswitz: 
"Trade is just the continuation of Politik by other means"

 "Historians Find Evidence of Recycling in Tudor Times" (but what about re-gifting?)"

  "....The Invention And Evolution Of Apparel In The World's Colder Climates."
    Continuing our pivot to fashion with the hope of garnering a Dolce & Gabbana sponsorship.

IARPA (like DARPA but for spies) Is Going Ahead With Its Embedded Wearables Program: Smart e-Pants

I Need A Yak 

And many, many more. 

AI Apocalypse: Whatever Happened To The Nudge People?

For our younger readers, "nudge" was a fad that came out of behavioral economics wherein people who wanted other people to bend to their will at least had the decency to pretend they weren't trying to coerce/manipulate their intended manipulees.

It was very popular in government circles ca. 2008 - 2023. At it's height in the twenty-teens you couldn't go a week without someone writing something about the topic. 

I miss those days.

I'm reminded of nudge because we now have this Jacob Coxon fellow telling us AI will kill everyone and disavowing any suggestion that his motives and presentation are anything but purely altruistic.

Here's a xeet from venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson we'll use as background:

Foreign accounts can drive the conversation on American AI policy. We have the data. Coxon's resignation post from Anthropic received 165M views and sparked a "groundswell of urgency over AI regulation in Congress" (per today's front page WSJ) Coxon's post reveals some interesting hidden patterns about who is amplifying our political debates online. It drew 76% of its reposts (spreading the news) from foreign countries. The top two were India and Indonesia. In contrast, when @ParkerThayer, an investigative researcher, posted his own analysis (expressing serious skepticism about the circumstances of the post and alleging that its amplification was coordinated), he got 6.6M views and drew most of its engagement from the U.S., with only 34% from foreign countries, led by Canada and the UK. Sure, people overseas have a stake in what the U.S. chooses to do on AI. But ultimately it is us Americans who will decide our own public policy. Don't be fooled by what's trending. A big thank you to @ElonMusk and X for making country of origin visible, which makes analyses like this even possible. Last year's “Great Unmasking" on X was the first time anyone shined a spotlight onto this subject. As much of our political conversation shifts online, it will be increasingly important to understand where engagement is coming from. Source (with more analyses of foreign influence): https://t.co/GduSKImETi

— Steve Jurvetson (@FutureJurvetson) September 11, 2026

Jurvetson continues:

....Coxon's post reveals some interesting hidden patterns about who is amplifying our political debates online.  It drew 76% of its reposts (spreading the news) from foreign countries. The top two were India and Indonesia. 

In contrast, when @ParkerThayer, an investigative researcher, posted his own analysis (expressing serious skepticism about the circumstances of the post and alleging that its amplification was coordinated), he got 6.6M views and drew most of its engagement from the U.S., with only 34% from foreign countries, led by Canada and the UK. 

Sure, people overseas have a stake in what the U.S. chooses to do on AI. But ultimately it is us Americans who will decide our own public policy. Don't be fooled by what's trending. 

A big thank you to @ElonMusk and X for making country of origin visible, which makes analyses like this even possible. Last year's “Great Unmasking" on X was the first time anyone shined a spotlight onto this subject. As much of our political conversation shifts online, it will be increasingly important to understand where engagement is coming from.

Source (with more analyses of foreign influence): DigitalBorders.com

Among other things this Parker Thayer fellow that Jurvetson references has published to X is this:

This post looks like the start of a VERY sophisticated and well-funded PR operation to get support for Democrats to regulate AI into oblivion. Let me show you how it works:
1.) This guy, with minimal followers and no previous account activity, goes to the Wall Street Journal which publishes an exclusive with quotes from him on his resignation 18 minutes BEFORE this post goes up. Planning was clearly done in advance.

2.) Within hours, it has tens of thousands of reposts and the account has 100k+ followers. The post is punchy, quotable, it almost seems professionally written. The first three accounts to quote tweet it all do so within 15 minutes of the initial posting. Remember, this account had basically zero engagement beforehand, so an organic reach explanation seems unlikely.

According to Grok those accounts are @_NathanCalvin (General Counsel at Encode AI), @peterwildeford (Head of Policy at the AI Policy Network), and @DKokotajlo (Head of the AI Futures Project), all of which are up-and-coming AI-Doomer policy advocacy nonprofits.

The AI Futures Project website says it is funded “primarily” by the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which says on its own website that it has advised Jaan Tallinn, Skype creator and one of the leading investors in Anthropic, to grant over $2.5 million to the AI Futures Project since 2024.

Encode AI says on its website that it is ALSO funded by the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which in turn says that it told Anthropic investor Jaan Tallinn to grant $516,000 to Encode AI in 2025.

And wouldn’t you know it, the Survival and Flourishing Fund ALSO says it told Jaan Tallinn to grant $2 million to the AI Policy Institute, the 501(c)(3) affiliate of the AI Policy Network, as well.

What are the odds that the first three quote tweets of Coxon’s post would all be major AI-restriction policy advocates funded generously by the same donor, who also happens to be one of the leading investors in, and a board member of, Anthropic, the company Coxon was resigning from? And all within 15 minutes of posting (two within ten)?

3.) Jacob Coxon doesn’t have much of a resume, but we do know that, in 2022, he got a $20,159 scholarship for the “long term future scholarship program” from the Good Ventures Foundation, one of the philanthropic vehicles of Dustin Moskovitz, a notorious AI-doomer who has spent tens if not hundreds of millions on policy advocacy to strictly regulate AI, while also being an Anthropic Investor himself.

It also just so happens that the 14th person to quote Coxon’s post was @MaxNadeau_ (27 minutes after posting) who is the program officer for the Technical AI Safety team at Coefficient Giving, another of Moskovitz’s philanthropic spending vehicles. Max is not a frequent poster, his last posts before quoting Coxon were before Labor Day, but he was remarkably quick off the mark for this one.

4.) Basically every major Democrat politician and candidate has suddenly glommed on to this post, and conveniently, as the people cry out foe answers, Bernie Sanders already has a bill written to “ban super intelligence” and regulate AI into oblivion, and will be releasing later this week. The bill, among many other things, will create “a new cabinet-level federal agency to safeguard the public from the dangers of artificial intelligence” that will be “advised by an Artificial Intelligence Advisory Board comprised of experts on artificial intelligence.” Do you think, perhaps, Anthropic and its many investors who fund AI policy advocacy might have interest in getting to place a pet “expert” on the board of an entity that dictates what AI is and isn’t allowed to do? And isn’t it fortuitous that this whistleblower came forward  with his oh-so scary stories so close in proximity to the release of the most radical piece of AI legislation ever introduced? 

This post looks like the start of a VERY sophisticated and well-funded PR operation to get support for Democrats to regulate AI into oblivion. Let me show you how it works: 1.) This guy, with minimal followers and no previous account activity, goes to the Wall Street Journal which publishes an exclusive with quotes from him on his resignation 18 minutes BEFORE this post goes up. Planning was clearly done in advance. 2.) Within hours, it has tens of thousands of reposts and the account has 100k+ followers. The post is punchy, quotable, it almost seems professionally written. The first three accounts to quote tweet it all do so within 15 minutes of the initial posting. Remember, this account had basically zero engagement beforehand, so an organic reach explanation seems unlikely. According to Grok those accounts are @_NathanCalvin (General Counsel at Encode AI), @peterwildeford (Head of Policy at the AI Policy Network), and @DKokotajlo (Head of the AI Futures Project), all of which are up-and-coming AI-Doomer policy advocacy nonprofits. The AI Futures Project website says it is funded “primarily” by the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which says on its own website that it has advised Jaan Tallinn, Skype creator and one of the leading investors in Anthropic, to grant over $2.5 million to the AI Futures Project since 2024. Encode AI says on its website that it is ALSO funded by the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which in turn says that it told Anthropic investor Jaan Tallinn to grant $516,000 to Encode AI in 2025. And wouldn’t you know it, the Survival and Flourishing Fund ALSO says it told Jaan Tallinn to grant $2 million to the AI Policy Institute, the 501(c)(3) affiliate of the AI Policy Network, as well. What are the odds that the first three quote tweets of Coxon’s post would all be major AI-restriction policy advocates funded generously by the same donor, who also happens to be one of the leading investors in, and a board member of, Anthropic, the company Coxon was resigning from? And all within 15 minutes of posting (two within ten)? 3.) Jacob Coxon doesn’t have much of a resume, but we do know that, in 2022, he got a $20,159 scholarship for the “long term future scholarship program” from the Good Ventures Foundation, one of the philanthropic vehicles of Dustin Moskovitz, a notorious AI-doomer who has spent tens if not hundreds of millions on policy advocacy to strictly regulate AI, while also being an Anthropic Investor himself. It also just so happens that the 14th person to quote Coxon’s post was @MaxNadeau_ (27 minutes after posting) who is the program officer for the Technical AI Safety team at Coefficient Giving, another of Moskovitz’s philanthropic spending vehicles. Max is not a frequent poster, his last posts before quoting Coxon were before Labor Day, but he was remarkably quick off the mark for this one. 4.) Basically every major Democrat politician and candidate has suddenly glommed on to this post, and conveniently, as the people cry out foe answers, Bernie Sanders already has a bill written to “ban super intelligence” and regulate AI into oblivion, and will be releasing later this week. The bill, among many other things, will create “a new cabinet-level federal agency to safeguard the public from the dangers of artificial intelligence” that will be “advised by an Artificial Intelligence Advisory Board comprised of experts on artificial intelligence.” Do you think, perhaps, Anthropic and its many investors who fund AI policy advocacy might have interest in getting to place a pet “expert” on the board of an entity that dictates what AI is and isn’t allowed to do? And isn’t it fortuitous that this whistleblower came forward with his oh-so scary stories so close in proximity to the release of the most radical piece of AI legislation ever introduced?

— Parker Thayer (@ParkerThayer) September 9, 2026

I'm not on X so finding and embedding what the denizens are posting is a pain in the butt. 
I will have to leave it to the natural curiosity of our readers to find more but in the meantime this is a small start.

And nudge? We have dozens of posts on the topic, if interested use the 'search blog' box, upper left. Among the hits that pop up in the search results is this from August 2013:

"Nudge Squad": White House Creating "Behavioral Insights Team" that Will Look for Ways to Subtly Influence People's Behavior to Get Us to All Act "Better"
Nudge Squad.
Sounds like a '70's chimera: Mod Squad meets Esalen Institute.*.... 

And if the reader's curiosity is less focused on big-time manipulation attempts and more on "what the heck is this Esalen thing he's going on about," here's Nobel Laureate (Physics) Richard Feynman in a 2017 post:

COLD CASE — Who smeared Richard Feynman? [FBI FILES]

....And later Feynman hangin' at Esalen, Big Sur, CA:

During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas -- which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn't work, to eliminate it. This method became organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age. It is such a scientific age, in fact, that we have difficulty in understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing that they proposed ever really worked -- or very little of it did.

But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFO's, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I've concluded that it's not a scientific world.

Most people believe so many wonderful things that I decided to investigate why they did. And what has been referred to as my curiosity for investigation has landed me in a difficulty where I found so much junk that I'm overwhelmed. First I started out by investigating various ideas of mysticism and mystic experiences. I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations, so I know something about that. Then I went to Esalen, which is a hotbed of this kind of thought (it's a wonderful place; you should go visit there). Then I became overwhelmed. I didn't realize how MUCH there was.

At Esalen there are some large baths fed by hot springs situated on a ledge about thirty feet above the ocean. One of my most pleasurable experiences has been to sit in one of those baths and watch the waves crashing onto the rocky slope below, to gaze into the clear blue sky above, and to study a beautiful nude as she quietly appears and settles into the bath with me.

One time I sat down in a bath where there was a beatiful girl sitting with a guy who didn't seem to know her. Right away I began thinking, "Gee! How am I gonna get started talking to this beautiful nude woman?"

I'm trying to figure out what to say, when the guy says to her, "I'm, uh, studying massage. Could I practice on you?"

"Sure", she says. They get out of the bath and she lies down on a massage table nearby.

I think to myself, "What a nifty line! I can never think of anything like that!" He starts to rub her big toe. "I think I feel it", he says. "I feel a kind of dent -- is that the pituitary?"

I blurt out, "You're a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!"

They looked at me, horrified -- I had blown my cover -- and said, "It's reflexology!"

I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.....

That, of course is the introduction to Feynman's famous 1974 CalTech commencment speech, "Cargo Cult Science"
More here.

"Chinese EV company launches automated factory where humanoid robots build humanoid robots"

From Mumbai's FirstPost, September 8:

Chinese electric vehicle maker XPeng says it has commissioned an automated production line designed to manufacture advanced general-purpose humanoid robots, in what the company describes as a first for the industry.

The announcement came from XPeng CEO He Xiaopeng, who shared images of the facility and a humanoid robot on X. According to He, the production system is designed to use robots to manufacture robots, reducing the extent of manual involvement in the assembly process.

Today, we launched the world’s first automated production line for advanced general‑purpose humanoid robots, using robots to mass‑produce robots, autonomously. This was uncharted territory, and we solved it from scratch. The commissioning of our production line means humanoid robots are now ready to scale up and step into the real world. What touched my heartstrings most was watching our very first advanced general‑purpose humanoid robot complete assembly and walk off the line on its own. To me, this is not just about a smarter tool or a commodity. I hope it gains true generalization ability to take on dangerous, repetitive, or undesirable tasks, and ultimately make life better. Perhaps one day, robots may become our companions, friends, or part of family. Grateful to every colleague on this momumental mission. And a warm welcome to IRON!

— Xiaopeng He (@xiaopenghexpeng) September 8, 2026

Continues:

...The commissioning of our production line means humanoid robots are now ready to scale up and step into the real world.

What touched my heartstrings most was watching our very first advanced general‑purpose humanoid robot complete assembly and walk off the line on its own. To me, this is not just about a smarter tool or a commodity. I hope it gains true generalization ability to take on dangerous, repetitive, or undesirable tasks, and ultimately make life better. Perhaps one day, robots may become our companions, friends, or part of family.

Grateful to every colleague on this momumental mission. And a warm welcome to IRON! 

....MUCH MORE

And In Other Elon Musk News....

We haven't had any Elon posts recently but that headline is evergreen, on any given day someone somewhere is publishing something on Mr. Musk.

Our most recent mention of the man was the outro from September 9's "Meanwhile, In Shanghai: Investors Demand Brain - Computer Interface Companies":

....Also quite a few posts on Elon Musk and Neuralink and on Dr. Miguel Nicolelis.

Which led me to ask the GoogleBox about Neuralink which led to Business Insider, July 21:

Investors are valuing Elon Musk's Neuralink at $42 billion on secondary markets

Demand for a piece of anything related to Elon Musk is booming.

The near-trillionaire's brain chip startup, Neuralink, is being valued as high as $42 billion in recent secondary market transactions, according to correspondence seen by Business Insider and a person familiar with the matter.

That's an almost five-time increase from Neuralink's last funding round last year, when the startup raised at a $9 billion valuation, Semafor reported at the time.

According to private markets research provider Caplight, transactions in recent months have ranged from $29 billion to $42 billion, with some current bidders even attempting to buy shares at an almost $60 billion valuation....

....MUCH MORE 

Flashback: What I'm Reading: Gambler's Fallacy and the Hot Hand

Most of our visitors know this stuff but here we have such a good exposition it may be worth a gander for even the time-constrained reader
Bold emphases mine.
From Frontiers in Psychology, Feb. 5, 2015:
Small samples and evolution: did the law of small numbers arise as an adaptation to environmental challenges?

Gorka Navarrete^1*, Carlos Santamaría² and Dan Froimovitch³

• ¹Laboratory of Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, Psychology Department, Universidad Diego Portales, UDP-INECO Foundation Core on Neuroscience, Santiago, Chile
• ²Cognitive Psychology Department, University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain
• ³Department of Physiology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

In the context of casino gambling, only a minority (~15%) of players presented with a streak of at least length 6 in roulette disregard recent events in deciding their next move, which is the normatively optimal approach to such a decision (Croson and Sundali, 2005). The majority of people would instead subscribe to a belief in a recency effect. This intriguing pattern of reasoning is categorized as either the gambler's fallacy, when the subject perceives negative recency (GF; Laplace, 1951; Tune, 1964; Tversky and Kahneman, 1971), or as the hot hand fallacy, when positive recency is perceived (HH; Gilovich et al., 1985). Such tendencies demonstrate, among a variety of things, that magical thinking is not exclusive to astrologists and tarot fanatics. Both the GF and HH refer to instances of the subject projecting a relationship between prior and present events, albeit in opposing directions. 

For example, subsequent to observing a run of 6 “heads,” a subject committing the GF would expect “tails” on the next coin toss. Alternatively, a subject committing the HH, following a similar streak of, say, successful basketball throws, would expect another “hit” on the next throw. Both fallacies have been posited as consequences of our immanent adherence to the law of small numbers—a distorted conception of chance, according to which short random sequences are considered highly representative of their underlying generating process (Tversky and Kahneman, 1971; Gilovich et al., 1985); But, counterintuitively, when dealing with sequences governed by chance, the short sub-sequences that we mistake as essentially representative of the overall generating process, actually deviate systematically from sequential properties on the global level; such small sub-sequences, on the basis of which we draw predictive inferences, are rather misrepresentative, containing excessive alternations and lacking sufficient long runs (Gilovich et al., 1985).

When predicting the next outcome in a random bivariate sequence of events, after having observed a local streak in either direction, we tend to fall into one of two behavioral categories, depending on how random the underlying process is perceived to be (Burns and Corpus, 2004). In accordance with the law of small numbers, when the conception of a random generating process is committed to, we expect the next event following a streak of a particular signal to switch to the alternate signal. Alternatively, when the generating process is believed to be nonrandom, we tend to expect the next signal to be consistent with that of the preceding streak. In very simple terms, given a streak in one direction (e.g., three heads in a row):

(a) When a causal mechanism explaining the streak does not easily come to mind, we tend to commit the GF (e.g., after a few heads, we believe the next throw is more likely to land tails). This occurs most often when the sequential probability is perceived to be fixed (Navarrete and Santamaría, 2012).

(b) When a causal mechanism is easily accessible (e.g., tampered coin, hot hand, etc.), and the sequence appears to be non-representative of our typified notion of a random sequence, we tend to commit the HH (e.g., after a few successful shots, the player is more likely to succeed again).

In general, we hold—or are inclined to feel as though we hold—a certain degree of control over the events of our immediate environment (Harris and Osman, 2012). We tend to think that the probability of experiencing a car accident is related to our performance behind the wheel; and while this is oftentimes the case, it is definitely not the case as frequently as we would like. The difficulties humans encounter in dealing with phenomena of fixed probabilities are likely related to the fact that, amidst our proximal surroundings, things rarely appear to occur by pure chance. 

Ordinary events around us are sourced in recognizable causes and elicit appreciable consequences. 

Moreover, we are innately specialized in discerning patterns (Lopes, 1982) and cause-effect relationships between successive events—especially those in temporal proximity to one another. From an ecological standpoint it is rare for one to observe sequential events that are completely independent of each other (Ayton and Fischer, 2004). Thus, it is of little surprise that we exhibit a distinctive ineptitude when it comes to handling random sequences.

Situations in which past events bear no influence on those of future ones, and, in particular, in which the probability of sequential outcomes is fixed, are primarily confined to games of chance, psychology laboratories, and sample spaces that tend toward infinity (Navarrete and Santamaría, 2012). Games of chance are known to be commonly addictive—a feature perhaps attributable to an illusory sense of control linked to an incapability to understand how they operate.

One could argue that games of chance were created with the intent of deceiving humans (Pinker, 1997). Moreover ecological circumstances in which the sample-size accessible to the subject exceeds a few dozen events are virtually absent from a rural or hunter gatherer setting (and likely from any other). Throughout our evolutionary history, it is likely that humans confronted minimally-sized samples exclusively, for which our current limited-capacity numerical cognition served us adequately (as a cautionary side note, see (Navarrete and Santamaría, 2011) for a comment on why such evolutionary arguments should be treated with special care). The numerical representations we seem hardwired to invoke are ill-suited for the processing of large samples....MUCH MORE 

Also at Frontiers in Psychology:
Nepotistic patterns of violent psychopathy: evidence for adaptation?

Previously in Gambler's Fallacy and the Hot Hand:
"How to Make a Bad Decision"
How Gamblers Get Hot (the 'hot hand' is real)

Recognizing and then managing a trader's hot streak is one of the more challenging things you can do in finance especially when the trader can't articulate what's going on, whether in credit derivatives or octopods who pick World Cup winners....

Baseball and Investing: "The ‘hot hand’ might be real after all"
"Luck vs. skill: What Bill Gross and Bill Miller have in common"
Taxonomy of Logical Fallacies (or How to open your mouth without removing all doubt*)

Speaking of fallacies (post immediately below)....a repost from August, 2009. You'll find the Gambler's Fallacy under the Probabilistic fallacies:... 

A Glossary of Luck

The language of luck, from “gris-gris” to “Irish lottery.”
apophenia: The tendency to perceive connections or meaningful patterns in random data; often used in ref. to divination, as in reading of tea leaves, or Roman practice of finding meaning in entrails. (See also gambler’s fallacy.) 
depressive realism: A psychological hypothesis that claims depressed people judge their control of events more accurately than do nondepressed people.  

Predicting the Improbable
"The ‘Hot Hand’ Debate Gets Flipped on Its Head"
Baseball and Investing: "The ‘hot hand’ might be real after all"
Luck vs. skill: What Bill Gross and Bill Miller have in common
More on The Top Earning Hedge Fund Managers and The Metaphysics of Moolah
"Can Investors Profit Using Academic Research?"
Investing Tips From the Dalai Lama
Remember When the Unluckiest Man in the World Won the Lottery?

Originally posted December 19, 2016 

For the Victims of 9/11

 Rest in Peace

Inflation: UP 0.4% For The Month Of August; Up 3.4% Over The Last Twelve Months

 From the Bureau of Labor Statistics, September 11:

CONSUMER PRICE INDEX - AUGUST 2026

The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) increased 0.4 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis in August after rising 0.1 percent in July, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Over the last 12 months, the all items index increased 3.4 percent before seasonal adjustment.

The index for gasoline rose 3.9 percent in August, accounting for over one third of the monthly all items increase. The index for energy increased 2.1 percent over the month. The shelter index rose 0.3 percent in August after rising 0.1 percent in July. The index for food increased 0.1 percent over the month, as the index for food away from home increased 0.3 percent. 

The index for all items less food and energy rose 0.3 percent after increasing 0.2 percent in July. Indexes that increased over the month include communication, lodging away from home, airline fares, education, and used cars and trucks. Conversely, the index for medical care and the index for motor vehicle insurance were among the major indexes that decreased in August.

The all items index rose 3.4 percent for the 12 months ending August as it did for the 12 months ending July. The all items less food and energy index rose 2.4 percent over the year, following a 2.5-percent increase over the 12 months ending July. The energy index increased 16.3 percent for the 12 months ending August. The food index increased 2.7 percent over the last year....

....MUCH MORE 

Over the last twelve months the price of gasoline is up 27.4% and the price of fuel oil is up 52.0%.

—Table A. Percent changes in CPI for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U): U.S. city average 

If interested see also: 

Table 2. Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U): U. S. city average, by detailed expenditure category  

"Diesel Crunch Set To Worsen As Refining Capacity Falls Short, Industry Warns"

From ZeroHedge, September 10:

The global diesel market - already trading at record prices - is set to further tighten in the coming months and keep fuel prices high, raising the prices of all goods and threatening the inflation targets of the central banks.

Industry officials, who gathered at the APPEC petroleum conference in Singapore this week, warned that the market has not seen the worst of the diesel crisis yet. Analysts say the real stress in oil markets is in the diesel market right now, OilPrice reported.

Global fuel markets are very tight and inflexible, despite the higher crude oil flows out of the Persian Gulf in recent weeks, Russell Hardy, chief executive of the world's biggest independent oil trader, Vitol Group, said on Tuesday.

“We're still not running enough refining capacity to prevent those draws, and we keep eating into the surplus that exists around the world,” Hardy said at the event, as carried by Bloomberg.

Despite the uptick in flows from the Strait of Hormuz, only 1 million barrels per day (bpd) out of an estimated 10 million bpd outbound flows are refined products, the rest is crude.

Refinery capacity is constrained in the Middle East, due to Iranian strikes on refineries and the trickle of fuel flows through Hormuz.

Moreover, refinery capacity in Russia is also severely restricted by nearly-daily Ukrainian drone strikes at Russian refineries, while Russia has banned diesel exports until at least the end of September.

Refineries in the United States and elsewhere have been running at maximum capacity this summer, having delayed maintenance. But they are unlikely to continue operating at these elevated utilization rates for much longer....

....MORE 

And at Bloomberg, September 11: 

US Diesel Prices Rise Past $6 a Gallon for First Time Ever 

"'Clean' Energy And Tech Spending Slides 17%. New Report Blames China, But Doesn't Tell The Whole Story."

From Investor's Business Daily, September 10:

Global spending on "clean" energy and clean tech plunged 17% in the first half of 2026, according to Rhodium. The research firm's new report peels back global spending trends across solar energy, electric vehicles, sustainable aviation fuel, and manufacturing.

Investments in the first quarter in particular fell so much than even a Q2 bump couldn't make up the difference. Q1 spending on cleaner energy plus related tech and manufacturing fell by $151.1 billion, or 28%, returning to 2024 levels, per Rhodium.

Its Clean Investment Monitor report pins 88% of the global decline on China in Q1, as it cut tax incentives for electric cars and transitioned solar and wind generation "toward market-based pricing." The latter, the report said, "drove a rush of installations ahead of the (June 2025) deadline, followed by an uneven pullback."

Electric car sales in the U.S. followed a similar trend in the first half of 2026. EV sales took off last summer after the Trump administration moved to slash tax incentives, triggering a subsequent pullback that makes year-over-year comparisons look grim, per earlier Benchmark reports.

Unsteady investments also show up in solar and battery manufacturing investment, which both declined globally, slipping 13% sequentially in Q1 and falling another 6% in Q2, per Rhodium. The sector's wobbly year to date also shows up in clean energy and technology stocks such as Tesla and First Solar.

Bright Spots In Other Clean Energy Reports....

....MUCH MORE 

"The Value Gap: Europe Cannot Scale"

I'm still smarting over the cat pee story. 

A working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, August 2026:

ABSTRACT
In 2008, the aggregate market value of U.S.-listed firms was roughly one-third higher than that of European-listed firms. By 2023, it was more than 300% higher, a difference of $34 trillion. The valuation gap is broad-based, rather than concentrated among a few superstar firms, and is driven by differences in firm values, not in the number of listed firms. Across sectors, the gap is larger in R&D-intensive industries and in industries with high returns to scale. European firms’ size is strongly correlated with home-country GDP, whereas U.S. firms’ size is unrelated to home-state GDP. Smaller European firms also face a particularly large cost-of-capital gap and do not appear able to substitute debt for limited access to equity financing, including venture capital. Taken together, these facts suggest that financial and product-market frictions constrain European firms’ ability to scale. 

I. INTRODUCTION

In 2008, the aggregate value (market capitalization) of U.S. publicly listed firms exceeded that of European firms by a third. By 2023, the U.S. stock market value exceeded Europe’s by more than 300%. The gap has risen from 3 trillion to 34 trillion USD, more than the value of U.S. GDP. This divergence is not a matter of exchange rate movements or the current size of the economy: scaled by GDP, U.S. market capitalization rose from 78% to 177% between 2008 and 2023, while Europe’s rose from 43% to just 63%. It is not a reflection of migration by European firms: cross-listing explains little of the gap. Instead, the main driver is the addition of several generations of younger firms with immense growth potential (and, in several cases, the realization of that potential), and with very high valuations. This simply has not happened in Europe.

What explains the lower valuation of European firms? Differences in the number of
listed do not explain the value gap, which is entirely driven by an increase in the average value of U.S. firms relative to European firms, i.e. this is a valuation gap. The valuation gap does not reflect sectoral composition—the average within-sector (where sectors are defined using the 4-digit SIC taxonomy) U.S.-Europe gap is 50%, while the unconditional gap is 62%. It is not driven by a handful of superstar firms. Therefore, broad-based valuations differences drive behind the gap. When we examine how firms are valued, we find that the gap in value is largest among younger, and more R&D-intensive firms, and within industries where scale economies are important.1 The U.S.-Europe gap, in otherwords, is driven by growth opportunities: in the number, size, and quality of high-growth
firms.

Our results are consistent with a technological change that has raised the returns to scale. Recent technologies—information technology, software, and intangible capital—disproportionately reward firms that can grow large (Bloom et al., 2012; Schivardi and Schmitz, 2020; Lashkari et al., 2024; De Ridder, 2024). Firms in the United States have adopted and exploited these technologies faster than European firms. A shift of this kind raises the value of exactly the firms where we find the largest differences: younger, smaller, R&D-intensive firms, and in industries where the winners can scale up quickly....

....MUCH MORE 

"Cat Pee Was the Billion-Dollar Business Nobody Saw Coming"

I'm obviously doing something wrong with this energy and high-tech approach.

From Inc., September 10:

Founder Daniel Rotman raised little money, hired cautiously, and built around a practical product instead of growth-at-all-costs. The result was a $1.4 billion acquisition by Mars.... 

....VIDEO 

Inc. had the story back in June:

Cat Fancy: How Daniel Rotman’s PrettyLitter Turned $1 Million in Capital Into a $1.4 Billion Exit 

The innovative cat litter business may have been unsexy, but it was wildly lucrative when it sold to Mars. Now Rotman and his investors are ready to tell the whole scoop.  

During the 2010s, buzzy direct-to-consumer brands were snatching up tens of millions in venture capital, but first-time founder Daniel Rotman raised barely any for his cat litter brand, PrettyLitter. Even as the company’s sales surpassed $100 million, he hired just a dozen full-time employees. In 2021, the scrappy team scaled the company to what would ultimately be a $1.4 billion acquisition by Mars. Five years after exiting, Rotman has left his formal role as an adviser at the multinational manufacturer and is returning to his first career: politics. 

Now, he is sharing the playbook that got him to a nine-figure exit. His first piece of advice? “Go unsexy. Go for those categories that are ripe for disruption that really need someone smart representing the needs of the consumer,” says Rotman. “While everyone’s looking at dog…No one was looking at cat, so the whole time I was eating everybody’s lunch.” Suddenly, he says, all of the incumbents and investors had the same reaction: “Where the hell did these people come from?”...