"Historians Still Unable To Determine How Americans Were Able To Build Hoover Dam."

Today is the 91st Anniversary of the dedication of Hoover Dam.

First up, America's Finest News Source:

CAMBRIDGE, MA— Expressing continued bafflement at the practical knowledge and proficiency required to construct the massive structure, leading historians announced Friday that they remained unsure how Americans managed to build the Hoover Dam. “Decades into researching this tremendous feat of engineering, the question of how Americans ever mustered the ingenuity, determination, and resources to pull it off remains veiled in mystery,” said Harvard researcher Pritam Singh, noting that the enigmatic dam suggested Americans once possessed a level of competence, civic planning, and mastery of structural engineering far beyond what history would suggest....

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From the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation:

Hoover Dam
The Story of Hoover Dam - Essays 

• Artwork
• Cofferdams
• Concrete
• Fatalities
• High Scalers
• Jet Flow Gate Test
• Spillways
• Tunnels
• Wages
• What is Biggest?
• Workforce
• Articles from the Past

Fatalities at Hoover Dam
Many people who visit Hoover Dam ask: 1) How many people died building the dam?; and 2) How many of those are buried in the concrete? The second question is the easiest to answer -- none! No one is buried in Hoover Dam.

The dam was built in interlocking blocks. Each block was five feet high. The smallest blocks were about 25 feet by 25 feet square, and the largest blocks were about 25 feet by 60 feet. Concrete was delivered to each block in buckets, eight cubic yards at a time. After each bucket was delivered, five or six men called "puddlers" would stamp and vibrate the concrete into place, packing it down to ensure there were no air pockets in it. Each time a bucket was emptied, the level of concrete would raise from two inches up to six inches, depending on the size of the block. With only a slight increase in the level at any one time, and the presence of several men watching the placement, it would have been virtually impossible for anyone to be buried in the concrete. So, there are no bodies buried in Hoover Dam.

The question about fatalities is more difficult to answer, because it depends in a large part on who is included as having "died on the project."

For example, some sources cite the number of deaths as 112. But this incorporates incidents that occurred before the dam was authorized, and well in advance of construction. This figure includes the first fatalities from 1922, when Reclamation employees J.G. Tierney and Harold Connelly -- who were conducting geological surveys from barges in the Colorado River -- fell into the river and drowned. That was 6 years before the dam was authorized, and 8 years before construction began!

Some references also include in the fatality count those who died from non-construction related causes. For example, men, women, and children who lived in Boulder City, but did not die at the dam site or as a result of working there, were included in these statistics because they were, technically, part of the Boulder Canyon Project effort, and worked for Reclamation, Six Companies Inc., or one of the many subcontractors involved in the project, or resided in Boulder City during the construction years.

In addition, some references include those who may have been injured at the dam site while working there, but did not die there, while others do not. Perhaps these individuals were being transported to a hospital, were in a hospital, or had been discharged from a hospital when they died. But since they were not on the job site at the time, they were not included in the "official" number.

The "official" number of fatalities involved in building Hoover Dam is 96. These were men who died at the dam site (classified as "industrial fatalities") from such causes as drowning, blasting, falling rocks or slides, falls from the canyon walls, being struck by heavy equipment, truck accidents, etc. Industrial fatalities do not include deaths from heat, pneumonia, heart trouble, etc.

The record regarding the number of fatalities that occurred at Hoover Dam during its construction is just not that clear. However, the following information comes from the Hoover Dam Project History, volumes 1 through 5, 1931 to 1935, and provides the best information Reclamation has available on this subject.

The information is presented in the same format as it is printed, with a separate web page for each year. Some of the information in the Project History was found to be inaccurate; in those instances, we have noted corrections in this on-line version.

Use the navigation bar located at the bottom of each page to move from page to page.

Introduction   |   1931   |   1932   |   1933   |   1934   |   1935

And finally, from IEEE Spectrum, July 10, 2024:

Edith Clarke: Architect of Modern Power Distribution
The first U.S. woman EE designed the Hoover Dam’s turbine system  

Edith Clarke was a powerhouse in practically every sense of the word. From the start of her career at General Electric in 1922, she was determined to develop stable, more reliable power grids.  

And Clarke succeeded, playing a critical role in the rapid expansion of the North American electric grid during the 1920s and ’30s.

During her first years at GE she invented what came to be known as the Clarke calculator. The slide rule let engineers solve equations involving electric current, voltage, and impedance 10 times faster than by hand.

Her calculator and the power distribution methods she developed paved the way for modern grids. She also worked on hydroelectric power plant designs, according to a 2022 profile in Hydro Review.

She broke down barriers during her life. In 1919 she became the first woman to earn a master’s degree in electrical engineering from MIT. Three years later, she became the first woman in the United States to work as an electrical engineer.

Her life is chronicled in Edith Clarke: Trailblazer in Electrical Engineering. Written by Paul Lief Rosengren, the book is part of IEEE-USA’s Famous Women Engineers in History series.

Becoming the first female electrical engineer....

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Atlanta Fed GDPNow Estimate +3.7% For Q3, 2026

From the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta:

September 30, 2026

The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the third quarter of 2026 is 3.7 percent on September 30, down from 5.0 percent on September 25. After this morning’s releases from the US Census Bureau and the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, an increase in the nowcast of third-quarter real gross private domestic investment growth from 18.7 percent to 20.7 percent was more than offset by a decrease in the nowcast of third-quarter real personal consumption expenditures growth from 4.2 percent to 3.5 percent and a decrease in the nowcast of the contribution of net exports to third-quarter real GDP growth from -1.37 percentage points to -2.60 percentage points.

We've mentioned, having tracked this measure for years, that GDPNow tends to run hotter than the (eventually) reported figure, slowly converging into the month after the end of the quarter.

GDPNow home

Tomorrow is another update day 

Inflation: "Core PCE Prints Cooler Than Expected Due To Change In Methodology, As Savings Rate Plunges To 3 Year Low"

From ZeroHedge, September 30: 

Ahead of today's closely watched core PCE report - the Fed's (reportedly) favorite inflation indicator (although that will probably shift to Truflation after Kevin Warsh's task force is done with analyzing the data), which was seen by many as deciding whether the Fed will hike in October and December, or just December as NY Fed president John Williams strongly hinted yesterday, we warned readers that PCE may surprise to the downside: "the Bureau of Economic Analysis updated methodology for calculating inflation in three components is expected to trim August year-on-year change by a few tenths of a percentage point."

Why PCE may surprise to the downside: the Bureau of Economic Analysis updated methodology for calculating inflation in three components is expected to trim August year-on-year change by a few tenths of a percentage point.

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 30, 2026

And surprise it did, because despite rampant energy inflation and record diesel prices, headline PCE came in line sequentially, printing up 0.3%, in line with expectations but coming in far cooler than expected on an annual basis, rising just 3.4%, vs expectations of a 3.7% print.

The MoM jump in headline PCE was driven by services, a reversal from last month's drop, largely due to the spike in communication and education services....

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But it was the far more important core PCE, which strips out volatile energy and food prices, that rose 0.2% MoM (technically 0.247%, below the +0.3% MoM expected) with a notable miss in the YoY print, which dropped to +3.0% from the unrevised 3.3% (now revised to 3.0%), missing estimates of a 3.3% print.

Within core, the biggest jump was again communications and education services....

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The market reaction to the release brings to mind Dr. Evil's demand, and more especially the reaction thereto, in the third Austin Powers movie (Goldmember):

"1 billion, gagillion, fafillion, shabolubalu million illion yillion....Yen."

about which Wikipedia says:

"This time his demand is met with simple confusion from the world leaders."

"Private Equity Is Buying Life Insurers, and the Public Bears the Heightened Risk"

There are entire law firm practice groups devoted to this stuff.

From the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business' ProMarket, September 20:

In new research, Pranjal Drall and Andrew Granato argue that the move of private equity firms into life insurance has increased the probability that insurers will go insolvent. If they do, under an obscure system of insurance guaranty funds, the losses will spread out beyond the insolvent insurer’s creditors to other insurers and, ultimately, taxpayers. 

---

Life insurance has long been considered one of the least exciting parts of finance. Policyholders, wanting to provide for their families in the event of tragedy, buy long-lasting policies that pay out money to their beneficiaries if they die early. Life insurers sell large quantities of policies, thereby pooling risk and spreading out potential financial losses. The insurers then invest the proceeds in safe, high-quality corporate bonds. The insurers earn a small spread and the beneficiaries can be confident that their life insurer will be solvent if and when it comes time to pay the bill.

As with many industries, the rise of private equity (PE) has fundamentally reworked this staid business model of life insurance. In about fifteen years, PE has grown from controlling no life insurers to controlling about 15% of the sector. In most industries, PE invests in private companies to boost profitability before selling or merging them with another company. In contrast, PE firms take control of insurers to combine the money from selling insurance policies with alternative private-credit lending, in part to finance their traditional buyout funds.

PE firms and some business commentators have hailed this strategy as a masterstroke that relies on the “permanent capital” of life insurers: policyholders who expect to pay the insurer upfront for long periods of time, even decades. These long-duration liabilities, they argue, make life insurers an ideal host for long-term, illiquid private credit, with efficiencies that allow insurers to hold these higher-yielding assets to maturity and enhance performance for policyholders and investors alike. We do not dispute that there are theoretical efficiencies in this structure. However, in our paper, we argue that its practical implementation has relied heavily on regulatory arbitrage that has the potential to shift large losses onto the public.

The current risk of the life insurance market

Risks within the life insurance market lie in the distinctive structure of insurance’s insolvency, tax, and financial-regulation law. Life insurance and annuity policyholders hold contracts that involve paying the insurer upfront, with the expectation of benefits that will materialize over the long run. To bolster policyholder confidence that the insurer will still be around to make payouts, all states implement “insurance guaranty funds” to backstop policyholders even if the insurer goes insolvent. The logic is somewhat similar to the logic of federal deposit insurance, which backstops banking depositors to maintain their confidence that they will have access to their money even if their bank goes out of business. 

Each guaranty fund functions as follows. Each insurance policyholder is guaranteed to have their policy remain in force up to a specific statutory cap, generally around $250,000-$300,000. When an in-state insurer becomes insolvent, the state regulator takes over the insurer’s operations. To make up the shortfall to policyholders, the regulator bills every surviving insurer in the state, proportional to how many insurance premiums each insurer sells in the state. In essence, the insurers pool their risk and insure one another. In 44 states, in the case that an insurer goes bankrupt and other insurers must bail out its policyholders, those insurers are permitted to take a tax credit against their assessment payment, usually over the course of the next five years. For these states, the taxpayer ultimately insures the insurers.

The core issue with such a guarantee is what economists call “moral hazard.” Insurance policyholders, like bank depositors, have little incentive to monitor what their banks and insurers do with their money, as other insurers or the broad public will bail them out. From the perspective of the insurers and their investors, since they have limited liability, they have increased ability to invest funds from their policies in riskier assets, as losses fall upon other insurers and the public. To restrain this behavior, banks and insurers are both subject to heightened financial-regulation standards, such as regulatory penalties for investing in assets that are considered to carry more risk.

The degree to which banking’s financial regulatory regime successfully restrains bank risk is debatable, and certainly it did not prevent the financial implosion of the industry in 2008. In addition, the design of insurance’s backstop entails even greater flaws than those present in banking. These design flaws sharpen the incentives for insurers to take on excessive risk, with more direct liability for taxpayers. 

How guaranty funds compare to deposit insurance

We argue that guaranty funds and their associated financial regulatory regime entail worse moral hazard issues than federal deposit insurance in several ways. First, unlike banks, which must pre-pay quarterly for deposit insurance, guaranty funds step in only after insolvency. This means that the insolvent insurer never makes a single contribution into the fund that rescues its policyholders. 

Second, while deposit insurance fees are measured by how risky a bank is, guaranty funds apportion payments purely by how much insurance an insurer sells. Essentially, safe insurers are subsidizing risky insurers. 

Third, deposit insurance only relies on public funding if the bank’s deposit fund is not enough to fully cover depositors. In the case of life insurance, taxpayers are the default reimbursement mechanism in all 44 states that permit guaranty-fund tax credits, as the insurers essentially pass on the bill through forgone corporate taxes....

....MUCH MORE 

And just to make things interesting, Senator Elizabeth Warren is pushing for Federal regulation of P.E. in insurance while the National Association of Insurance Commissioners is pushing back on behalf of their members with the argument that the historic role of state regulation has been and will continue to be what works best. Here's a letter the NAIC sent to the Senator last week:

September 24, 2026

The Honorable Elizabeth Warren
Ranking Member
Senate Banking, Housing,
and Urban Affairs
Washington, DC 20510

Dear Senator Warren:

Thank you for your interest in state insurance regulators’ oversight of the nexus between private investment firms and investment companies....

It's big money. Private Equity wants to goose the returns that their insurance companies are receiving by directly funding private credit.

From Insurance Business, September 25:

NAIC targets $1.2 trillion in insurer private credit with tighter solvency rules 

And once again just to make things interesting, in addition to plain vanilla private credit, the PE firms seem very attracted to structured products.

Capital Markets: "The Lack of Urgency Expressed by NY Fed President Williams Pushes Rates Lower and Weighs on the Greenback"

From Marc to Market:

The combination of lower oil prices yesterday and less hawkish comments by NY Fed President Williams helped steady US interest rates yesterday. Williams, who has a permanent vote on the FOMC as its vice chair, open speaks as part of the Fed’s leadership, and downplayed the sense of urgency. The Fed funds were discounting about a 70% chance of a hike at the October FOMC meeting, a few days before the midterm election.  The implied odds of a 25 bp cut are now nearer 40%. 

The dollar is trading with a heavier bias today against nearly all the G10 currencies.  A less than hawkish statement following yesterday hike by the Reserve Bank of Australia, and today’s slightly softer than expected August CPI has weighed on the Aussie today. Ahead of the week-long holiday beginning tomorrow in China, the PBOC unexpectedly set the dollar’s reference rate relatively sharply lower today (CNY6.7351), a new low since January 2023. New monetary and fiscal measures to support the economy have been unveiled over the last couple of days.....

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"Somali pirates killed oil tanker crew before rescue, official tells BBC"

From the BBC, September 30: 

Five crew members of an oil tanker seized by pirates off the coast of Somalia were killed before local security forces retook the vessel, a senior regional official has told the BBC.

Puntland Deputy Information Minister Bile Qabowsade said the five were killed by pirates before regional forces boarded MT Hoarner 25.

He said the dead included three Pakistani nationals, one Indian and one national of Myanmar. Four other crew members were injured, including three Pakistanis and one Indian.

The tanker, which was carrying about 18,500 barrels of oil destined for the Somali capital, Mogadishu, was seized in April by six armed men while sailing off the coast of Somalia.

Sixteen suspected pirates have been arrested, while others escaped and were being pursued, officials said.

Qabowsade rejected suggestions that forces from Puntland, a semi-autonomous region of Somalia, had helped some of the pirates escape. The authorities have not given further details how the five crew members were killed or how the pirates took control of the vessel....

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"Here’s How Delhi Achieved Its Epic Power-Grid Fix" (It slashed electricity losses from 50 to 5 percent)

From IEEE Spectrum, September 28:

It’s 6 a.m. on a cold January morning in 2002 in New Delhi. It’s still dark outside, and I’m in the kitchen preparing breakfast, packing lunches, and getting my two children ready to catch the school bus when, for the third time in a week, the power goes out. No lights, no mixer to finish my daughter’s puttu—her favorite rice dish—no kettle, no toaster. The bathroom is dark, and the kids are upset. 

It will probably be hours before the power comes back on, so I grab a flashlight and light the candles that are set up around the house for these occasions. We’re behind schedule now. We pack the food we have, bundle up as the house turns chilly, and head outside, leaving a mess in the kitchen. We make our way to the bus stop in the dark—the streetlights are out, too—only to discover my daughter has missed her ride. Again. I’ll be late for work at Jamia Millia Islamia, a university where I am a professor of electrical engineering and teach power systems and smart grids. I just hope the power is on there.

This was a common scene for my family and all of Delhi in the early 2000s. Power outages happened almost daily and lasted hours. When the power was on, the quality was so poor that it would dim lights, flicker screens, and wreak havoc on appliances. Customer service at the power utilities essentially didn’t exist.

These problems had been getting worse through the 1980s and 1990s. The cause: an aging distribution grid bereft of crucial technologies, and electricity providers with little accountability. The situation became so bad that the city was losing more than half of its power through obsolete equipment and theft. These staggering losses meant that utilities got paid for only a fraction of the electricity they were trying to deliver. And the lack of funds prevented them from investing in better grid infrastructure.

But over the last quarter century, a remarkable effort by the government and the city’s distribution utilities has turned Delhi’s grid into a reliable, modern system. Power losses have shrunk from over 50 percent in 2002 to 5 to 6 percent in 2026—on par with France and Belgium, and better than Greece and Serbia. Delhi’s grid reliability index, a measure of how often electricity can be counted on, stood at around 70 percent in 2002 and has now topped 99.9 percent.

With reliable power, businesses across the city have blossomed. The streetlights are bright. The number of electric vehicles, including city buses, is growing daily. Quality of life has improved. Today, my family is comfortable year-round in our home despite Delhi’s scorching summers and cold winters. The chaos of losing power no longer hinders me from getting to work. The city still has problems—pollution, overcrowding, noise—but thankfully, reliable power is no longer among them.

The transformation of Delhi’s grid can serve as a model for other cities that suffer from decrepit power infrastructure. Regions of Albania, Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Estonia, India, Kenya, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Uganda, and Venezuela are reeling from heavy losses in their distribution grids. Their problems look like Delhi’s 25 years ago. I believe it’s possible to improve electricity in these places by adapting the changes Delhi made. Here’s an inside look at how the city accomplished it....

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Canada: "Volkswagen subsidiary delays opening of $7B St. Thomas, Ont., battery plant to 2029"

From the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, September 24:

Conservative MP raises concerns about delay, citing federal subsidies and job promises 

The Volkswagen subsidiary building an electric vehicle (EV) battery "gigafactory" in St. Thomas, Ont., says the facility is now expected to begin operations in 2029, two years later than originally planned.

PowerCo Canada made the announcement in a news release about hiring Mississauga, Ont.-based EllisDon Corporation as the general contractor for construction of the factory.

"St. Thomas is now expected to begin operations in 2029 to accommodate next-generation battery technology, while retaining the flexibility to scale over time as market conditions evolve," said a news release.

PowerCo declined to make a spokesperson available for an interview with CBC News about the delay. 

Originally scheduled for a 2027 opening, the $7-billion factory — with a promise of up to $13 billion in subsidies from the federal government — was first announced in 2023. It was estimated it would result in the creation of 3,000 direct jobs and tens of thousands of indirect jobs in the region. 

To prepare for the arrival of the plant, surrounding municipalities and the provincial government have undertaken infrastructure projects to increase sewer and road capacity for the population boom that was expected in 2027....

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Both the plant and the delay are pretty big deals. Unlike the U.S. where it seems there is something announced each week, Canada is not currently attracting a lot of foreign direct investment, particularly not on this scale. 

Here's hoping things turn around for both VW and Canada before the technology is rendered obsolete by some of the stuff coming over the horizon. 

Capital Markets: "The Dollar Remains Firm and the RBA Delivered its Fourth Hike of the Year, though Sounded Less Hawkish"

From Marc Chandler at Bannockburn Global Forex: 

The US dollar continues to trade with a firmer bias.  We are still struck by the over-bought technical momentum indicators, arguably encouraged by the aggressive pricing of the trajectory of Fed policy. In the Fed funds futures, the odds of an October hike six days ahead of the midterm election. In recent years, there is some precedent for a move six days before a national election (e.g., 2008, 2018, and 2022). The market is pricing in almost 100 bp of hikes over the next 12 months.  Sentiment seems vulnerable to any disappointment with the economic data in the coming days.  

Throughout the North American session today, no fewer than six Fed officials speak today.  Most has [sic] spoken recently and it seems clear, as the dot plot indicated, many are prepared to hike rates again this year.  The question is when. However, also recall that the dot plot less than two weeks old showed the median projection was for no hikes next year.  That said, it is possible the under new management, the Summary of Economic Projections are dropped next year....

....MUCH MORE  

If only there was some way to harness the energy in the Fedspeak wind. 

"Collateral damage: How Cognac is paying the price for Europe’s trade wars"

Well that and the fact that people in the West don't seem to be drinking as much as they did 50 or 100 or 150 years ago.

From EuroNews, September 27:

 French Cognac producers are battling falling sales as trade disputes with China and the US squeeze the export-dependent industry and leave growers seeking EU support.

As the Cognac harvest draws to a close in southwestern France, winegrowers already know they face another difficult year. 

Cognac makers are struggling. The 300-year-old amber brandy is only produced around the Charente River, but it has been caught in the trade wars between the EU and China, as well as by tensions with its top export market, the US.

For months, producers have watched largely powerless as access to both markets has been squeezed.

The industry has a historic connection to the EU. Jean Monnet, the French statesman regarded as one of the EU's founding fathers, came from a Cognac-producing family and worked in the family business.

Today, however, the sector is in disarray as sales plummet. Cognac is overwhelmingly dependent on foreign markets, with 98% of production exported outside the EU.

“Collateral damage” from trade wars 
Ironically, this year's drought has helped bring supply closer to falling demand.

“We thought the harvest was going to be promising, but in the end the drought took its toll,” Matthieu Augier, a winegrower in Gondeville, told Euronews. “Compared with a typical year, we’re looking at a 30 to 40% reduction in the harvest in economic terms. You could say in a way that nature helps regulate our surpluses.”

Since 2023, Cognac sales have fallen from 230 million to 140 million bottles. The four main trading houses – Rémy Martin, Hennessy, Martell and Courvoisier – had to slash their orders from winegrowers in the region after clients cancelled contracts....

....MUCH MORE 

In the U.S. the Baby Boomers are increasing both their "heavy" drinking and their "binge" drinking, the only age group to do so:

Why Older Americans Are Drinking More Alcohol—Not Less 

Time Magazine, September 21, 2026 

Physical AI: "AMD acquiring Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs AI firm in deal worth $8.2 billion"

There just might be something to this physical AI stuff.

From CNBC, September 28: 

• AMD said it agreed to acquire World Labs, a San Francisco-based AI lab developing a so-called world model.
• The chipmaker said it’s paying $8.2 billion in an all-stock transaction for World Labs.
• AI researchers hope that world models can help develop robots and other physically grounded artificial intelligence applications.  

Advanced Micro Devices said Monday that it’s agreed to acquire World Labs, the San Francisco-based AI lab founded by industry pioneer Fei-Fei Li, for $8.2 billion.

The chipmaker, which previously invested in World Labs, said it’s paying for the startup in stock.

Li was a Stanford professor who previously worked for Google and led AI research. She will become AMD’s chief scientist and an executive vice president at AMD, which is chasing Nvidia in the market for AI processors.

World Labs is developing a so-called world model, which can be used to simulate 3D environments. In a demo presented by Li and AMD CEO Lisa Su earlier this year, the two executives showed a World Labs model called Marble creating a 3D scene out of a few images.

“Intelligent agents, whether it’s robots or vehicles or even tools, can learn inside very rich physics-aware digital worlds before they even need to be deployed into the real one, making them much safer,” Li said at the presentation....

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 If interested, some of our prior links on Madame Li are in Saturday, September 26's AI: "World model companies are keeping a lot of secrets".

Our single-sentence opinion introducing January 2026's ""As artificial intelligence moves into real world, will physical AI pay off?":

Good question. Physical AI will probably pay off in ways that are measurable faster than chatbots will...

August 14 - "World Models Are AI’s Next Frontier"  

August 15 - More On Physical AI: "How world models became AI's next frontier"

Nvidia's Jensen Huang has been very serious about physical AI for the last three years. Here's a February 2025 post: 

Nvidia Plummets 8.5% On Ennui, Boredom (NVDA)

... On the other hand Observer jumps ahead to what will most likely be a theme for the next twelve - fifteen months and/or until Blackwell's replacement is rolling off TSMC's assembly lines. February 27:

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Predicts the Next Big Thing After ‘Agentic A.I’ 

"Now is the beginning of the agentic A.I. era...then there's physical A.I. after that."

Capital Markets: "War in Middle East Sends Oil Prices and Yields Higher, Underpins the Dollar"

From Marc to Market:

The US has rejected Iran’s latest offer and appears to be moving more force into the region. Oil prices have jumped, which is also serving to push up yields.  The dollar is firmer against most of the G10 currencies. New verbal intervention by Japanese officials, clinging on to the cooperation of the US, to warn against yen weakness. 

Yet, with rising US yields, it will be difficult to suppress the greenback. Perhaps, one of the most interesting developments today has been the PBOC’s sharply lower dollar fix.  Last week, the PBOC had cautioned against one-way moves in the yuan.  The dollar’s fix was lowered by the most since April.  Ironically, it does not appear that the currency was discussed by Trump and Xi, but the yen was reportedly discussed during Trump-Takaichi talks.  Trump and Xi will meet two more times this year (November APEC ins Shenzhen and December G20 at Trump’s golf club in Florida). The US and China agreed to reduce tariffs on $60 bln of goods imported from each other....

....MUCH MORE  

And In Other Elon News: SpaceX Will Attempt To Put The Ridiculously Huge Starship Into Orbit Today (SPCX)

Following on the post immediately below, ""Elon Musk admits Grok lags behind Anthropic’s AI model, says xAI needs time to catch up" (SPCX)". 

From CNN, September 27:

SpaceX’s massive Starship is finally going to orbit — and the effects could be seismic 

People near the sandy shores of Texas’ southernmost coastline are accustomed to the earth-shattering roar of the most powerful rocket ever made: Since 2023, various prototypes of SpaceX’s Starship have taken flight from the area 13 times — with nearly half ending in some form of unintended explosion.

But the stakes are about to get even higher.

On Monday, SpaceX will attempt to launch Starship to orbit for the first time, allowing it to deploy the inaugural batch of a new generation of Starlink internet satellites. Liftoff is expected during a 75-minute launch window that will open at 8:15 a.m. ET.

If successful, Monday’s test flight could mark a monumental step forward — signifying that Starship may soon leave its test flight phase and enter full operation.

As Starship crosses that threshold, the ripple effects for the broader space industry are expected to be seismic.

Starship is set to deploy a host of new space-based technologies, including the upgraded Starlink satellites designed to boost the capacity of SpaceX’s global internet business and orbital data centers that CEO Elon Musk hopes will power energy-sucking AI models.

The promises only grow bolder from there: Starship has a multibillion-dollar contract to carry NASA astronauts to the moon’s surface — perhaps for the first time since the Apollo program — amid a new space race with China. And Musk continues to harp on his long-shot vision of using the gargantuan launch vehicle to create a self-sustaining city on Mars.

Since Starship test flights began, dating back to brief “hop” tests in 2019, those goals have seemed far beyond the horizon. But Monday’s flight, if successful, will mark the beginning of a new phase in the vehicle’s development — and introduce a host of new risks.

For the past 13 test flights, SpaceX intentionally placed Starship in a “passively safe suborbital trajectory,” the company acknowledged in a blog post. This meant that “even if control over the spacecraft was completely lost, it was already on a path to reenter the atmosphere and splash down in a pre-determined location.”

As Starship attempts to reach orbit for the first time, the vehicle will lose that safety net. It will be traveling at such high speeds and at a precise trajectory that it will enter free fall around the planet, meaning that— if it loses control — it can’t be easily dragged back down to Earth.

Reaching orbit will offer Starship a dazzling array of new possibilities, perhaps allowing it to deploy functional satellites for the first time as well as pave the way for future exploration deeper into space....

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"Elon Musk admits Grok lags behind Anthropic’s AI model, says xAI needs time to catch up" (SPCX)

From CryptoBriefing, September 26: 

The xAI founder acknowledged he was wrong about Anthropic's standing in the AI race, calling it the current leader with no close rivals  

Elon Musk, acknowledged on X that xAI’s Grok is less advanced than Anthropic’s latest offerings, marking a rare moment of public humility from someone who usually operates at maximum confidence.

The admission carries real weight. Musk didn’t just say Grok needs improvement. He said he was wrong about Anthropic’s standing in the AI landscape entirely, calling the company the current leader with no rivals matching its top models.

The numbers tell the story 
Grok 4.5, which xAI launched on July 8, 2026, was supposed to be a competitive leap forward. The model is priced aggressively at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, positioning it as a cost-effective alternative to the field’s heavyweights.

Benchmark scores paint a clear picture: Grok 4.5 lags behind both Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and Opus 4.8 across multiple categories. The gap is especially pronounced in coding tasks, where Grok 4.5 scored just 53% on the DeepSWE 1.1 benchmark.

Musk pointed to a straightforward explanation for the disparity. xAI has been operating for roughly three years, while Anthropic has had six years to build its team, refine its research pipeline, and iterate on model architectures....

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"The US-China tectonic plates have shifted"

Both countries have financial problems that feed into social problems. As a totalitarian autocracy China may have the advantage. (the ghost of ca. 2009 Tom Friedman stirs) 

From Semafor, September 26:

Before this week, the last time a US president greeted a foreign leader at Joint Base Andrews was when John F. Kennedy welcomed British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in 1962.

But that’s not the reason the image of US President Donald Trump waiting at the foot of the stairs of an Air China Boeing-747 to personally greet Chinese leader Xi Jinping is historic. Macmillan led a close American ally; Xi leads America’s paramount adversary. In rolling out the red carpet, Trump underscored how rapidly the balance of power in the relationship has shifted.

The turning point came last year, when China made the ultimate power move, threatening to choke off rare earths — and turn US factories dark — after Trump ramped up tariffs on Chinese goods to more than 140%.

Trump backed down, and at the time, Rush Doshi, a Georgetown University professor and former Biden administration official, wrote that China had proved itself to be a “true peer” of the US, unafraid to push back. Doshi’s take on the arrival ceremony, which also included a 21-gun salute and a flyover by B-1B bombers — far exceeding courtesies extended to Trump in Beijing in May — has been that China believes “they’ve basically tamed the United States.”....

....MUCH MORE 

If interested here is Friedman's 2009 op-ed via the Wayback machine. The NYT website has gone through so many iterations that the correct URL is actually a bit difficult to find, even at the Internet Archive (many of the links are re-directs into the void). 

The Incoming Berlin Government Was Voted In After Promising To Expropriate The City's Landlords. Will They Do It?

That's not me asking, that's federally funded media, Deutsche-Welle.

First some background. Two posts from 2021, the second one five years-almost-to-the-day ago: 

March 2 - "Berlin’s Rent Controls Are Proving to Be a Disaster"
 

September 28 - German Politics and Policies:....

....So with all this running through my head, the first thing I saw regarding German politics on Monday was that the referendum to expropriate and socialize Berlin apartments from Germany's largest landlord had passed. Although the referendum is not binding on the Berlin government the result 57% ja/39% nein is one heck of an indication of the political zeitgeist.....

And from D-W, September 23:

Could Berlin expropriate large real estate companies? 

The socialist Left Party won the Berlin election partly on the promise to implement the city's 2021 expropriation referendum as a way to solve the city's rent crisis. But can it really happen? 

The socialist Left Party, which won the Berlin election on September 20, was the only major party on the ballot that said it would implement the results of Berlin's 2021 referendum, when 57.6% of Berliners voted to expropriate the apartments owned by real estate companies that own more than 3,000 units.

But the federal government has said they won't let it happen. So is it even possible? And how did we get here? DW explains.

•  What did the Left Party say about expropriation?

The Left Party was one of the main supporters of a successful, years-long grassroots campaign called "Deutsche Wohnen & Co. enteignen," ("Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen").

Deutsche Wohnen is a major property developer that owns over 140,000 units across Germany, and 100,000 in Berlin alone. 

The campaign and the Left Party argued that by expropriating this and a handful of other major companies like it, the Berlin government could put some 270,000 apartments in Berlin into public ownership, and make them available at affordable rent prices. Other estimates put the number at around 240,000.

The argument struck a chord, as surveys showed that housing and rent prices were the biggest concerns for Berlin voters in the recent election.

Some 25% of rented property in Berlin is already in public ownership, through state-owned companies like Berlinovo. The expropriation measure would likely push that up to over 30%.

• 2021 referendum — what was the question and what came out of it?

The original referendum, held in September 2021, asked Berliners to vote yes or no on a five-point plan: 

- Socializing the apartments owned by the major property companies 

- Administration of the properties by a public-law entity

- Administration of the properties with participation from city officials, renters, and local communities

- Ban on any re-privatization

- Compensation for the property companies "significantly below" the market value of the property....

....MUCH MORE 

After the referendum the property companies did the rational thing, they quit building, developing and rehabbing properties that would be at risk of expropriation. Some high end/luxe accommodations were built but at the lower end and in the middle the situation is worse than it was in 2021. 

Our story so far:

September 26 - With The Victory Of Die Linke (The Left) In Berlin And The Probability Of The City's First Muslim Mayor: "First We Took Manhattan, Then We Took Berlin"

September 26 - Thinking About Berlin's Politics: Return of the City-State, Or: The End of the Nation State May Be Upon Us

One more from 2021, probably not related:

August 25, 2021 - "Uganda receives 51 out of expected 2,000 Afghan refugees"

Oh dear. You can just imagine the conversation:
"What's this? Kampala? There must be some mistake, I signed up for the Berlin package: Ku'damm, techno, Tiergarten, last of the hipsters. Not Uganda."

"Bill Gates says unchecked AI could ‘cause a billion deaths’ in call for regulation"

From The Guardian, September 26: 

Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist speaks with NBC’s Kristen Welker in interview airing on Sunday 

Bill Gates has called on the US’s federal legislators and law enforcers to regulate the development of artificial intelligence (AI), saying in an interview airing on Sunday that the technology left unchecked could cause “a billion deaths” and “no one thinks self-regulation is enough”.

“You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like,” the Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist said to Kristen Welker, the NBC Meet the Press host. “And that has to be a required thing.”

Using a term meant to describe an expense required to run a business, Gates continued: “It will be a little bit of overhead for the industry – but not a dramatic slowing of what they’re doing.”

Another portion of the interview – excerpts of which NBC circulated in advance – saw Gates dramatically admonish that AI in the wrong hands would be “certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths”.

“There’s never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools,” Gates added, echoing other recent similar warnings by a wide array of tech and political figures.

Gates otherwise is generally regarded as optimistic about humans’ future. Many reporting or commenting on his conversation with Welker noted that it occurred in the wake of a nearly 6,000-word essay that he published in late August warning about AI and the potentially lethal ills it poses to humanity on a large scale....

....MUCH MORE 

And at GeekWire, September 15:

Gates Foundation bets $1B on AI to boost global health, agriculture and education 

"East German espionage raised GDP by 7.4% in late 1980s, study finds"

Now do China.

From Reuters, September 26/27:

East Germany's extensive Cold War economic espionage in the ​1970s and 1980s lifted its overall economic output ‌by 7.4% at the end of the 1980s, according to a study by the Rockwool Foundation Berlin, seen by ​Reuters on Sunday.

 

Here are some more details:

 

Industrial ​value added was 22.3% higher due to espionage, ⁠equivalent to 20.2 billion East German marks, or €4.1 ​billion ($4.7 billion) in 2020 prices. All estimates refer ​to 1988, the year before the Berlin Wall fell.

Co-author Adrian Lerche said the findings had present-day relevance as governments tighten ​export controls, screen foreign investment and seek to ​protect strategic technologies.

The Stasi, East Germany's sprawling intelligence service, helped companies ‌obtain ⁠scientific and technical information from Western businesses and research institutions. Firms receiving useful intelligence recorded faster productivity growth, invested more and concentrated more on core ​products....

....MORE 

Our last visit with the Rockwool Foundation was February's "Technology's Long Shadow: How Areas In Germany That Early-Adopted The Steam Engine Are Outperforming Today". 

Major Police Action At UK’s Fairford Air Base

From Stars and Stripes, September 27:

Several men arrested near RAF Fairford on suspected explosives offenses

Police in the United Kingdom evacuated homes Sunday morning in a village next to a military installation used by the U.S. Air Force after arresting several men for suspected explosive-related offenses. 

Shortly after 8 a.m. on Sunday, the Gloucestershire police said “a number of properties are currently being evacuated in the Whelford area following the declaration of a major incident.”

Army bomb disposal experts were also on the scene examining a number of vehicles, the police said in a statement. Whelford, a village of several hundred people in western England, is adjacent to RAF Fairford, a base that U.S. bombers have used to carry out strikes on Iran. 

Residents were evacuated to a nearby leisure center, and a cordon was in place, police said, adding, “we’d like to reassure people that we believe this incident is contained.”...

....MUCH MORE

Thinking About Berlin's Politics: Return of the City-State, Or: The End of the Nation State May Be Upon Us

Following on With The Victory Of Die Linke (The Left) In Berlin And The Probability Of The City's First Muslim Mayor: "First We Took Manhattan, Then We Took Berlin" earlier today.

The fact that Die Linke not only won the election for the city-state (Stadtstaaten) of Berlin but did so in the face of the rise of AfD really is notable and raises the question: "Whither the Nation-State?"

Some previous looks at this query. First up, the headline post from September 2017:

Because, as mentioned in the introduction to "Trends to Watch: "Can mayors actually rule the world?":

In low-key but very persistent ways technocrats* have been aiming at this target for years and now it seems to be gathering some momentum. Here's a good introduction by Harvard's Diane Davis....

And because there is serious money pushing this idea, it is sometimes challenging to discern whether a piece of writing is reporting or advocacy.
As always, it's your call.

From Aeon:

Return of the city-state
Nation-states came late to history, and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest they won’t make it to the end of the century 

 

 A woodcut of Nuremberg from the Nuremberg Chronicle 1493

If you’d been born 1,500 years ago in southern Europe, you’d have been convinced that the Roman empire would last forever. It had, after all, been around for 1,000 years. And yet, following a period of economic and military decline, it fell apart. By 476 CE it was gone. To the people living under the mighty empire, these events must have been unthinkable. Just as they must have been for those living through the collapse of the Pharaoh’s rule or Christendom or the Ancien Régime.

We are just as deluded that our model of living in ‘countries’ is inevitable and eternal. Yes, there are dictatorships and democracies, but the whole world is made up of nation-states. This means a blend of ‘nation’ (people with common attributes and characteristics) and ‘state’ (an organised political system with sovereignty over a defined space, with borders agreed by other nation-states). Try to imagine a world without countries – you can’t. Our sense of who we are, our loyalties, our rights and obligations, are bound up in them.

Which is all rather odd, since they’re not really that old. Until the mid-19th century, most of the world was a sprawl of empires, unclaimed land, city-states and principalities, which travellers crossed without checks or passports. As industrialisation made societies more complex, large centralised bureaucracies grew up to manage them. Those governments best able to unify their regions, store records, and coordinate action (especially war) grew more powerful vis-à-vis their neighbours. Revolutions – especially in the United States (1776) and France (1789) – helped to create the idea of a commonly defined ‘national interest’, while improved communications unified language, culture and identity. Imperialistic expansion spread the nation-state model worldwide, and by the middle of the 20th century it was the only game in town. There are now 193 nation-states ruling the world.

But the nation-state with its borders, centralised governments, common people and sovereign authority is increasingly out of step with the world. And as Karl Marx observed, if you change the dominant mode of production that underpins a society, the social and political structure will change too.

The case against the nation-state is hardly new. Twenty years ago, many were prophesising its imminent demise. Globalisation, said the futurists, was chipping away at nation-states’ power to enforce change. Businesses, finance and people could up sticks and leave. The exciting, new internet seemed to herald a borderless, free, identity-less future. And climate change, internet governance and international crime all seemed beyond the nation-state’s abilities. It seemed too small to handle international challenges; and too lumbering to tinker with local problems. Voters were quick to spot all this and stopped bothering to vote, making matters worse. In 1995, two books both titled The End of the Nation State – one by the former French diplomat Jean-Marie Guéhenno, the other by the Japanese organisational theorist Kenichi Ohmae – prophesised that power would head up to multinational bodies such as the European Union or the United Nations, or down to regions and cities.

Reports of its death were greatly exaggerated, and the end-of-the-nation-state theory itself died at the turn of the millennium. But now it’s back, and this time it might be right.

There were only tens of millions of people online in 1995 when the nation-state was last declared dead. In 2015, that number had grown to around 3 billion; by 2020, it will be more than 4 billion. (And more than 20 billion internet-connected devices.) Digital technology doesn’t really like the nation-state. John Perry Barlow’s ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ (1996) sums it up well: the internet is a technology built on libertarian principles. Censorship-free, decentralised and borderless. And now ubiquitous.

This is an enormous pain for the nation-state in all sorts of ways. It’s now possible for the British National Health Service to be targeted by ransomware launched in North Korea, and there are few ways to stop it or bring perpetrators to justice. App technology such as Uber and Deliveroo has helped to produce a sudden surge in the gig economy, which is reckoned to cost the government £3.5 billion a year by 2020-1. There are already millions of people using bitcoin and blockchain technologies, explicitly designed to wrestle control of the money supply from central banks and governments, and their number will continue to grow. It’s also infusing us with new values, ones that are not always national in nature: a growing number of people see themselves as ‘global’ citizens....MUCH MORE

That was followed by a counter-argument in October 2017:

"Why nation-states are good"

...We've been kicking around ideas on how to profit from a devolution of power from larger entities (nation-states) to smaller (city-states) should said devolution occur. So, stealing a way of thinking from Eisenhower, in another context, obvs.:

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

 - Dwight D. Eisenhower

And in December 2018:

What Wharton Is Thinking About: "Nation-States Are Failing…Will a New, Feudal Order Replace Them?"

Are nation-states failing?
They are changing, that's for sure. And there are lots of people who would like to shape/reshape the world to whatever image of  how-things-should-be that they happen to prefer.
Who knows how people should organize themselves? Or, be organized? Seriously, who knows. A lot of people act as if they know and push one direction or another but maybe no one knows.

From Knowledge@Wharton....

Finally, in April 2026:

"A Shakeup Is Coming for the Nation-State"

For centuries, holding vast territory has been the basis of state security. Drones and AI are about to make it a vulnerability.  

Some related posts:

February 2017 - Trends to Watch: "Can mayors actually rule the world?"
Local authorities are pushing to fundamentally move away from the longstanding dominance of the nation-state. How can we ensure that this is for the best?....

September 2017 - A Warning On Mayors Ruling The World From A Surprising Source

There is a determined push to decrease the importance of nation-states while elevating the worldwide political power of municipalities and their mayors, a trend I had assumed CityLab backed come hell-or-high-water.
Maybe not.
The writer of this piece, Amy Liu, hangs her hat at Brookings....

October 2017 - Pope Francis Calls For "Rethinking of the figure and the role of the Nation-State..."

November 2017 - "Mayoral Powers in the Age of New Localism"

One of the problems with politics is that the people attracted to power are exactly the ones who should not be allowed anywhere near it.
Go figure.

We've been watching the mission-creep trend in municipal governance for a while now, trying to get in front of it—"Il faut bien que je les suive, puisque je suis leur chef"*—to make a bucko or two but, to date, have only come up with the tautology that these people would rather jet off to Buenos Aires during the Northern Hemisphere winter for the Global Parliament of Mayors** than stay home and fix potholes.
It was ever thus, or at least has been since 1967 when John Lennon noted "4000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire"

*Ledru-Rollin, 1848—schoolboy French translation: "I must follow them for I am their leader."
**This year the get-together was actually held in Stavanger in late September. Nice 'hood, nice time of year....

April 2019 - "Cities Are Rising in Influence and Power on the Global Stage"

A subject near and dear to our jaded hearts.
It's the manifestation of the age-old thirst for power, to make the world as you want it, and an acknowledgement that fixing potholes is boring....

May 2019 - "Money and trust. Amsterdam moneylenders and the rise of the modern state..."

It has always been about trust.
From the smallest group, immediate family, up through larger and larger populations, clans, tribes etc,  to the nation state, and, some hope, transnational and global agglomerations.
When trust is lost people instinctively pull back to the group or even the individuals they believe they can trust.

The other city-states among Germany's sixteen states are Hamburg and Bremen.

We'll keep an eye on them but for now the action is in what used to be called in the 1920's, red Berlin.  

Hillary Clinton weighs in on open AI models

From Madame Secretary of State Clinton's twitter feed:

We're used to thinking of open-source models as an unadulterated good. But in the case of AI, they can actually pose additional dangers, as @ReidHoffman and I got into at #CGI2026. I appreciated this nuanced discussion. https://t.co/2V3oP2Ufaw

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) September 24, 2026

With The Victory Of Die Linke (The Left) In Berlin And The Probability Of The City's First Muslim Mayor: "First We Took Manhattan, Then We Took Berlin"

From the pretty darn linke* Jacobin magazine, September 21:

Germany’s socialist party Die Linke came first in Sunday’s Berlin election with a huge vote among young Berliners and the multiethnic working class. Now its lead candidate, Elif Eralp, hopes to become Berlin’s new mayor. 

On Sunday, Germany’s socialist party Die Linke won the Berlin elections for the first time. Like New York’s Zohran Mamdani, it beat the establishment parties by offering Berliners concrete action on rents and the cost of living. 

Ok, Berlin doesn’t have a socialist mayor quite yet. But left-wing Die Linke, which won Sunday’s Berlin state election, is in a strong position to lead its next government. Even as the far right rises across Germany, Die Linke has distinguished itself with a strong stance in defense of multiethnic society and a constant focus on the cost of living and housing. For this, it was rewarded by many Berliners.

The result is vindication for a party which was on life support just two years ago, after messy internal conflicts. Many of the conditions for its growth were already then in place. Berliners had long seen their rents rising; the establishment center left has for decades cut back social protections and labor rights; the call to mobilize against rising nationalism is hardly new either. Yet only more recently has Die Linke become an outward-facing force, able to galvanize resistance to the current reactionary drift in German politics.

Die Linke’s campaign centered on the cost of living and specifically on rent. West Berlin was historically cheaper than the Federal Republic’s main cities, and even after reunification the capital boasted much empty space. Yet the sell-off of the public housing stock to private profiteers in the 1990s–2000s, plus a lack of new builds, has pushed up costs. While Berliners voted in a 2021 referendum to renationalize the housing stock, the city government didn’t make good on the result. In this election, Die Linke promised that it would do so....

....Registration 

*From Jacobin's About page:

Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. The print magazine is released quarterly and reaches 75,000 subscribers, in addition to a web audience of over 3,000,000 a month.

AI: "World model companies are keeping a lot of secrets"

From TechCrunch, September 20:

This week, I moderated a panel on world models at the All In conference (no relation to the podcast), and it gave me a chance to dig into one of the most mysterious corners of the AI world. The big players in the space are Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs and Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs — and while both have accumulated a lot of buzz and funding, they also rank pretty low on the trying-to-make-money scale.

At their core, world models are about automating spatial intelligence, so the field could head in lots of exciting and lucrative directions, from robotics to interactive video to more complex self-driving systems. 

But when I started to press on where we would actually see the tech commercialized, things got foggy. The closest thing I found to an authority was Michael Rabbat, a co-founder of AMI Labs and the company’s VP of World Models, who joined me on the panel. But when I pressed him on exactly what the company was working on, he was cagey. “We’ll talk about it when we’re ready to talk about it.” Over email, he clarified, “We’re still in a research and building phase, so we’re not talking publicly about any product plans or timeline.”

To be fair, AMI is less than a year old, so it’s fair enough to keep quiet. But this sort of caginess extends to the whole world-modeling space. World Labs’ Marble is probably the most fully developed product in the space, and its demos range from straightforward media creation, building explorable environments for video games, or CGI effects. There are robotics use cases too, but the whole platform seems more designed to demonstrate capabilities. 

That secrecy even extends to these companies’ suppliers. On the sidelines of the same conference, I spoke to Alex de Vigan, CEO of Physicl — a data supplier for the burgeoning world model business. He says he knows Physicl’s data has been useful for whatever they’re building, but he’s still in the dark about what exactly that is. “I wish they would tell us more. We could build more useful data if we knew what they were working on,” de Vigan told me....

....MUCH MORE 

If interested see also:

December 2024 - "Fei-Fei Li’s Startup Allows You to Walk in the 3D World of Edward Hopper Paintings"

November 2026 - "He’s Been Right About AI for 40 Years. Now He Thinks Everyone Is Wrong."

January 2026 -  Former Meta AI Honcho Called Large Language Models A Dead End

August 14 - "World Models Are AI’s Next Frontier"

One of the overarching themes in the arc of AI development: Large Language Models and especially chatbots are not the be-all and end-all of artificial intelligence.

The writer,  Celine Herweijer, is Visiting Professor in Energy and Geopolitics at the LSE and former Group Chief Sustainability Officer at HSBC....

August 15, 2026 - More On Physical AI: "How world models became AI's next frontier"

"Major section of California’s $231B High-Speed Rail could shrink to tiny track ending at remote orchard"

But what a pick-your-own opportunity for the orchards.

From the New York Post, September 21:

California’s $231 billion High-Speed Rail dream could hit a literal dead end at a remote Central Valley orchard.

The state’s long-troubled bullet train could be forced to dramatically shrink its first operating segment, potentially leaving both Merced and Bakersfield off the initial route as the project barrels toward a massive cash crunch.

Instead, California may have to pour its remaining money into completing a much smaller stretch of track between Madera and Poplar Avenue in rural Kern County, an isolated endpoint surrounded largely by farmland and orchards, project Inspector General Benjamin Belnap told KCRA’s California Politics 360.

The drastic downsizing could become reality if the California High-Speed Rail Authority runs through its available funding as projected by December 2027.

Without another infusion of cash from Sacramento, officials may have little choice but to abandon, at least temporarily, plans to connect the first operating segment all the way from Merced to Bakersfield and focus their dwindling resources on the shorter Central Valley stretch.

The warning represents another potential setback for the decades-in-the-making bullet train, whose original vision was to whisk passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

With enough money no longer available to complete that vision in the short term, the state has focused on getting a 171-mile Merced-to-Bakersfield segment up and running. That portion alone is expected to cost as much as $36 billion.

But even that scaled-back goal could be in jeopardy....

....MUCH MORE 

I may have been overly-enthusiastic about the pick-your-own opportunity.

The only orchards on the market anywhere near the future choo-choo are almonds and cherries.

And no matter how yummy the almonds I don't think folks would have the patience to pick 'em. One almond...two almonds...three almonds...four... 

I'll console myself reminiscing about what France's high-speed-rail experts said, lo those many years (and billions) ago:

....The state was warned repeatedly that its plans were too complex. SNCF, the French national railroad, was among bullet train operators from Europe and Japan that came to California in the early 2000s with hopes of getting a contract to help develop the system.

The company’s recommendations for a direct route out of Los Angeles and a focus on moving people between Los Angeles and San Francisco were cast aside, said Dan McNamara, a career project manager for SNCF.‌

The company‌ ‌pulled out in 2011. “There were so many things that went wrong,” Mr. McNamara said. “SNCF was very angry. They told the state they were leaving for North Africa, which was less politically dysfunctional. They went to Morocco and helped them build a rail system.”

Morocco’s bullet train started service in 2018.....

There you have it, North Africa is less politically corrupt than California. Just amazing.

AI: Fabio Looks At Altman And Amodei

One of our favorite Marxist Professors. 

(we have three faves, two are economists and then there's Fabio) 

This piece is a week old but seems to be aging well.

 

From the substack of Fabio Vighi, Professor of Critical Theory and Italian at Cardiff University, UK, September 18:

 

The Rogue Swarm and the Federal Backstop 

There is a particular kind of tweet that only the CEO of a frontier lab can send at midnight on a Saturday. Dario Amodei’s was one of them: a warning that within six to twelve months a “rogue swarm” could seize control of the internet and inflict hundreds of billions in damage. The message was delivered with the grave, unsentimental cadence of a man who ‘has seen things that you people wouldn’t believe.’ Within minutes, Sam Altman and Elon Musk had joined the chorus – they had also “seen things.” By Sunday morning, the alarm was general.

Consider the timing and the cycle. Within the same week, an ex‑OpenAI, ex‑Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, posted that both companies were ‘racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.’ The alarmist thread drew more than 120 million views in its first day and prompted more than 20 politicians to respond with calls for AI regulation. Around the same time, Anthropic’s own economists released a scenarios report which featured roughly 15% annual GDP growth, 11.9% economy‑wide mass unemployment, and labour’s share of income falling from about 60% to 45.2% – as though the bleak forecast of technological unemployment required a formal scenarios report to be taken seriously. And within days of Amodei’s warning, Semafor reported that a previously stalled bipartisan AI safety bill had suddenly emerged as the most viable legislative option before 2027. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders, who had announced a superintelligence‑ban bill on 3 September, was preparing to introduce it formally and convene expert briefings on AI’s “extraordinary dangers.”

Let’s be serious and ask the only question that truly matters here: what does this sudden AI-panic wave actually produce? One thing it certainly does not and will not produce, is regulation in any binding sense. Instead, it creates the terrain or precondition for something entirely different: a federal backstop for AI capital expenditure (CapEx) that OpenAI and other labs have sought from the beginning. In this framework, Amodei’s swarm is the alibi. It gives Altman the perfect reason to postpone the trillion-dollar IPO – ‘an ill‑advised moment to go public’, he commented – while handing Congress the emotional warrant to authorise emergency federal funding to secure AI (and, it seems, the world) against catastrophe. The existential threat is real enough to justify the money and vague enough to justify anything else.

This is the Machiavellian techno-financial machinery in its purest form. The point to always keep in mind, amid all the noise, is that the AI buildout runs on mountains of debt: capital investments by tech giants on data centres and AI infrastructure will exceed a trillion dollars in 2027; off-balance-sheet commitments are at $3.1 trillion with $1.3 trillion added in a single quarter; AI bond issuance has hit $266 billion this year and a further $400 billion are expected next year. Several of the largest hyperscalers are now free‑cash‑flow negative, as AI data‑centre and chip spending outstrips operating cash generation and pushes more financing off their balance sheets. In short, private balance sheets can no longer absorb the debt bingeing on their own. So, the conditions for the next round of credit creation must be conjured politically: first the panic, then the guarantee, then the issuance. The safety discourse is the lubricant – the initial ideological form taken by this issuance. The sequence is straightforward: private credit finances the buildout; mounting fragility demands a public guarantee (through procurement, energy subsidies, liability protection, debt guarantees, or emergency appropriations) and the guarantee requires an emergency vocabulary. AI safety supplies that vocabulary.

The Rehearsal

As many will remember, in April 2026, Anthropic announced its Mythos model had ‘found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser.’ The White House restricted access to roughly 40 organisations, including Amazon, Microsoft, JPMorgan. The rest of the world’s banks, hospitals and governments were left waiting outside that circle. They had to confront the implications indirectly: through regulatory warnings, emergency briefings, and a rapidly expanding language of systemic risk.

The IMF called it a potential ‘macro-financial shock,’ warning that ‘correlated failures’ could ‘disrupt financial intermediation, payments and confidence at the systemic level.’ The Bank of England’s governor, Andrew Bailey, requested that Anthropic brief the Financial Stability Board – finance ministry officials and central bankers from the G20. Meanwhile, the ECB gave 110 banks until 31 October to submit ‘comprehensive action plans’ against AI-enabled cyber threats, raising its systemic risk assessment to “severe.” And Klaus Schwab, of course, had already said it plainly back in 2020: compared to a major cyber-attack, ‘the COVID-19 crisis would be seen as a small disturbance.’....

....MUCH MORE 

While many of the observations are not original to the good Professor, he does tie them together into a neat little package.