activescott's Notes

In the midst of a social crisis, Vance observed, Trump offered “an easy escape from the pain. To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution.” But, he argued, such promises were a cheap high. “He never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can’t. Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein.” Anne Applebaum: Trump’s anti-patriotic trap “Trump is cultural heroin,” Vance wrote. “He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.” “One day” is today. The trump presidency, while still quite dangerous, is also collapsing, cracking under the weight of its own choices. The main driver is the economy, which he sold as his strong point. We’re seeing tariff-driven price increases, gas prices that spiked from less than $3 to more than $4 a gallon during a 100-day war against Iran that America lost, wages failing to keep pace with the cost of living, and inflation ticking back up. Manufacturing jobs, which Trump promised to bring roaring back, are still being lost. Health care has gotten much more expensive on his watch, and millions have lost coverage. At the top of the nation’s health agencies sits Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who in a single year moved to cut the list of recommended childhood vaccines nearly in half, fired the government’s vaccine advisers and replaced them with skeptics, and presided over the worst measles outbreak in 30 years. The National Institutes of Health, the crown jewel of American biomedical science, has seen billions in research cut, clinical trials canceled, and labs closed, resulting in a “brain drain” that rival nations are racing to exploit. And the dismantling of USAID, along with the gutting of PEPFAR—the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the bipartisan AIDS-relief program credited with saving more than 25 million lives—has, by credible estimates, already cost the lives of hundreds of thousands, most of them children, with projections of as ma

This is the context in which Americans are celebrating the nation’s 250th birthday. It’s not simply that things are going badly; it’s that their view of the United States is darkening. Pride in being an American has hit a new low. Nearly 80 percent of Americans believe the Founders would be disappointed with how the country has turned out.

Some of that sentiment reflects the fact that the president and those around him subvert the rule of law, decency, and democratic restraints. Many Americans believe the country is, in its current incarnation, betraying its ideals. They feel at odds with the nation they love.

Which brings me back to J. D. Vance. Ten summers ago he understood, better than most, the threat Trump posed to America. Vance, who described himself as a “Never Trump guy,” thought Trump was an “idiot.” He admitted to a friend at the time that he goes “back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.” But then ambition made its offer, and Vance, who had seen the danger so clearly, discovered he could see his way around it. The first stop was the Senate; the next was the vice presidency.

The remedy, according to Lincoln, was a “political religion” based on reverence for the law and fidelity to America’s constitutional process. Lincoln was in turn relying on the wisdom of George Washington, and particularly Washington’s farewell address. America’s two greatest presidents shared an intense conviction: that a republic depends on some measure of virtue in its citizens and some measure of integrity in its leaders. Without them, the temple of liberty will fall. The past decade in America has been a lost decade. Far too many Americans have cheered on the men tearing at the temple. But Americans can now see, later than they should have, the cost of the damage. It is within our power to make it whole. What remains is to find the will. There is a name for those who do: renewers of ruined cities, repairers of the breach, restorers of streets in which to dwell.

Although instances of noncitizen registration and voting are rare, the SAVE America Act’s goal of ensuring that only citizens can register to vote is important. But there are easier, more cost-effective ways to improve citizenship verification that don’t create new barriers for eligible voters.

Registration and voting attempts by noncitizens are routinely investigated and prosecuted by the appropriate authorities, and there is no evidence that attempts at voting by noncitizens have ever been significant enough to impact any election’s outcome. In fact, there is ample evidence to indicate that registration and voting by noncitizens is few and far between.

Utah, for example, performed a citizenship review of its entire voter registration list from April 2025 through January 2026. After a time-intensive, multi-step review of more than 2 million registered voters, they identified only one confirmed instance of noncitizen registration and zero instances of noncitizen voting.

Additionally, many state election offices began using U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ (USCIS) Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program in 2025 to verify voter citizenship. Records from this program show that just 0.04% of voter verification cases are returned as noncitizens.

Many eligible citizens don’t have documentary proof of citizenship

According to the U.S. Department of State, examples of primary citizenship evidence include a birth certificate, a U.S. passport, a Consular Report of Birth Abroad, a Certificate of Citizenship, or a Naturalization Certificate. (While Real IDs are often assumed to be a reliable proxy for citizenship, they do not definitively establish citizenship.) 

Although at least one of these documents are in theory available to most citizens, not all voters have them readily available. According to recent studies:

9% of all eligible voters do not have, or do not have easy access to, documentary proof of citizenship. 52% of registered voters do not have an unexpired passport with their current legal name. 11% of registered voters do not have access to their birth certificate. Additionally, birth certificates often lack information that matches a person’s current identity. For instance, someone who has changed their name through marriage or court order may need to present a third document (such as a marriage certificate) to join their proof of citizenship (e.g., birth certificate) with their proof of identity (e.g., driver’s license), further decreasing the likelihood that a voter will have the appropriate documentation on hand to successfully register.

Even if voters were to provide documentary proof of citizenship, verifying the authenticity of those documents is an inherently complex task, one that election officials and motor vehicle departments often do not have the resources or training to perform.

Kansas offers a case study of how a documentary proof requirement would likely play out in practice. Before the law took effect, noncitizen registration in Kansas was exceedingly rare, accounting for about 0.002% of registered voters. After adoption, the documentary proof of citizenship requirement prevented roughly 31,000 eligible citizens, or 12% of all applicants, from registering to vote. In short, the law prevented far more citizens from registering to vote than noncitizens.

He said that although a prohibition on mail-in voting with exceptions and other requests made by Trump could be included, the “bigger reach” is to hone the bill to focus on providing proof of citizenship when registering to vote and the presentation of photo ID before casting a ballot — the core components of the bill. “That eliminates the problem, all the fraud and everything that everybody’s concerned about in our elections, particularly, frankly, in these blue states,” Johnson said.

The most common objection I hear to evals is “our product is hard to eval”.

This objection is a product smell. Artifacts that are hard for you to verify are often hard for users too. In the worst case, users have to redo the work from scratch to verify the output. More importantly, designing your product for ease of verification should come before building evals.

The shuttering of local news outlets and proliferation of AI-generated content has led to a rise in “pink slime” websites, which the Poynter Institute describes as outlets producing “poor quality reports that appear to be local news,” and are “frequently produced via automation and templates.” Often these sites are, according to Poynter, “funded by outside companies with a partisan source of financing.”  For example, a sprawling network of 450 websites — including 189 that “were set up as local news networks across 10 states” — was discovered ahead of the 2020 election cycle by the Columbia Journalism Review. CJR linked the network to a conservative businessman’s company “known for its low-cost automated story generation,” as well as for “faking bylines and quotes, and for plagiarism.” In Knox County, Ohio, a proposed wind farm became the subject of critical coverage in a local outlet after it was purchased by Metric Media, “part of a ‘pink slime’ network,” ProPublica reported at the time.

But countries hit earlier by the ketamine wave offer a grim warning about the drug’s dark side.  In the U.K., the number of people seeking treatment for ketamine addiction increased twelvefold between 2015 and 2025. Hospitals have reported growing numbers of chronic users suffering catastrophic bladder damage caused by the drug’s toxic metabolites. Some patients, including teenagers, have required bladder removal surgery. Heavy use can also cause debilitating abdominal pain known as “K-cramps,” which some users attempt to relieve by taking more ketamine.

only a small number of fatalities linked to sole ketamine use. Deaths more often involve misadventure, such as drowning, accidents or the combined effect of mixing multiple substances, rather than direct toxicity. For example, Missouri doctor Bolek Payan disappeared in December 2022 and was later found drowned in his pond after taking ketamine. The most high-profile death has been that of Matthew Perry, whose body was found in his hot tub after he knocked himself out with a large dose of ketamine. Even so, the resulting trial of the “Ketamine Queen,” the invented nickname prosecutors gave to an LA dealer called Jasveen Sangha who sold the drugs to Perry’s friend, ended with her being sentenced to 15 years.

Authorities are also increasingly concerned about “tusi,” or “pink cocaine,” a party drug that most often contains ketamine mixed with MDMA and caffeine. The Instagram-friendly drug was created by a new generation of young Colombian narcos in the early 2010s before spreading to Spain and its holiday hotspots such as Ibiza and the Canaries.

Medical examiners in Miami have reported a spike in deaths involving the drug. In one 2024 case, a 24-year-old woman crashed her car and killed two people after taking tusi, and told officers she was “from the future.”

Although at a lower level than other illicit drugs, ketamine poisonings, seizures and cases of pharmaceutical diversion are all rising nationally. Investigators say the U.S. market is increasingly being supplied by industrial-scale illicit production in Europe and India, with the drug being smuggled into the U.S. often from the U.K. by plane and boat.

US Ambassador Mike Huckabee said Washington "recognises Jerusalem as the eternal, indigenous, and forever capital of the Jewish people".

"I would say God made that decision 3,800 years ago, and we finally got around to acknowledging what had been determined long before the United States of America came along."

The agreement follows President Donald Trump's decision during his first term to recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital in December 2017 and relocate the US embassy from Tel Aviv.

The US went ahead with the plan even though Palestinians continue to seek East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state. Because of these competing claims, most countries have kept their embassies in Tel Aviv, maintaining that Jerusalem's final status should be settled through peace negotiations in line with international law and relevant United Nations resolutions.

Burbank traded seeds with fellow collectors all around the world. In a package from India, he found seeds for a huge blackberry with an even bigger flavor.

Burbank named it the Himalaya Giant (even though it’s actually believed to be from Armenia).

Burbank found that the Himalaya Giant grew like nobody’s business – but only in temperate areas, like the Pacific Coast.

By the early 1900s, the Himalaya Giant – which would eventually be known as the Himalayan blackberry – was especially thriving in the Puget Sound region.

OpenFGA takes the best ideas from Google's Zanzibar paper for Relationship-Based Access Control, and also solves problems for Role-based Access Control and Attribute-Based Access Control use cases. The modeling language is powerful enough for engineers, but friendly enough for other stakeholders on your team as well.

The Agency is a growing collection of meticulously crafted AI agent personalities. Each agent is:

🎯 Specialized: Deep expertise in their domain (not generic prompt templates)
🧠 Personality-Driven: Unique voice, communication style, and approach
📋 Deliverable-Focused: Real code, processes, and measurable outcomes
✅ Production-Ready: Battle-tested workflows and success metrics

Think of it as: Assembling your dream team, except they're AI specialists who never sleep, never complain, and always deliver.

Trump reported another $635 million from the sale of his Trump meme coins. The news underlines how crypto has transformed the president's fortunes. In his disclosure a year ​ago, opens new tab, for example, the president reported $57.35 million from token sales at World Liberty, which then leaped nine-fold in this year’s filing. Reuters recently estimated the Trump family has made at least $2.3 ​billion from crypto-related projects since Trump returned to the White House in 2025. On taking office, Trump began to put in place policies and initiatives that ⁠the industry saw as beneficial, from implementing federal rules for stablecoins to dialing back policing of the industry by the U.S. Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

A 2019 study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics found that minimum wage increases did not affect the overall number of low-wage jobs in the five years following the wage increase. However, it did find disemployment in 'tradable' sectors, defined as those sectors most reliant on entry-level or low-skilled labor.[78]

A 2018 study published by the University of California agrees with the study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics; it finds that minimum wages actually lead to fewer jobs for low-skilled workers. The article discusses a trade-off for low- to high-skilled workers: when the minimum wage is increased, GDP is more heavily redistributed toward high-academia jobs.[79]

In another study, which shared authors with the above, published in the American Economic Review, found that a large and persistent increase in the minimum wage in Hungary produced some disemployment, with the large majority of additional cost being passed on to consumers. The authors also found that firms began substituting capital for labor over time.[80]

Card and Krueger expanded on this initial article in their 1995 book Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage.[82] They argued that the negative employment effects of minimum wage laws are minimal if not non-existent. For example, they look at the 1992 increase in New Jersey's minimum wage, the 1988 rise in California's minimum wage, and the 1990–91 increases in the federal minimum wage. In addition to their own findings, they reanalyzed earlier studies using updated data, generally finding that the earlier negative employment effects did not hold up in the larger datasets.[83] This had major implications on policy, challenging long-held economic views that increasing minimum wage led to deadweight loss.

A 2011 paper reconciled differences between datasets, showing positive employment effects for small restaurants but negative effects for large fast-food chains.[87] A 2014 analysis found that minimum wage reduces employment among teenagers.[88]

A 2017 study in Seattle found that raising the minimum wage to $13 per hour reduced the incomes of low-wage workers because they worked fewer hours as businesses adjusted to higher labor costs.[94] A 2019 study in Arizona suggested that smaller minimum wage increases might lead to slight economic growth without significantly distorting labor markets.[95]

For free-market types, including The Economist, fiddling with wages by fiat sets off alarm bells. In a competitive market anything that artificially raises the price of labour will curb demand for it, and the first to lose their jobs will be the least skilled—the people intervention is supposed to help. That is why Milton Friedman called minimum wages a form of discrimination against the low-skilled; and it is why he saw topping up the incomes of the working poor with public subsidies as a far more sensible means of alleviating poverty.

Scepticism about the merits of minimum wages remains this newspaper’s starting-point. But as income inequality widens and workers’ share of national income shrinks, the case for action to help the low-paid grows. Addressing the problem through subsidies for the working poor is harder in an era of austerity, when there are many other pressing claims on national coffers. Other policy options, such as confiscatory taxes, are unattractive.

Nor is a moderate minimum wage as undesirable as neoclassical purists suggest. Unlike those in textbooks, real labour markets are not perfectly competitive. Since workers who want to change jobs face costs and risks, employers may be able to set pay below its market-clearing rate. A minimum wage, providing it is not set too high, could thus boost pay with no ill effects on jobs.

Empirical evidence supports that argument. In flexible economies a low minimum wage seems to have little, if any, depressing effect on employment. America’s federal minimum wage, at 38% of median income, is one of the rich world’s lowest. Some studies find no harm to employment from federal or state minimum wages, others see a small one, but none finds any serious damage. Britain’s minimum wage, at around 47% of median income, with a lower rate for young people, also does not seem to have pushed many people out of work.

High minimum wages, however, particularly in rigid labour markets, do appear to hit employment. France has the rich world’s highest wage floor, at more than 60% of the median for adults and a far bigger fraction of the typical wage for the young. This helps explain why France also has shockingly high rates of youth unemployment: 26% for 15- to 24-year-olds.

A second lesson is that politicians should give the power to set minimum wages to technocrats. In Britain, the floor is adjusted annually on the advice of economists and statisticians in the Low Pay Commission; it has generally advanced gradually. In America, the federal floor is set by politicians and adjusted irregularly in huge increments. That does no favours to American workers or their employers.

Finally, governments should remember that minimum wages are a palliative. They should not distract attention from more fundamental causes of low wages—such as a lack of education and skills—and the efforts to address them.

There is a long and sorry history of political operatives trying to trick Americans out of voting. In 2008, these tactics were focused on voters in battleground states. In Philadelphia, fliers distributed and posted in a West Philadelphia neighborhood claimed that any violation as simple as an unpaid parking ticket would render people ineligible to vote and subject to arrest at the polls. In southern Virginia and at George Mason University in the northern part of the state, official-looking fliers “informed” voters that, because of projected high turnout, Democrats should wait and vote on November 5, the day after the election.

The U.S. has a long history of mail voting. Large-scale use of mail ballots originated during the U.S. Civil War, when some soldiers were allowed to vote remotely after absentee voting laws were passed in their home states. Today, mail voting is widely used around the world, with more than 30 countries—including Switzerland, Germany, and South Korea—allowing voters to cast ballots by mail.

Mail ballots are widespread across the United States. For example, in 2024 alone, the U.S. Postal Service processed over 99.2 million mail ballots.

Several studies indicate that certain forms of mail voting can increase voter turnout. A 2009 study for the Pew Charitable Trusts found that no-excuse absentee voting increased voter participation by about 3 percentage points in comparison to states with excuse absentee voting, when controlling for other factors that may impact turnout.

First, we find that cases of fraud involving any form of mail ballots were very rare. Across the entire country, and utilizing a maximally inclusive estimate, between six and 46 cases of mail voting fraud were identified in each general election. To calculate the percentage of mail voting fraud in a given year, we divided the total number of mail voting fraud cases by the total number of mail votes cast for each general election. We find an average total mail voting fraud percentage across the 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022 general elections of only 0.000043%, or about four cases of mail voting fraud out of every 10 million mail votes.

Although the database we utilized self-identified as “not…comprehensive,” we have reason to believe that this limited scope did not meaningfully distort our overall findings. The News21 database, which is among the most extensive databases of its kind currently publicly available, includes over 2,000 cases, of which we found 1,605 related to alleged voting fraud between 2000 and 2012. That averages to roughly 134 cases per year. Even if we assume this same case rate persisted for the four general elections examined, and assume the 134 cases of voting fraud were all mail voting fraud,8 that would still translate to only about 2.5 cases of mail voting fraud per 1,000,000 mail votes. This indicates that, even under assumptions that greatly inflate the frequency of mail voting fraud, the resulting probability of fraud remains negligible.

President Trump told a conservative podcaster this week that he wants Republicans to "take over the voting" in 15 states in order to "nationalize" the 2026 midterm elections, raising concerns that he may try to defy the Constitution and interfere in ways that would benefit his party.

"The Republicans should say, 'We want to take over,'" Trump declared in an interview with Dan Bongino, his former deputy F.B.I. director, on Monday. "We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many — 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting."

The president did not explain what he meant by 'nationalizing the voting," nor did he say which states he had in mind. But he went on to claim that it was necessary for the GOP to seize control because "people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally."

"We have states that are so crooked," he said. "We have states that I won that show I didn't win."

All of Trump's allegations of widespread, result-altering election fraud — claims he has been making since he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016 — have been conclusively debunked, both in court and by GOP election officials. A 2024 audit by Georgia's Republican secretary of state, for instance, found that just 20 of the 8.2 million people registered to vote there were not citizens. Only nine of them had ever cast ballots.

Even an ongoing review of the 2024 election by Trump's Department of Homeland Security has so far "found little evidence of widespread voting fraud by noncitizens," according to the New York Times.

Yet a series of recent moves — including last week's FBI raid on an election center in Fulton County, Ga. — suggest that Trump's call to nationalize the 2026 midterms may be more than mere rhetoric.

"I don't know why the federal government doesn't do [elections] anyway," Trump added at an Oval Office event on Tuesday. "The federal government should get involved."

Trump then vowed to sign "an EXECUTIVE ORDER" to that effect. (For the record, only about four out of every 10 million mail votes is found to be fraudulent; the vast majority of Americans use paper ballots already; and voting machines are a faster, cheaper and more accurate way of tabulating those ballots than counting by hand.)