Also: AMD's quarterly results, the government reviewing AI models, and the decline of capitalism. The post Is closed-source AI really losing its edge? appeared first on Cautious Optimism.

The latest in traditional publishing, marketing & promotion, culture & politics, and AI.

Americans are used to hearing one story about Iran: a hostile regime, a bad actor, a problem to contain. That story isn’t wrong. But it’s incomplete and that matters, because incomplete thinking…

During the 2018 Centennial of World War I, Donald Trump was scheduled to visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France. The relentless rain made helicopter travel to the Cemetery impossible, but…

Coined in 1740, ‘Britannia! rule the waves’ was a dawn-of-Empire exhortation to assert British naval power worldwide. Today, the Law Commission exhorts Britannia (or England and Wales, to be exact)…

In Spring 2026, editorial cartoonist Signe Wilkinson donated her drawings to the Annenberg School for Communication Library Archives. Wilkinson is best known for her work with the Philadelphia Daily…

Olúfémi O. Táíwò argues for a *constructive* form of reparations: distributive justice that looks to the past to construct a transition from the global racial empire we have today to the more just…

In the crepuscule of pre-dawn each day, I silently pop out the forehatch like a woodchuck to hop in a dinghy with a couple of new friends who sailed their Wharram 30 from England. He had been a…

Trump Administration aims to penalize disabled adults who live with their families Excerpt: The administration is working on a rule change that would deduct the value of a disabled adult’s bedroom…

Austin brought rents down 19%. Boston flew a delegation out to learn how, took detailed notes, came home, and did very little. This article explores what can easily be done.

This is the week of the RightsCon conference that wasn’t. RightsCon, the leading international Internet and human rights conference organised by civil society group Access Now, was cancelled by the…

Farmer here. We would not need market interventions if we simply had high tariffs on food. Farmers produce a commodity product that has to compete on price with food grown in countries with zero…

The rise of the Tamizhaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK), a political party set up by actor Joseph Vijay in Tamil Nadu, implies the slow uprooting of Dravidianism in the state. With a 35 percent vote share,…

Here are three recent TTAB decisions in Section 2(d) appeals. Remembering that a TTAB Judge (now retired) once said that one can predict the outcome of a Section 2(d) appeal 95% of the time just by…

Another anthropogenic global warming (AGW) modeling failure emerges in observed tropical cyclone data. According to climate modeling (Knutson et al., 2015 and 2020), everyday human activities such as…

Rarely a week goes by without a phone call from a passionate regional community member asking me asking for support to get a grant over the line. I get it, money feels like the answer. It’s…

NEWSFLASH: RFK Jr. plans to curb antidepressants, which he falsely compares to heroin. I’ve had crippling anxiety since I was 17. I know the age because I can remember the first anxiety-fueled…

Teacher Li through an X/Twitter account channels information from China to the outer world. Harassment of people exercising their right under Chinese law to petition at higher levels for the redress…

Does this look like a Labor front to you? Group ticket voting in Victoria has again been in the news a lot lately - see my latest article about whether abolishing it would assist One Nation . With…

We are grossly underreacting.

If my calendar does not deceive me, the Worcester Public Schools will release their proposed FY27 budget on Friday, but we're getting an early warning via press release of something of what's in it.…

When a crime scene has no physical address, investigators face a labyrinth of overlapping jurisdictions, conflicting laws, and technical challenges that traditional forensics never prepared them for.

Temps critiques on Trump, Carl Schmitt, and the competing logics of planetary governance.

Found the one freebie that Labour ministers won't gladly accept. We're only two years into the most authoritarian government of my lifetime and we're already long overdue to kick these corrupt,…

​A Tennessee pastor’s claims about UFO disclosure made headlines this week. In an April 27 YouTube video, Perry Stone, a televangelist, claimed that a friend had told him that a group of pastors…

In most elections in the United States, we have "first past the post voting" in which whoever gets the most votes wins.

How should we judge the performance of our political parties in the aftermath of the Scottish Parliamentary, the Welsh Senedd, and English local elections? The leadership hopefuls are circling Keir…

When I graduated fifteen years ago on the work of John Rawls, it was widely regarded as dated. A Theory of Justice had been published in 1971, and the lessons of Rawls’s masterpiece had by then been…

There has been a great deal of talk about Palantir Technologies, which leads me to suspect that a crusade is either being prepared or is perhaps already underway. And crusades against multinational…

Related: IP is Not “Not Property” It is impossible to own ideas Another way to explain the problem with IP: Resources v. Knowledge; Ownership v. Possession Libertarian and Lockean Creationism:…

Nigel Farage’s Reform UK have released a proposed law (PDF) that they are calling the Mass Deportation (Detention) Bill. ...

Those of us from Northern Ireland won't be surprised at the latest depressing 'themuns versus usuns' spat, with the Democratic Unionist Party Communities Minister Gordon Lyons now removing funding…

image by AI; my own prompt In a time of growing chaos, precarity, scarcity, anger, obscene inequality, economic and ecological decline, and untold war-mongering, fear-mongering and suffering, when…

Loudoun County, Virginia, was the most permissive jurisdiction in the United States for hyperscale data center construction. As of this quarter, it has nearly flipped 180 degrees. Is this the…

“Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’ I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the…

Mussab Ali in NJ-8 and Hartzell Gray in MO-4 share why they’re rejecting AIPAC money, fighting for working people, and building people-powered campaigns for CongressSubscribe to Let's…

A new form of capital is ascending: cloud capital—networked algorithmic machines that grant their owners remarkable powers to modify our behaviour. And just as financiers needed neoliberalism,…

What’s wrong with Sam Altman? Ask the guy who spent 18 months reporting on him. On this week’s podcast, Paul and Rich are joined by New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz, who recently put out a…

26. Absurd Ennoblements One can argue – reasonably – that the honours system has always been ridiculous, that singling people out for doing their jobs, and often very specific jobs at…

The cracks in the facade of the global climate science are getting wider, more glaring as a significant group of experts chooses to break rank. Modern Galileos are increasingly challenging the…

A few days ago there was a dust-up at the Park Slope Food Coop after a member, during a coop meeting, stated that "Jewish supremacism is a problem in this country." Following an outcry, the store's…

Does Amazon Basics, Amazon's in-house brand, still make everything in China? You might be surprised. The post Best Sellling Amazon Basics Products Not Made in China appeared first on No to China 2026.

Watching De Explainerr (2025), Every Banned Book Explained in 14 Minutes, has me thinking why are books (or movies…) banned. In all but the most extreme cases books and movies are banned either…

There was a big anniversary at the Greater Cincinnati Water Works this year, but it does not appear that anyone celebrated the occasion. Fifty years ago, on March 15, 1976, after more than 25 years…

In early 2026, the Gulf War caused a little bit of a mess to my travel plans, but on the bright side, the situation led me to Bhutan, one of the more peaceful spots on the planet.

If India is to meet its main economic, social and geopolitical challenges, Muslim politics has to change. The post-1947 approach of the “secular” parties - which has been about making symbolic…

In einem Interview mit DIE ZEIT spricht Dr. Parag Khanna darüber, wie die Blockade der Straße von Hormus die systemische Verwundbarkeit globaler Lieferketten offengelegt hat. Er argumentiert, dass…

The Taipei Times has reported that a 23-year-old university student in Taiwan has been arrested after using a software-defined radio and hand held radio to hack into Taiwan High Speed Rail…

Technocracy was a 1930s movement that wanted to replace elected governments with engineers and scientists running society through rationality and systems. What does it mean today in our world of…

I've spent the better part of two decades inventorying public APIs across the U.S. federal government, and the catalog has grown to a point where it deserves its own roundup. There are 211 agencies…