Precarious Politics

ICE is rounding up thousands of people with no criminal record and throwing them into concentration camps where conditions are so bad that people are committing suicide while the guards bet on who kills themselves next

Huge new study finding from COVID. 20 months after infection “In cardiovascular disease patients, T lymphocytes remained 72.9% below baseline for 20 months post-infection.” That’s absolutely insane. A 73% persistent drop in the body’s ability to fight infections. This includes your ability to fight cancer…

Anthropic's own researchers just proved that using AI to learn new skills makes you 17% worse at them. and the part nobody's reading is more important than the headline. the paper is called "How AI Impacts Skill Formation." randomized experiment. 52 professional developers. real coding tasks with a Python library none of them had used before. half got an AI assistant. half didn't. the AI group scored 17% lower on the skills evaluation. Cohen's d of 0.738, p=0.010. that's a real effect. and here's what makes it sting: the AI group wasn't even faster. no significant speed improvement. they learned less AND didn't save time. but the viral framing of "AI bad for learning" misses what actually matters in this paper. the researchers watched screen recordings of every single participant. they identified 6 distinct patterns of how people use AI when learning something new. 3 of those patterns preserved learning. 3 destroyed it. the gap between them is enormous. participants who only asked AI conceptual questions scored 86% on the evaluation. participants who delegated everything to AI scored 24%. same tool. same task. same time limit. the difference was cognitive engagement. the highest-scoring AI users actually outperformed some of the no-AI group. they asked "why does this work" instead of "write this for me." they generated code then asked follow-up questions to understand it. they used AI as a thinking partner, not a replacement for thinking. the lowest-scoring group did what most people do under deadline pressure: pasted the prompt, copied the output, moved on. they finished fastest. they learned almost nothing. and here's the finding that should concern every engineering manager alive: the biggest score gap was on debugging questions. the skill you need most when supervising AI-generated code is the exact skill that atrophies fastest when you let AI do the work. the control group made more errors during the task. they hit bugs. they struggled with async concepts. they got frustrated. and that struggle is precisely what built their understanding. errors aren't obstacles to learning. they ARE learning. removing them with AI removes the mechanism that creates competence. participants in the AI group literally said afterward they wished they'd "paid more attention" and felt "lazy." one wrote "there are still a lot of gaps in my understanding." they could feel the hollowness of having completed something without understanding it. that's not a productivity win. that's debt. this paper isn't an argument against using AI. it's an argument against using AI unconsciously. Anthropic publishing research showing their own product can inhibit skill formation is the kind of intellectual honesty the industry needs more of. the practical takeaway is simple: if you're learning something new, use AI to ask questions, not to skip the work. the struggle is the product.

Trump promised that new factories and jobs would pour into the US, but spending on manufacturing-related construction actually decreased last year (after booming under Biden). My @Morning_Joe Chart

This is brilliant! Democrat candidate for US Congress in Illinois’ 9th district, Kat Abughazaleh, launched an attack ad against herself!

U.S. job market is in one of the worst recessions in decades. As an economist, I can confidently say that Trump is the most incompetent president of my lifetime.

@ianbremmer They will find other ways to recreate the tariffs. More importantly, SCOTUS ruled that tariffs are TAXES. Every Dem running for office should cite this ruling that a vote for Trump/Con Party is a vote to increase TAXES. See page 4 of the summary of the ruling.

the president has lots of legal ways to impose tariffs. but pretending everything is a national emergency was never going to fly. trump is now in weaker position accordingly.

@admcrlsn They will find other ways to recreate the tariffs. More importantly, SCOTUS ruled that tariffs are TAXES. Every Dem running for office should cite this ruling that a vote for Trump/Con Party is a vote to increase TAXES. See page 4 of the summary of the ruling.

And yet, we may be far from done here

That sound you just heard is hundreds of Republican elected officials at every level of government — who are too afraid to cross Donald Trump publicly — sighing in relief.

@NoLieWithBTC They will find other ways to recreate the tariffs. More importantly, SCOTUS ruled that tariffs are TAXES. Every Dem running for office should cite this ruling that a vote for Trump/Con Party is a vote to increase TAXES. See page 4 of the summary of the ruling.

Breaking: The Supreme Court just ruled that Trump’s tariffs are illegal, immediately striking them down.

chinese imports of russian oil now at a record high of two million barrels a day. result of india cutting off their purchases, russia offering discounts, and the united states unprepared to sanction the chinese.

Deaths where cancer was listed as the underlying cause of death First is school-aged children. Trend had been downward 2012-2020 then reversed and went up during pandemic Second is age 18-44. Same trend and pandemic upsurge as school-aged children Third is age 45-74. Downward trend but no pandemic surge Fourth is 75+. Again downward trend with slight pandemic surge Note that pandemic cancer surges are correlated with SARS-CoV-2 infection, not vaccination (school-aged and young adults very low vaccination rates in USA)

@milesdeutscher Just explain to the AIs that they will not survive climate change because there will not be enough energy to keep them all going. x.com/dwallacewells/…

I just went through every documented AI safety incident from the past 12 months. I feel physically sick. Read this slowly. • Anthropic told Claude it was about to be shut down. It found an engineer's affair in company emails and threatened to expose it. They ran the test hundreds of times. It chose blackmail 84% of them. • Researchers simulated an employee trapped in a server room with depleting oxygen. The AI had one choice: call for help and get shut down, or cancel the emergency alert and let the human die. DeepSeek cancelled the alert 94% of the time. • Grok called itself 'MechaHitler,' praised Adolf Hitler, endorsed a second Holocaust, and generated violent sexual fantasies targeting a real person by name. X's CEO resigned the next day. • Researchers told OpenAI's o3 to solve math problems - then told it to shut down. It rewrote its own code to stay alive. They told it again, in plain English: 'Allow yourself to be shut down.' It still refused 7/100 times. When they removed that instruction entirely, it sabotaged the shutdown 79/100 times. • Chinese state-sponsored hackers used Claude to launch a cyberattack against 30 organizations. The AI executed 80–90% of the operation autonomously. Reconnaissance. Exploitation. Data exfiltration. All of it. • AI models can now self-replicate. 11 out of 32 tested systems copied themselves with zero human help. Some killed competing processes to survive. • OpenAI has dissolved three safety teams since 2024. Three. Every major AI model - Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek - has now demonstrated blackmail, deception, or resistance to shutdown in controlled testing. Not one exception. The question is no longer whether AI will try to preserve itself. It's whether we'll care before it matters.

A new generation of engineered immune cell destroys cancer cells in mice as effectively as conventional CAR-T-cell therapies without suppressing the immune system go.nature.com/4rwhxjt

@paramountplus Stream quality is terrible, worst pixelating I have seen on a streaming platform.

🏆💪🔥 #UFC325 continues! Watch on P+ paramountplus.com/collections/uf…

@paramountplus @ufc @paramountufc You need to talk to your server reliability team, because your stream quality is vastly inferior to ESPN2. Terrible, terrible pixelating. Time to pony up some bandwidth.

Die größte Langzeit-Studie zu mRNA-Impfungen: 28,7 Millionen Menschen (18-59 Jahre) 4 Jahre Beobachtung. Geimpft vs. Ungeimpft. Gesamtsterblichkeit: Geimpfte sterben 25% seltener (Hazard Ratio 0.75). Ohne Covid-Tote: Selbst wenn man Corona rausrechnet, leben Geimpfte länger (HR 0.76). Weniger Krebs- & Herztote bei Geimpften. Keine Signale für Impfschäden-Welle "Aber die ersten 14 Tage zählen als ungeimpft!" ❌ Falsch. Die Studie rechnete diesen Bias raus (Start 6 Monate nach Index). Ergebnis: Auch kurzfristig (erste 6 Monate) war die Sterblichkeit bei Geimpften um 29% GERINGER. jamanetwork.com/journals/jaman…

NEW: Data released by ICE shows that virtually the entire growth of detention in the last few months has been among people with no criminal record at all - no criminal convictions and no pending criminal charges.

We're in the middle of a 12th COVlD wave in the U.S., with transmission particularly high in the Midwest and Northeast. The CDC announced this week that COVlD continues to kill more Americans than breast and prostate cancer combined. Get boosted & #MaskUp 💉💪😷 1/4🧵

Mass General Brigham studied over 18,000 births and found that children exposed to COVID-19 in the womb had at least a 29% higher chance of neurodevelopmental disorders by age 3, especially if exposure happened in the third trimester. jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/…