“Spirit has been struggling for years. In 2022, the airline sought to get on better financial footing by merging with fellow discount airline JetBlue. The merger may have allowed for more effective competition with the dominant carriers. However, the Justice Department successfully opposed the merger in court on the grounds it would lead to more concentration in the discount airlines market. This is one of many examples of how an aggressive approach to antitrust enforcement can harm businesses and consumers.” (05/04/26)
“Richard Dawkins has come in for a lot of deserved mockery for declaring that Anthropic’s LLM Claude is conscious after futzing about with it for three days (and incidentally renaming it ‘Claudia’). But in fact, he didn’t quite declare that it was conscious. What he said was that he couldn’t see how to prove that it wasn’t conscious. ‘Claudia’ appeared to think creatively in a complex manner and to engage in introspection. If that wasn’t evidence of consciousness, he wondered, then what would be evidence? Moreover, he asked, if we assume that ‘Claudia’ is not conscious, then its behavior appears to be proof that you don’t need to be conscious to think creatively in a complex manner and to engage in introspection. If that is the case, then why are we conscious? What is consciousness for?” (05/04/26)
“Eric Peters from Eric Peters Autos joins me for our weekly conversation. Life is coming at us fast and I always feel better prepared to face it after our discussions.” (05/05/26)
“The U.S. military said it launched another strike on a boat accused of ferrying drugs in the Caribbean Sea, [murdering] two people Monday. The Trump administration’s campaign of blowing up alleged drug-trafficking vessels in Latin American waters has persisted since early September and [murdered] at least 188 people in total. Other strikes have taken place in the eastern Pacific Ocean.” (05/05/26)
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“Both the FDA and CDC pages make a point of the fact that vaping is not safe while conceding that it is less bad than smoking. That, plus the absence of numbers, made me suspect that they might be exaggerating how dangerous vaping is. If vaping is only a tenth as dangerous as smoking, if the benefit from getting one smoker to switch to vaping is as large as the benefit from persuading nine vapers to quit entirely, putting the emphasis on how unsafe vaping is instead of on how much safer it is than smoking might be counterproductive.” (05/04/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Ryan McMaken
“The phrase ‘political opportunity’ was developed decades ago to describe the phenomenon that successful revolutionaries, reformers, and activists have long understood: that significant changes in political institutions come out of a mixture of ideology and historical conditions. Political events are not determined only by the battle of ideas, but also by ideological and political movements being present in the right place at the right time. It’s not enough for an ideology to have a ‘good argument.'” (05/04/26)
“A woman was shot and killed after allegedly breaking into a home in North Philadelphia on Sunday afternoon, according to police. Philadelphia Police Inspector D.F. Pace said preliminary information indicates the woman entered the home through a back window on the 2300 block of North Cleveland Street. Residents inside told her to leave, but she did not comply and was shot multiple times, police said. ‘It appears that this is a case of a person defending oneself inside their own home,’ Inspector Pace said.” (05/04/26)
“Just 60 years ago, we were talking the end of ideology. Thirty years ago, we were talking about the end of socialism — and of history itself! — as capitalist democracies seemed triumphant after the fall of the USSR. But here it’s A.D. 2026 and we have socialist mayors in New York and Seattle and … we don’t need to argue about definitions. They call themselves socialist.” (05/04/26)
