“Productivity growth is an old concept; we’ve been seeing it at a substantial pace for more than 200 years. Nonetheless, many elite intellectual types like to claim they know nothing about it when they talk about AI. It’s far from clear how much of a productivity boom we will see with AI. For people who are lost with my reference to productivity growth, the story that AI will take all the jobs is a story of a massive productivity boom. If that happens, it will mean that the people who are still working will be hugely more productive, since we will be producing the same or more goods and services as we do at present, with many fewer people working. FWIW, virtually no major forecaster or forecasting agency is projecting anything like this productivity boom. For example, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that productivity growth will average 1.5 percent over the next decade.” (05/07/26)
“The first baby boomer on the Supreme Court hit a milestone on Thursday, becoming the second-longest serving justice in history at a time when his influence has never seemed greater. Once an outlier on the nation’s highest court, Justice Clarence Thomas has become a towering figure in the conservative legal movement over the last decade as he helped secure landmark rulings on abortion, voting and Second Amendment rights. The only justice with a longer tenure is liberal William O. Douglas. Thomas would overtake Douglas in 2028 if he remains on the court, and there is no sign he plans to retire anytime soon.” (05/07/26)
“Canada is set to host the headquarters of the proposed Defence, Security, and Resilience Bank, or DSRB, a new multinational institution designed to mobilize tens of billions in financing for military and security projects among allied nations. In short, what we are seeing is the quiet normalization of something far more consequential: the permanent financialization of war. The structure being envisioned for DSRB closely resembles other multilateral financial institutions. It would raise capital on global markets, issue bonds, and extend loans to governments and defense companies. That means funding for military supply chains, weapons systems, and defense infrastructure would increasingly flow through financial markets rather than direct public expenditure. In doing so, war itself risks being transformed from a political decision subject to public scrutiny into a financial product embedded in portfolios.” (05/07/26)
“An outbreak of hantavirus on board a cruise ship is not the start of a pandemic, the UN health agency has said. Maria van Kerkhove, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the World Health Organization (WHO), told a news briefing that it was not the same situation as six years ago with Covid-19, because hantavirus spreads through ‘close, intimate contact’. Health authorities are racing to trace dozens of people who have recently disembarked from the Dutch vessel MV Hondius. On Thursday, the WHO said that overall, five of eight suspected cases of hantavirus had been confirmed. Three people have died, including a 69-year-old Dutch woman, who had the virus. Her Dutch husband and a German woman also died, and their cases are being investigated. Hantavirus typically spreads from rodents – but in the latest outbreak the transmission between people was documented for the first time, the WHO said.” (05/07/26)
“Back in 2018, during his first term as president, Donald Trump called for a curb on a federal requirement that publicly traded firms report their performance every three months. The idea is to nudge both investors and corporations toward longer-term perspectives and focus less on a fluctuating stock price. This week, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) unveiled a plan that will allow such companies to provide reports every six months. In the intervening eight years, ever-faster algorithms have enabled warp-speed stock trading, inflating shareholder impatience and expectations of instantaneous information and returns. In 2021, a Cornell University study confirmed that ‘firms were actually becoming more short-term oriented across the market’ – a trend linked to the growing demand for more data and short-term projections for the investing public and markets.” (05/06/26)
“A man accused of a firebomb attack that killed one person and injured a dozen others while they were demonstrating in Boulder, Colorado, in support of Israeli hostages in Gaza has pleaded guilty to murder and other charges. Mohamed Sabry Soliman entered the pleas Thursday in Boulder County District Court. He now faces up to life in prison without the possibility of parole in the attack in downtown Boulder last June 1. Soliman’s attorneys revealed he would plead guilty in a Sunday court filing in a related federal case. Soliman has meanwhile pleaded not guilty to federal hate crime charges. Prosecutors are weighing whether to seek the death penalty in the federal case, according to his attorneys.” (05/07/26)
“Film-maker James Cameron and Disney are being sued by an actress who has accused the director of using her likeness as the basis for one of the lead characters in his hit film series Avatar. German-born US actress Q’orianka Kilcher, who is of indigenous Peruvian descent, alleged that in 2005 – when she was 14 – Cameron ‘extracted her facial features’ from a photograph of her portraying Pocahontas in another film, The New World. In court documents filed on Tuesday in California, her team claimed Cameron ‘directed his design team to use it as the foundation for the character of Neytiri,’ depicted on screen by Zoe Saldaña. BBC News has contacted Cameron and Disney for a comment. The Avatar movies contain a hybrid of live-action performance mixed with computer-generated characters.” (05/07/26)
“Oliver Larkin spent most of the 2024 election season spamming out ‘I’ll be blunt’ emails on behalf of Adam Schiff: ‘We had a massive fundraising list from the Trump impeachment, and I was up until 3 in the morning sending emails and texts. And in those first 24 hours, we raised like $1.6 or $1.7 million.’ Chained to his computer screens in a Deerfield Beach bungalow 3,000 miles from Schiff’s campaign headquarters, he began to feel disconnected from man’s innate feedback loops of longing and satisfaction. ‘Trump loved to single him out, he was attacking Schiff all the fucking time, every week, calling him ‘Pencil Neck’ or ‘Watermelon Head’ or ‘Shifty Schiff,’ and every time something like that happened it was like, this could raise ten thousand dollars, this could raise twenty thousand dollars,’ the candidate told the Prospect.” (05/07/26)
“Powerful storms that spawned at least three tornadoes tore through several Mississippi counties, damaging around 500 homes, uprooting trees and injuring at least 17 people, authorities said Thursday. There were no reports of deaths after the tornadoes cut across the state’s southwest late Wednesday evening, said Scott Simmons, a spokesperson for the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency. He said 12 of those hurt were transported from a hard-hit trailer park in the small community of Bogue Chitto, about an hour’s drive south of the state capital in rural Lincoln County. Most of the two dozen homes at Gene’s Mobile Home Supply were flattened into heaps of splintered boards and twisted metal. People picked through the debris Thursday morning under cloudy skies as a chain saw buzzed in the background.” (05/07/26)
“For the past century, the agendas of the Democratic Party were predictable. They professed concern for working Americans and supported blue-collar unions. Unemployment insurance, a 40-hour work week, disability insurance, and Social Security were their trademarks — often rapidly achieved by growing government bureaucracies and continually raising taxes. Still, many Democrats were socially conservative. By the 1970s, Democrats still deplored antisemitism. Party officials had rejected their own segregationists to champion civil rights. Presidents like Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy all supported strong defense and military deterrence. All that is now passe. The only vestigial Democrat left in Congress is Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, himself roundly despised by Democrat leaders. Today, supporting Israel and calling for campuses to stop their institutionalized antisemitism is Democratic political suicide.” (05/07/26)
