Author name: DJ Henderson

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A former Orion manager has surprisingly credible plans to fly European astronauts

Europe, Science, Space, the exploration company / /

She found herself wanting to build something more modern. Looking across the Atlantic, she drew inspiration from what SpaceX was doing with its reusable Falcon 9 rocket. She watched humans launch into space aboard Crew Dragon and saw that same vehicle fly again and again. “I have a huge admiration for what SpaceX has done,” she said.

Huby also saw opportunity in that company’s success. SpaceX is the only provider of crew transportation in the Western world. It’s likely that Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft will never become a serious competitor. India’s human spaceflight program is making some progress, but it’s unclear whether the Gaganyaan vehicle will serve non-Indian customers.

The opportunity she saw was to provide an alternative to SpaceX based in Europe. This would yield 100 percent of the market in Europe and offer an option to countries like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, and other nations interested in going to space.

“I know it’s super hard, and I know it was crazy,” Huby said. “But I wanted to try.”

Starting small

She founded The Exploration Company in August 2021 with $50,000 in the bank and a small team of four people. Three years later, the company has 200 employees and recently announced that it had raised $160 million in Series B funding. It marked the first time that two European sovereign funds, French Tech and Germany-based DTCF, invested together. The news even scored a congratulatory post on LinkedIn from French President Emmanuel Macron, who wrote, “The history of space continues to be written in Europeans.”

To date, then, Huby has raised nearly $230 million. Her company has already flown a mission, the “Bikini” reentry demonstrator, on the debut flight of the Ariane 6 rocket this last summer. The small capsule was intended to demonstrate the company’s reentry technology. Unfortunately, the rocket’s upper stage failed on its deorbit burn, so the Bikini capsule remains stuck in space.

Still, the company is already hard at work on a second demonstration vehicle, about 2.5 meters in diameter, that will have more than a dozen customers on board. The spacecraft for this demonstration flight, named Mission Possible, is fully assembled, Huby said, and it will launch on SpaceX’s Transporter 14 mission next summer, likely in July. This mission was developed in 2.5 years at a cost of $20 million, plus $10 million for the launch.

A former Orion manager has surprisingly credible plans to fly European astronauts Read More »

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DirecTV announces termination of deal to buy Dish satellite business

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DirecTV CEO Bill Morrow indicated his company wasn’t willing to change the deal to satisfy Dish bondholders. “We have terminated the transaction because the proposed Exchange Terms were necessary to protect DirecTV’s balance sheet and our operational flexibility,” Morrow said.

AT&T still selling DirecTV stake

AT&T owns 70 percent of DirecTV but plans to sell its stake to private equity firm TPG, which owns the other 30 percent. DirecTV said this separate deal is still moving forward.

“The termination of the Dish acquisition does not affect TPG’s acquisition of the remaining 70 percent stake in DirecTV from AT&T, which is expected to close in the second half of 2025,” DirecTV said.

EchoStar was hoping to get rid of the declining satellite TV business and focus on its cellular ambitions. When the deal was announced on September 30, EchoStar said it would be able “to focus more clearly on enhancing and further deploying its nationwide 5G Open RAN wireless network.”

DirecTV and Dish tried to merge over two decades ago. The deal was scrapped after the US Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit, saying the merger “would eliminate competition between the nation’s two most significant direct broadcast satellite services.”

AT&T bought DirecTV for $48.5 billion in 2015 but lost nearly 10 million subscribers in the ensuing years before completing a spinoff in 2021. The subscriber losses continued after the spinoff; DirecTV lost 1.8 million subscribers in 2023, bringing it down to an estimated 11.3 million.

EchoStar recently reported having 5.89 million Dish TV subscribers and 2.14 million Sling TV subscribers after the latest customer losses in the satellite division and customer gains for the Sling streaming service.

DirecTV announces termination of deal to buy Dish satellite business Read More »

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Russian ballistic missile attack on Ukraine portends new era of warfare

ICBM, IRBM, Military, missile, russia, Science, Space, Ukraine / /

The Oreshnik missiles strike their targets at speeds of up to Mach 10, or 2.5 to 3 kilometers per second, Putin said. “The existing air defense systems around the world, including those being developed by the US in Europe, are unable to intercept such missiles.”

A global war?

In perhaps the most chilling part of his remarks, Putin said the conflict in Ukraine is “taking on global dimensions” and said Russia is entitled to use missiles against Western countries supplying weapons for Ukraine to use against Russian targets.

“In the event of escalation, we will respond decisively and in kind,” Putin said. “I advise the ruling elites of those countries planning to use their military forces against Russia to seriously consider this.”

The change in nuclear doctrine authorized by Putin earlier this week also lowers the threshold for Russia’s use of nuclear weapons to counter a conventional attack that threatens Russian “territorial integrity.”

This seems to have already happened. Ukraine launched an offensive into Russia’s Kursk region in August, taking control of more than 1,000 square kilometers of Russian land. Russian forces, assisted by North Korean troops, are staging a counteroffensive to try to retake the territory.

Singh called Russia’s invitation of North Korean troops “escalatory” and said Putin could “choose to end this war today.”

US officials say Russian forces are suffering some 1,200 deaths or injuries per day in the war. In September, The Wall Street Journal reported that US intelligence sources estimated that a million Ukrainians and Russians had been killed or wounded in the war.

The UN Human Rights Office most recently reported that 11,973 civilians have been killed, including 622 children, since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022.

“We warned Russia back in 2022 not to do this, and they did it anyways, so there are consequences for that,” Singh said. “But we don’t want to see this escalate into a wider regional conflict. We don’t seek war with Russia.”

Russian ballistic missile attack on Ukraine portends new era of warfare Read More »

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FCC chairwoman announces departure, paving way for Republican majority

jessica rosenworcel, Policy / /

Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel announced today that she will leave the agency on January 20, 2025, the day of President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration.

“Serving at the Federal Communications Commission has been the honor of a lifetime, especially my tenure as chair and as the first woman in history to be confirmed to lead this agency,” Rosenworcel said in today’s announcement. Rosenworcel said that being chair during the pandemic “made clear how important the work of the FCC is and how essential it is for us to build a digital future that works for everyone.”

Rosenworcel touted the agency’s work in “setting up the largest broadband affordability program in history—which led to us connecting more than 23 million households to high-speed Internet, connecting more than 17 million students caught in the homework gap to hotspots and other devices as learning moved online.” That discount program ended this year after Congress let funding run out, despite Rosenworcel’s repeated pleas for more money.

Rosenworcel, a Democrat, is following tradition, as the FCC chair typically resigns when the opposing party wins the White House. The move will leave the FCC with two Democrats and two Republicans, paving the way for the GOP to add one member and gain a 3–2 majority.

FCC had 2-2 deadlock for most of Biden’s term

Rosenworcel became an FCC commissioner in 2012 and was promoted to chair by President Biden in 2021. She was forced to operate without a Democratic majority for most of her time as chair due to a series of political developments.

FCC chairwoman announces departure, paving way for Republican majority Read More »

microsoft-flight-simulator-2024-arrives-with-a-“full-digital-twin”-of-earth

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 arrives with a “full digital twin” of Earth

flight sim, flight simulator, gaming, microsoft, Microsoft flight simulator / /

You’re getting pretty close to the ground there, chief. But the good news is, you’re generating terrain for other players.

Credit: Microsoft

You’re getting pretty close to the ground there, chief. But the good news is, you’re generating terrain for other players. Credit: Microsoft

AI learning was used for 2024‘s world mapping. It allowed for a (possibly hyperbolic) “4,000 times more” detail in textures and terrain meshes, Wloch told TechRadar. Players will see this mainly when they’re closer to ground, with the terrain generating detail on demand. Machine learning is run against tens of thousands of tiles of Earth terrains, and it does picture analysis to generate, say, wet gravel or nighttime grasslands during winter. Data generated from a player is streamed into other pilots’ games, Neumann told Rock Paper Shotgun.

Hot air balloons across a night sky.

Throw a little engine on that balloon and you’ve got yourself a Flydoo, a word I learned today.

Credit: Microsoft

Throw a little engine on that balloon and you’ve got yourself a Flydoo, a word I learned today. Credit: Microsoft

You can fly a balloon and a “Flydoo,” the latter of which is a balloon with a tiny engine. Aircraft and airports you customized or purchased are carried over from 2020 into 2024. EuroGamer has a list of every aircraft in the game, which includes a Joby VTOL air taxi.

Father figure pointing out an approaching helicopter to his child on a mountain ridge.

When will hikers learn to stick to the trails in Zoar Valley?

Credit: Microsoft

When will hikers learn to stick to the trails in Zoar Valley? Credit: Microsoft

A new Career Mode, with 26 different paths, adds some structure to the pre-existing challenges and rewards. You can start out as a rookie and work through up to 54 training courses. You then decide exactly what kind of ace you want to be. You can be a regional airline pilot, a global specialist in VIP helicopter rides, a cropduster, a firefighter, or some other kind. You can own a fleet and expand your business or stick to being a jockey for hire.

There are many animals with realistic behavior, ported in from Planet Zoo. Neumann previously worked at Frontier, the company behind Planet Zoo (and Elite: Dangerous). Wanting some of that old “animals doing things” energy, Neumann said he called Frontier’s CEO and said, “Can I have your animals?” Neumann told Sports Illustrated. So now sheep head inside when it’s raining, birds migrate, and elephants will finally be impressed with your low-level flybys—maybe.

Flight Simulator 2020 will continue to get support, according to a FAQ on the developer’s site. It’s a valid question of what “support” will look like after 2024 is released and if it matches up with the initial promise of “10 years of support.”

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 arrives with a “full digital twin” of Earth Read More »

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I played Half-Life 2 for the first time this year—here’s how it went

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Wake up and smell the ashes, Ms. Washenko.

This article is part of our 20th anniversary of Half-Life 2 series. Credit: Aurich Lawson

It’s Half-Life 2 week at Ars Technica! This Saturday, November 16, is the 20th anniversary of the release of Half-Life 2—a game of historical importance for the artistic medium and technology of computer games. Each day up through the 16th, we’ll be running a new article looking back at the game and its impact.

The time has finally come to close one of the most notable gaps in my gaming history. Despite more than a decade of writing about video games and even more years enjoying them, I never got around to playing Half-Life 2.

Not only have I not played it, but I’ve managed to keep myself in the dark about pretty much everything to do with it. I always assumed that one day I would get around to playing this classic, and I wanted the experience to be as close as possible to it would have been back in 2004. So my only knowledge about Half-Life 2 before starting this project was 1) the game is set in the same universe as Portal, a game I love, 2) the protagonist is named Gordon Freeman, and he looks uncannily like a silent, spectacled young Hugh Laurie, and 3) there’s something called the Gravity Gun.

That’s it. I didn’t even know exactly what the Gravity Gun did, only that it existed.

So, the time has come for me to learn what the fuss is all about. I’ve cataloged my off-the-cuff reactions as well as my more analytical thoughts about Half-Life 2, both as a standalone project and as a catalyst for setting new standards in design. But if you’re looking for the TL;DR of whether I think the game holds up, my answer is: it depends.

Beginning a classic with a clunk

A red letter day indeed! Time to experience this iconic piece of video game history. I spend most of the intro sequence in the train station soaking in the atmosphere of the dystopian City 17. A few minutes in, though, I think I’m supposed to sneak past a guard. Because I’m a fugitive trying to escape this freaky Big Brother building, and I swear Barney told me to avoid detection. Instead, the guard immediately sees me and whomps me on the head for not putting a bottle into the trash. Not an auspicious beginning.

I make it to Dr. Kleiner’s lab for a little bit of story exposition. I like this rag-tag group of geniuses and the whole vibe of a secret scientific rebellion. I also appreciate that it’s not a static cutscene, so I can poke around the lab while I listen or observe the characters interacting.

After a failed teleport and getting a crowbar from Barney, I then spend a long time getting shot and dying in a train yard. Like, an embarrassingly long time. Perhaps I was assuming at this early stage that Half-Life 2 would be like Portal with real guns, because I figured this area had to be a puzzle. I’m not sure how I missed the one portion of the environment that I could slip through, but I convinced myself that I was supposed to leap across the tops of the train cars, Frogger style. And Gordon might have many skills, but his jumping leaves something to be desired.

Finally, I realize that there’s a gap in the cars, and I move along. This canal setting is striking, but I keep being unsure which areas of the map I can access. I’ve heard that the level design is one of the most lauded parts of Half-Life 2, but this is proving to be a genuine struggle with the game.

When I played Portal, I sometimes was unsure how to progress, but because that game is presented in the austere confines of a science experiment, I felt like I was supposed to be challenged. In Half-Life 2, though, where there are higher stakes and I’m running for my life, getting stuck just makes me feel dumb and annoyed. And I’m doubly annoyed because this escape sequence would probably feel amazing if I didn’t keep getting lost. Again, not the thrilling start I was hoping for.

Killing a barnacle by feeding it an explosive barrel is a definite high point. I may have cackled. This is the sort of clever environmental interaction I expected to see from the minds that later made Portal.

Headcrabs, on the other hand, are just obnoxious. My dinky little pea shooter pistol doesn’t feel like great protection. What’s a rogue physicist gotta do to get a shotgun?

From airboats to zombies

After a break, I return armed with a renewed determination to grok this game and, more importantly, with an airboat. For 90 percent of the Water Hazard chapter, I am feeling like a badass. I’m cruising in my watery ride, flying over ramps, and watching a silo collapse overhead. Especially in those rare moments when the 2000s electro jams punctuate my fights, I feel like a true action hero.

A helicopter hovers over an airboat in Half-Life 2

The airboat sequence was divisive in 2004, but this writer enjoyed it. Credit: Anna Washenko

Next I reach the Black Mesa East chapter, which is a perfect interlude. The game’s approach to world-building is probably the area where my feelings align most closely with those of Half-Life 2 veterans. It is spectacular. Heading down into the lab may be the best elevator ride I’ve taken in a game. Judith is talking science, and outside the shaft, I see humans and vortigaunts conducting fascinating experiments. Small vignettes like those are a perfect way to introduce more information about the rebellion. They give subtle context to a game that doesn’t do much to explain itself and doesn’t need to.

Also, Dog is the best boy. Seriously, I’ve seen modern games where the animations didn’t have as much personality as when Alyx treats her robot protector like an actual dog, and he shakes in delight. My only sadness is that Dog doesn’t accompany me to Ravenholm.

Dog and Alyx standing together at Black Mesa East

Dog is, in fact, the best boy. Credit: Valve

I do wish Dog had come with me to Ravenholm. I learned after the fact that this chapter is one of the most iconic and beloved, but I had the opposite reaction. Survival horror is not my jam. These whirling death traps are sweet, but I hate jump scares, and I don’t love any of my weapons for the encounters.

That brings me to something I don’t want to say, but in the spirit of journalistic honesty, I must: I don’t adore the Gravity Gun. Obviously it was the game’s signature creation here and probably what most of you recall most fondly, but I did not fully grasp its potential immediately. Based on the tutorial in Black Mesa East, I assumed it would mostly be a component to puzzle-solving and traversal rather than a key part of combat. I only started using it as a weapon in Ravenholm because I ran out of ammo for everything else.

It’s not that I don’t get the appeal. Slicing zombies up with a saw blade or bashing them with paint cans is satisfying—no complaints there. But I found the tool inconsistent, which discouraged me from experimenting as much as the developers may have hoped. I’m pretty sure I do as much damage to myself as to enemies trying to lob exploding barrels. I want to be able to fling corpses around and can’t (for reasons that became apparent later, but in the moment felt limiting). Later chapters reinforced my uncertainty, when I couldn’t pull a car to me, yet a push blast had enough power to overturn the vehicle.

And once again, I had a rough time with navigation. Maybe I was missing what other people would have seen as obvious cues, the way I’m attuned to finding climbing paths marked by color in modern games—controversial as that yellow marking convention may be, its absence is noted when you’re struggling to read the environment with a visual language for the game that emphasizes realism over readability. Or maybe I’ve gotten over-reliant on the tools of the sprawling RPGs I favor these days, where you have a mini-map and quest markers to help you manage all the threads. But for an agonizingly long time, I stared at an electrified fence and wires that seemed to lead to nowhere before realizing that I was supposed to enter the building where Father Grigori first appeared on the balcony. A giant bonfire of corpses out front seemed like a clear ‘do not enter’ sign, so it didn’t occur to me that I could go inside. Alas.

Speaking of which, Father Grigori is the best part of the section. He’s a total bro, giving me a shotgun at long last. I feel kind of bad when I just abandon him to his murderous flock at the end of the chapter. I hope he survives?

Familiarity and finding my footing

The new weapons are coming fast and furious now. I’m impressed at how good the combat feel is. I like the pulse rifle a lot, and that has become my go-to for most long-distance enemies. I wish I could aim down sights, but at least this feels impactful at range. Although I don’t usually favor the slow cadence of a revolver in other games, I also enjoy the magnum. The SMG serves well as a workhorse, while the rocket launcher and crossbow are satisfying tools when the right situation arises.

But my favorite weapon, far more than the Gravity Gun, is the shotgun. Especially at point-blank range and into a fast zombie’s head. Chef’s kiss. Maybe it’s my love of Doom (2016) peeking through, but any time I can go charging into a crowd with my shotgun, I’m a happy camper.

While the worldbuilding in Half-Life 2 is stellar, I don’t think the writing matches that high. Just about every brief encounter with allies starts with someone breathlessly gasping, “Gordon? Gordon Freeman?” It’s the sort of repetition that would make for an effective and dangerous drinking game.

I was surprised when I entered another vehicle section. I liked the airboat, even though the chapter ran a touch long, but this dune buggy feels a lot jankier. At least it starts with a gun attached.

I love the idea of this magnet crane puzzle. I wish it didn’t control like something from Octodad, but I do get my buggy up out of the sand.

A metal sheet is placed on the sand by the gravity gun

The “floor is lava” sequence involves placing objects with the Gravity Gun to avoid disturbing an army of angry antlions by stepping on the sand. Credit: Anna Washenko

Things start turning around for me once I reach the sandy version of ‘the floor is lava.’ That’s a cute idea. Although I keep wanting to rotate objects and have a more controlled placement with the Gravity Gun like I could when I did these kinds of tasks with the Ultrahand ability during The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. I understand that Half-Life 2 crawled so TotK could run, but that knowledge doesn’t mean I have a better time using the mechanic. Toward the end of the sequence, I got bored by the slow pace of creating a bridge and just barrelled ahead, willing to face a firefight just to move things along.

At this point, however, things take a decided turn for the better when I get my other favorite weapon of the game: My own antlion army! Commanding them is so fabulously ridiculous. The scene where hordes of antlions leap over high walls to attack gunmen on the towers leading into Nova Prospekt may be my favorite moment so far in the entire game. If this is how all of you felt flinging radiators around with the Gravity Gun back in the day, then I get why you love it so. I’m sure I won’t be able to keep this glorious power indefinitely, but I would happily finish the rest of the story with just antlions and a shotgun if they’d let me.

The Nova Prospekt area is the first time I really see a clear line connecting Half-Life 2 to Portal. None of the puzzles or characters thus far gave me Portal vibes, but I definitely get them here, especially once turrets come into play. By this point, I’m finally navigating the space with some confidence. That might be the result of logging enough hours or maybe it was just the sense that GLaDOS could start talking to me at any moment. Whatever the reason, I think I’m finding my groove at last.

A dialogue subtitle instructs a shotgun-wielding Gordon to start setting up turrets in an alien prison

Nova Prospekt is one of the first areas Valve made when it developed Half-Life 2, so it’s not surprising it bears a lot of similarity to environments and vibes in both the original Half-Life and in Portal. Credit: Anna Washenko

Somehow I am not surprised by Judith’s sudden but inevitable betrayal in this chapter. Alyx not getting along with her in the Black Mesa East chapter felt pretty telling. But then she’s just going to let Judith enter teleport coordinates unsupervised? Alyx, you’re supposed to be smart!

What do you know—now Judith has re-kidnapped Eli. Color me shocked.

Onward and upward to the end

It’s nice having human minions. They’re no antlions, but I like how the world has shifted to a real uprising. It reminds me of the big charge at the end of Mass Effect 3, running and gunning through a bombed-out city with bug-like baddies overhead.

Snipers are not a welcome addition to the enemy roster. Not sure why Barney’s whining so much. You could throw some grenades, too, my dude.

Barney tags along with my minions as we reach the Overwatch Nexus. Destroying floor turrets is probably the first time I’ve struggled with combat. These are the least precise grenades of all time. Once we make it through the interior sequence, it’s time to face down the striders. I can’t imagine how you’d play this section bringing down the swarm of them on a harder difficulty. My health takes a beating as I run around the wreckage desperately looking for ammo reloads and medkits. In theory, this is probably a great setpiece, but I’m just stressed out. Things go a little better once the combat is paired with traversal, and the final showdown on the roof does feel like a gratifying close to a boss fight.

On to the Citadel. Why on earth would I get into one of these pods? That’s a terrible idea. But apparently that’s what I’m going to do. I hope I’m not supposed to be navigating this pod in any way, because I’m just taking in the vibes. It’s another transit moment with glimpses into what the enemies have been getting up to while the rebellion rages outside. It’s eerie; I like it.

A strider looms over the player as the player switches weapons

Battling the striders as the game moves toward its finale. Credit: Anna Washenko

The Gravity Gun is the core of Half-Life 2, so it makes sense that a supercharged version is all I have for the final push. I appreciate that I can use it to fling bodies, but my reaction is a little muted since this was an idea I’d had from the start. But I do find the new angle of sucking up energy orbs to be pretty rad.

I arrive in Dr. Breen’s office, and it looks grim for our heroes. Judith redeeming herself surprises me more than her betrayal, which is nice. When he runs off, I’m mentally preparing myself as I chase him for a final boss showdown. Surely, something extra bonkers with the Gravity Gun awaits me. I climb the teleportation tower, I pelt Breen’s device with energy orbs, I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop, and…

Huh?

Context is everything

In the moment, I was torn between feeling that the opaque ending was genius and that it was an absolute cop-out. It was certainly not how I expected the game to end.

But on reflection, that wound up being a fitting final thought as the credits rolled, because I think ‘expectations’ were at the heart of my conflicted reactions to finally playing Half-Life 2. I’ve rarely felt so much pressure to have a particular response. I wanted to love this game. I wanted to share the awe that so many players feel for it. I wanted to have an epic experience that matched the epic legacy Half-Life 2 has in gaming history.

I didn’t.

Instead, I had whiplash, swinging between moments of delight and stretches of being stymied or even downright pissed off. I was tense, often dreading rather than eagerly awaiting each next twist. Aside from a handful of high points, I’m not sure I’d say playing Half-Life 2 was fun.

As I mentioned at the start, the big question I felt I had to answer was whether Half-Life 2 felt relevant today or whether it only holds up under the rosy glow of nostalgia. And my answer is, “It depends.” As an enigmatic person once said, “The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world.” It’s all in the context.

Moments that were jaw-dropping in 2004 have less impact for someone like me who’s played the many titles that copied, standardized, and perfected Half-Life 2‘s revelations. Intellectually, I understand that the Gravity Gun was a literal game-changer and that a physics engine deployed at this scale was unheard of. But funnily enough, a modern player is even less likely to see those innovations as so, well, innovative when a game has as much polish as Half-Life 2 does. Half-Life 2 has almost no rough edges in the execution. Everything works the way it was intended.

Since that polish means the new ideas don’t feel like experiments, and since I’ve seen them in other games in the intervening years, they don’t register as notable.

Just as you don’t need to be a fan of Aristotle’s Poetics to appreciate drama, you don’t need to love Half-Life 2 to appreciate its legacy. As a fun game to play, whether it holds up will come down to you and your context. However, as a showcase of the technology of the time and a masterclass in world-building, yes, Half-Life 2 holds up today.

I played Half-Life 2 for the first time this year—here’s how it went Read More »

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Trump team puts EV tax credit on the block, Tesla is on board: Report

Cars, EV adoption, EV tax credit, Tesla / /

Ending the tax credit is not something the incoming administration can do via executive action—Congress controls government spending, and this would require new legislation. But the budget reconciliation process results in bills that cannot be filibustered, and Reuters says that the Trump transition team will likely use this route as part of a larger revamp of tax laws.

Tesla was a major beneficiary of the new clean vehicle tax credit; under the previous scheme, an OEM was only eligible until it sold its 200,000th plug-in vehicle, at which point the credit available to its customers began to sunset. Tesla—which exclusively sells plug-in vehicles—was unsurprisingly the first to reach this threshold, at which point its EVs became more expensive than competitor cars. But the sales cap was eliminated under the new rules.

One might expect the company would be up in arms over this proposal. But according to Reuters, that’s not the case—Tesla is in favor of ending the clean vehicle tax credit, and CEO Elon Musk has previously said such a move would be far more damaging to rival companies than to Tesla.

Trump team puts EV tax credit on the block, Tesla is on board: Report Read More »

are-standing-desks-good-for-you?-the-answer-is-getting-clearer.

Are standing desks good for you? The answer is getting clearer.

cardiovascular health, health, Science, sitting, standing / /

Whatever your office setup, the most important thing is to move.

Without question, inactivity is bad for us. Prolonged sitting is consistently linked to higher risks of cardiovascular disease and death. The obvious response to this frightful fate is to not sit— move. Even a few moments of exercise can have benefits, studies suggest. But in our modern times, sitting is hard to avoid, especially at the office. This has led to a range of strategies to get ourselves up, including the rise of standing desks. If you have to be tethered to a desk, at least you can do it while on your feet, the thinking goes.

However, studies on whether standing desks are beneficial have been sparse and sometimes inconclusive. Further, prolonged standing can have its own risks, and data on work-related sitting has also been mixed. While the final verdict on standing desks is still unclear, two studies out this year offer some of the most nuanced evidence yet about the potential benefits and risks of working on your feet.

Take a seat

For years, studies have pointed to standing desks improving markers for cardiovascular and metabolic health, such as lipid levels, insulin resistance, and arterial flow-mediated dilation (the ability of arteries to widen in response to increased blood flow). But it’s unclear how significant those improvements are to averting bad health outcomes, such as heart attacks. One 2018 analysis suggested the benefits might be minor.

And there are fair reasons to be skeptical about standing desks. For one, standing—like sitting—is not moving. If a lack of movement and exercise is the root problem, standing still wouldn’t be a solution.

Yet, while sitting and standing can arguably be combined into the single category of ‘stationary,’ some researchers have argued that not all sitting is the same. In a 2018 position paper published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, two health experts argued that the link between poor health and sitting could come down to the specific populations being examined and “the special contribution” of “sitting time at home, for example, the ‘couch potato effect.'”

The two researchers—emeritus professors David Rempel, formerly at the University of California, San Francisco, and Niklas Krause, formerly of UC Los Angeles—pointed to several studies looking specifically at occupational sitting time and poor health outcomes, which have arrived at mixed results. For instance, a 2013 analysis did not find a link between sitting at work and cardiovascular disease. Though the study did suggest a link to mortality, the link was only among women. There was also a 2015 study on about 36,500 workers in Japan, who were followed for an average of 10 years. That study found that there was no link between mortality and sitting time among salaried workers, professionals, and people who worked at home businesses. However, there was a link between mortality and sitting among people who worked in farming, forestry, and fishing industries.

Still, despite some murkiness in the specifics, more recent studies continue to turn up a link between total prolonged sitting—wherever that sitting occurs—and poor health outcomes, particularly cardiovascular disease. This has kept up interest in standing desks in offices, where people don’t always have the luxury of frequent movement breaks. And this, in turn, has kept researchers on their toes to try to answer whether there is any benefit to standing desks.

One study published last month in the International Journal of Epidemiology offers a clearer picture of how standing desks may relate to cardiovascular health risks. The authors, an international team of researchers led by Matthew Ahmadi at the University of Sydney in Australia, found that standing desks don’t improve heart health—but they don’t harm it, either, whereas sitting desks do.

Mitigating risks

For the study, the researchers tracked the health data of a little over 83,000 people in the UK over an average of about seven years. During the study, participants wore a wrist-based accelerometer device for at least four days. The devices were calibrated to determine when they were sitting, standing, walking, or running during the waking hours. With that data, the researchers linked their sitting, standing, and stationary (combined sitting and standing) times to health outcomes in their medical records.

The researchers focused on two categories of health outcomes: cardiovascular, covering coronary heart disease, heart failure, and stroke; and orthostatic circulatory disease events, including orthostatic hypotension (blood pressure drops upon standing or sitting), varicose veins, chronic venous insufficiency (veins in your legs don’t move blood back up to your heart), and venous ulcers. The reasoning for this second category is that prolonged sitting and standing may pose risks for developing circulatory diseases.

The researchers found that when participants’ total stationary time (sitting and standing) went over 12 hours per day, risk of orthostatic circulatory disease increased 22 percent per additional hour, while risk of cardiovascular disease went up 13 percent per hour.

For just sitting, risks increased every hour after 10 hours: for orthostatic circulatory disease, risk went up 26 percent every hour after 10 hours, and cardiovascular disease risk went up 15 percent. For standing, risk of orthostatic circulatory disease went up after just two hours, increasing 11 percent every 30 minutes after two hours of standing. But standing had no impact on cardiovascular disease at any time point.

“Contrary to sitting time, more time spent standing was not associated with a higher CVD [cardiovascular disease] risk. Overall, there was no association for higher or lower CVD risk throughout the range of standing duration,” the authors report.

On the other hand, keeping sitting time under 10 hours and standing time under two hours was linked to a weak protective effect against orthostatic circulatory disease: A day of nine hours of sitting and 1.5 of standing (for a total of 11.5 hours of stationary time) lowered risk of orthostatic circulatory disease by a few percentage points, the study found.

In other words, as long as you can keep your total stationary time under 12 hours, you can use a little standing time help you keep your sitting time under 10 hours and avoid increasing both cardiovascular and orthostatic risks, according to the data.

Consistent finding

It’s a very detailed formula to reduce the health risks of long days at the office, but is it set in stone? Probably not. For one thing, it’s just one study that needs to be replicated in a different population. Also, the study didn’t look at any specifics of occupational versus leisure standing and sitting times, let alone the use of standing desks specifically. The study also based estimates of people’s sitting, standing, and total stationary time on as little as just four days of activity monitoring, which may or may not have been consistent over the nearly seven-year average follow-up period.

Still, the study’s takeaway generally fits with a study published in January in JAMA Network Open. This study looked at the link between occupational sitting time, leisure physical activity, and death rates—both deaths from all causes and those specifically caused by cardiovascular disease. Researchers used a group of over 480,000 workers in Taiwan, who were followed for an average of nearly 13 years.

The workers who reported mostly sitting at work had a 16 percent increased risk of all-cause mortality and a 34 percent higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease compared with workers who did not sit at work. The workers who reported alternating between sitting and standing, meanwhile, did not have an increased risk of all-cause or cardiovascular disease mortality. The findings held after adjusting for health factors and looking at subgroups, including by sex, age, smokers, never-smokers, and people with chronic conditions.

That said, being highly active in leisure time appeared to offset the mortality risks among those who mostly sit at work. At the highest leisure-time activity levels reported, participants who mostly sit at work had comparable risks of all-cause mortality as those who alternated sitting and standing or were didn’t sit at work. Overall, the data suggested that keeping overall stationary time as low as possible and alternating sitting and standing to some extent at work can reduce risk.

The authors call for incorporating breaks in work settings and even specifically recommend allowing for standing and activity-permissive workstations.

The takeaway

While prolonged standing has its own risks, the use of standing desks at work can, to some extent, help lessen the risks of prolonged sitting. But, overall, it’s important to keep total stationary time as low as possible and exercise whenever possible.

Photo of Beth Mole

Beth is Ars Technica’s Senior Health Reporter. Beth has a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and attended the Science Communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in covering infectious diseases, public health, and microbes.

Are standing desks good for you? The answer is getting clearer. Read More »

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How Valve made Half-Life 2 and set a new standard for future games

first-person shooter, Game Design, game development, gaming, half life 2, steam, Valve Software / /

From physics to greyboxing, Half-Life 2 broke a lot of new ground.

This article is part of our 20th anniversary of Half-Life 2 series. Credit: Aurich Lawson

It’s Half-Life 2 week at Ars Technica! This Saturday, November 16, is the 20th anniversary of the release of Half-Life 2—a game of historical importance for the artistic medium and technology of computer games. Each day up through the 16th, we’ll be running a new article looking back at the game and its impact.

There has been some debate about which product was the first modern “triple-A” video game, but ask most people and one answer is sure to at least be a contender: Valve’s Half-Life 2.

For Western PC games, Half-Life 2 set a standard that held strong in developers’ ambitions and in players’ expectations for well over a decade. Despite that, there’s only so much new ground it truly broke in terms of how games are made and designed—it’s just that most games didn’t have the same commitment to scope, scale, and polish all at the same time.

To kick off a week of articles looking back at the influential classic, we’re going to go over the way it was made, and just as importantly, the thought that went into its design—both of which were highly influential.

A story of cabals and Electronics Boutique

Development, design, and production practices in the games industry have always varied widely by studio. But because of the success of Half-Life 2, some of the approaches that Valve took were copied elsewhere in the industry after they were shared in blog posts and conference talks at events like the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC).

The cabals of Valve

Valve is famous for influencing many things in gaming, but it was most influential in its relatively flat and democratic team structure, and that played out even during Half-Life 2’s development in the early 2000s. While many studios are broken up into clear departments big and small for different disciplines (such as art, level design, combat design, narrative design, AI programming, and so on), many parts of Valve’s Half-Life 2 team consisted of a half-dozen multi-disciplinary small groups the company internally called “cabals.”

Each major chapter in Half-Life 2 had its own unique four-to-five-person cabal made up of level designers and programmers. These groups built their levels largely independently while frequently showing their work to other cabals for feedback and cross-pollination of good ideas. They all worked within constraints set in a pre-production phase that laid out elements like the main story beats, some of the weapons, and so on.

A resistance soldier shoots at a Strider in the streets of City 17

Each major chapter, like this battle-in-the-streets one toward the end of the game, was designed by a largely independent cabal. Credit: Valve

Additionally, similarly sized design cabals worked on aspects of the game’s design that crossed multiple levels—often made with representatives from the chapter cabals—for things like weapons.

There was even a “Cabal Cabal” made up of representatives from each of the six chapter teams to critique the work coming from all the teams.

Ruthless playtesting

Many game designers—especially back in the ’80s or ’90s—worked largely in isolation, determining privately what they thought would be fun and then shipping a finished product to an audience to find out if it really was.

By contrast, Valve put a great deal of emphasis on playtesting. To be clear: Valve did not invent playtesting. But it did make that a key part of the design process in a way that is even quite common today.

The Half-Life 2 team would send representatives to public places where potential fans might hang out, like Electronics Boutique stores, and would approach them and say something along the lines of, “Would you like to play Half-Life 2?” (Most said yes!)

A group of game developers sits on couches and takes notes while a PC gamer plays Half-Life 2

A photo from an actual early 2000s playtest of an in-development Half-Life 2, courtesy of a presentation slide from a Valve GDC talk. Credit: Valve

The volunteer playtesters were brought to a room set up like a real player’s living room and told to sit at the computer desk and simply play the game. Behind them, the level’s cabal would sit and watch a feed of the gameplay on a TV. The designers weren’t allowed to talk to the testers; they simply took notes.

Through this process, they learned which designs and ideas worked and which ones simply confused the players. They then made iterative changes, playtested the level again, and repeated that process until they were happy with the outcome.

Today’s developers sometimes take a more sophisticated approach to sourcing players for their playtests, making sure they’re putting their games in front of a wider range of people to make the games more accessible beyond a dedicated enthusiast core. But nonetheless, playtesting across the industry today is at the level it is because of Valve’s refinement of the process.

The alpha wave

For a game as ambitious as Half-Life 2 was, it’s surprising just how polished it was when it hit the market. That iterative mindset was a big part of it, but it extended beyond those consumer playtests.

Valve made sure to allocate a significant amount of time for iteration and refinement on an alpha build, which in this case meant a version of the game that could be played from beginning to end. When speaking to other developers about the process, representatives of Valve said that if you’re working on a game for just a year, you should try to get to the alpha point by the end of eight months so you have four for refinement.

Apparently, this made a big impact on Half-Life 2’s overall quality. It also helped address natural downsides of the cabal structure, like the fact that chapters developed by largely independent teams offered an inconsistent experience in terms of the difficulty curve.

With processes like this, Valve modeled several things that would be standard in triple-A game development for years to come—though not all of them were done by Valve first.

For example, the approach to in-game cutscenes reverberates today. Different cabals focused on designing the levels versus planning out cutscenes in which characters would walk around the room and interact with one another, all while the player could freely explore the environment.

A screenshot of Combine soldiers fighting antlions in Nova Prospekt

Nova Prospekt was one of the first levels completed during Half-Life 2‘s development. Credit: Valve

The team that focused on story performances worked with level designers to block out the walking paths for characters, and the level designers had to use that as a constraint, building the levels around them. That meant that changes to level layouts couldn’t create situations where new character animations would have to be made. That approach is still used by many studios today.

As is what is now called greyboxing, the practice of designing levels without high-effort artwork so that artists can come in and pretty the levels up after the layout is settled, rather than having to constantly go back and forth with designers as those designers “find the fun.” Valve didn’t invent this, but it was a big part of the process, and its in-development levels were filled with the color orange, not just gray.

Finding the DNA of Half-Life 2 in 20 years of games

When Half-Life 2 hit the market via the newly launched Steam digital distribution platform (more on that later this week), it was widely praised. Critics and players at the time loved it, calling it a must-have title and one that defined the PC gaming experience. Several of the things that came out of its development process that players remember most from Half-Life 2 became staples over the past 20 years.

For instance, the game set a new standard for character animations in fully interactive cutscenes, especially with facial animations. Today, far more advanced motion capture is a common practice in triple-A games—to the point that games that don’t do it (like Bethesda Game Studios titles) are widely criticized by players simply for not taking that route, even if motion capture doesn’t necessarily make practical sense for those games’ scope and design.

And Half-Life 2’s Gravity Gun, which dramatically built on past games’ physics mechanics, is in many ways a  concept that developers are still playing with and expanding on today. Ultrahand, the flagship player ability in 2023’s The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, could be seen as a substantial evolution from the Gravity Gun. In addition to offering players the ability to pick and place objects in the world, it gives them the power to attach them to one another to build creative contraptions.

There’s also Half-Life 2’s approach to using environmental lines and art cues to guide the player’s attention through realistic-looking environments. The game was lauded for that at the time, and it was an approach used by many popular games in the years to come. Today, many studios have moved on to much more explicit player cues like the yellow climbing holds in so many recent triple-A titles. As you’ll see in an upcoming article this week written by someone who played Half-Life 2 for the very first time in 2024, Half-Life 2’s approach may have set the stage, but modern players might expect something a little different.

A trainyard in City 17

Environments like this were carefully designed to guide the player’s eye in subtle ways. Today, many triple-A games take a less subtle approach because playtesting with broader audiences shows it’s sometimes necessary. Credit: Valve

One thing about the environment design that Half-Life 2 was praised for hasn’t been replaced these days, though: a commitment to subtle environmental storytelling. World-building and vibes are perhaps Half-Life 2’s greatest achievements. From BioShock to Dishonored to Cyberpunk 2077, this might be the realm where Half-Life 2’s influence is still felt the most today.

A legacy remembered

Looking back 20 years later, Half-Life 2 isn’t necessarily remembered for radical new gameplay concepts. Instead, it’s known for outstanding execution—and developers everywhere are still applying lessons learned by that development team to try to chase its high standard of quality.

Even at the time, critics noted that it wasn’t exactly that there was anything in Half-Life 2 that players had never seen before. Rather, it was the combined force of quality, scope, presentation, and refinement that made an impact.

Of course, Valve and Half-Life 2 are also known for multiple memorable cultural moments, some of the industry’s most infamous controversies, and playing a big part in introducing digital distribution. We’ll explore some of those things as we count down to the “Red Letter Day” this Saturday.

Photo of Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon is a senior editor at Ars Technica. He covers Apple, software development, gaming, AI, entertainment, and mixed reality. He has been writing about gaming and technology for nearly two decades at Engadget, PC World, Mashable, Vice, Polygon, Wired, and others. He previously ran a marketing and PR agency in the gaming industry, led editorial for the TV network CBS, and worked on social media marketing strategy for Samsung Mobile at the creative agency SPCSHP. He also is an independent software and game developer for iOS, Windows, and other platforms, and he is a graduate of DePaul University, where he studied interactive media and software development.

How Valve made Half-Life 2 and set a new standard for future games Read More »

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Review: The fastest of the M4 MacBook Pros might be the least interesting one

Apple, apple m4, Apple silicon, m4, m4 max, m4 pro, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Reviews, Tech / /

Not a surprising generational update, but a lot of progress for just one year.

The new M4 Pro and M4 Max MacBook Pros. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The new M4 Pro and M4 Max MacBook Pros. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

In some ways, my review of the new MacBook Pros will be a lot like my review of the new iMac. This is the third year and fourth generation of the Apple Silicon-era MacBook Pro design, and outwardly, few things have changed about the new M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max laptops.

Here are the things that are different. Boosted RAM capacities, across the entire lineup but most crucially in the entry-level $1,599 M4 MacBook Pro, make the new laptops a shade cheaper and more versatile than they used to be. The new nano-texture display option, a $150 upgrade on all models, is a lovely matte-textured coating that completely eliminates reflections. There’s a third Thunderbolt port on the baseline M4 model (the M3 model had two), and it can drive up to three displays simultaneously (two external, plus the built-in screen). There’s a new webcam. It looks a little nicer and has a wide-angle lens that can show what’s on your desk instead of your face if you want it to. And there are new chips, which we’ll get to.

That is essentially the end of the list. If you are still using an Intel-era MacBook Pro, I’ll point you to our previous reviews, which mostly celebrate the improvements (more and different kids of ports, larger screens) while picking one or two nits (they are a bit larger and heavier than late-Intel MacBook Pros, and the display notch is an eyesore).

New chips: M4 and M4 Pro

That leaves us with the M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max.

We’ve already talked a bunch about the M4 and M4 Pro in our reviews of the new iMac and the new Mac minis, but to recap, the M4 is a solid generational upgrade over the M3, thanks to its two extra efficiency cores on the CPU side. Comparatively, the M4 Pro is a much larger leap over the M3 Pro, mostly because the M3 Pro was such a mild update compared to the M2 Pro.

The M4’s single-core performance is between 14 and 21 percent faster than the M3s in our tests, and tests that use all the CPU cores are usually 20 or 30 percent faster. The GPU is occasionally as much as 33 percent faster than the M3 in our tests, though more often, the improvements are in the single or low double digits.

For the M4 Pro—bearing in mind that we tested the fully enabled version with 14 CPU cores and 20 GPU cores, and not the slightly cut down version sold in less expensive machines—single-core CPU performance is up by around 20-ish percent in our tests, in line with the regular M4’s performance advantage over the regular M3. The huge boost to CPU core count increases multicore performance by between 50 and 60 percent most of the time, a substantial boost that actually allows the M4 Pro to approach the CPU performance of the 2022 M1 Ultra. GPU performance is up by around 33 percent compared to M3 Pro, thanks to the additional GPU cores and memory bandwidth, but it’s still not as fast as any of Apple’s Max or Ultra chips, even the M1-series.

M4 Max

And finally, there’s the M4 Max (again, the fully enabled version, this one with 12 P-cores, 4 E-cores, 40 GPU cores, and 546GB/s of memory bandwidth). Single-core CPU performance is the biggest leap forward, jumping by between 18 and 28 percent in single-threaded benchmarks. Multi-core performance is generally up by between 15 and 20 percent. That’s a more-than-respectable generational leap, but it’s nowhere near what happened for the M4 Pro since both M3 Mac and M4 Max have the same CPU core counts.

The only weird thing we noticed in our testing was an inconsistent performance in our Handbrake video encoding test. Every time we ran it, it reliably took either five minutes and 20 seconds or four minutes and 30 seconds. For the slower result, power usage was also slightly reduced, which suggests to me that some kind of throttling is happening during this workload; we saw roughly these two results over and over across a dozen or so runs, each separated by at least five minutes to allow the Mac to cool back down. High Power mode didn’t make a difference in either direction.

CPU P/E-cores GPU cores RAM options Display support (including internal) Memory bandwidth
Apple M4 Max (low) 10/4 32 36GB Up to five 410GB/s
Apple M4 Max (high) 12/4 40 48/64/128GB Up to five 546GB/s
Apple M3 Max (high) 12/4 40 48/64/128GB Up to five 409.6GB/s
Apple M2 Max (high) 8/4 38 64/96GB Up to five 409.6GB/s

We shared our data with Apple and haven’t received a response. Note that we tested the M4 Max in the 16-inch MacBook Pro, and we’d expect any kind of throttling behavior to be slightly more noticeable in the 14-inch Pro since it has less room for cooling hardware.

The faster result is more in line with the rest of our multi-core tests for the M4 Max. Even the slower of the two results is faster than the M3 Max, albeit not by much. We also didn’t notice similar behavior for any of the other multi-core tests we ran. It’s worth keeping in mind if you plan to use the MacBook Pro for CPU-heavy, sustained workloads that will run for more than a few minutes at a time.

GPU performance in our tests varies widely compared to the M4 Max, with results ranging from as little as 10 or 15 percent (for 4K and 1440p GFXBench tests—the bigger boost to the 1080p version is coming partially from CPU improvements) to as high as 30 percent for the Cinebench 2024 GPU test. I suspect the benefits will vary depending on how much the apps you’re running benefit from the M4 Max’s improved memory bandwidth.

Power efficiency in the M4 Max isn’t dramatically different from the M3 Max—it’s more efficient by virtue of using roughly the same amount of power as the M3 Max and running a little faster, consuming less energy overall to do the same amount of work.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Finally, in a test of High Power mode, we did see some very small differences in the GFXBench scores, though not in other GPU-based tests like Cinebench and Blender or in any CPU-based tests. You might notice slightly better performance in games if you’re running them, but as with the M4 Pro, it doesn’t seem hugely beneficial. This is different from how it’s handled in many Windows PCs, including Snapdragon X Elite PCs with Arm-based chips in them because they do have substantially different performance in high-performance mode relative to the default “balanced” mode.

Nice to see you, yearly upgrade

The 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros. The nano-texture glass displays eliminate all of the normal glossy-screen reflections and glare. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The new MacBook Pros are all solid year-over-year upgrades, though they’ll be most interesting to people who bought their last MacBook Pro toward the end of the Intel era sometime in 2019 or 2020. The nano-texture display, extra speed, and extra RAM may be worth a look for owners of the M1 MacBook Pros if you truly need the best performance you can get in a laptop. But I’d still draw a pretty bright line between latter-day Intel Macs (aging, hot, getting toward the end of the line for macOS updates, not getting all the features of current macOS versions anyway) and any kind of Apple Silicon Mac (fully supported with all features, still-current designs, barely three years old at most).

Frankly, the computer that benefits the most is probably the $1,599 entry-level MacBook Pro, which, thanks to the 16GB RAM upgrade and improved multi-monitor support, is a fairly capable professional computer. Of all the places where Apple’s previous 8GB RAM floor felt inappropriate, it was in the M3 MacBook Pro. With the extra ports, high-refresh-rate screen, and nano-texture coating option, it’s a bit easier to articulate the kind of user who that laptop is actually for, separating it a bit from the 15-inch MacBook Air.

The M4 Pro version also deserves a shout-out for its particularly big performance jump compared to the M2 Pro and M3 Pro generations. It’s a little odd to have a MacBook Pro generation where the middle chip is the most impressive of the three, and that’s not to discount how fast the M4 Max is—it’s just the reality of the situation given Apple’s focus on efficiency rather than performance for the M3 Pro.

The good

  • RAM upgrades across the whole lineup. This particularly benefits the $1,599 M4 MacBook Air, which jumps from 8GB to 16GB
  • M4 and M4 Max are both respectable generational upgrades and offer substantial performance boosts from Intel or even M1 Macs
  • M4 Pro is a huge generational leap, as Apple’s M3 Pro used a more conservative design
  • Nano-texture display coating is very nice and not too expensive relative to the price of the laptops
  • Better multi-monitor support for M4 version
  • Other design things—ports, 120 Hz screen, keyboard, and trackpad—are all mostly the same as before and are all very nice

The bad

  • Occasional evidence of M4 Max performance throttling, though it’s inconsistent, and we only saw it in one of our benchmarks
  • Need to jump all the way to M4 Max to get the best GPU performance

The ugly

  • Expensive, especially once you start considering RAM and storage upgrades

Photo of Andrew Cunningham

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

Review: The fastest of the M4 MacBook Pros might be the least interesting one Read More »

calling-all-ars-readers!-your-feedback-is-needed.

Calling all Ars readers! Your feedback is needed.

ars technica, feedback, Staff / /

Many of you know that most of our staff is spread out all over these United States, but what you might not know is that it has been more than five years since many of us saw each other in meatspace. Travel budgets and the pandemic conspired to keep us apart, but we are finally gathering Team Ars in New York City later this week. We’d love for you to be there, too, in spirit. 

As we gear up for our big fall meeting, we want to hear from you! We’ve set up a special email address, Tellus@arstechnica.com, just for reader feedback. We won’t harvest your email for spam or some nonsense—we just want to hear from you. 

What would we like to hear about? We’re eager to know your thoughts on what we’re doing right, where we could improve, and what you’d like to see more (or less) of. What topics do you think we should be covering that we aren’t? Are we hitting the right balance in our reporting? Is there too much doom and gloom, or not enough? Feel free to be as specific and loquacious as you wish. 

This is your chance to speak directly to us and influence our future direction. While we welcome comments on this post, emailing your feedback to Tellus@arstechnica.com will help us better organize and address your thoughts during our meeting.

Thanks in advance for helping us make Ars even better!

Calling all Ars readers! Your feedback is needed. Read More »

the-online-sports-gambling-experiment-has-failed

The Online Sports Gambling Experiment Has Failed

Online / /

Related: Book Review: On the Edge: The Gamblers

I have previously been heavily involved in sports betting. That world was very good to me. The times were good, as were the profits. It was a skill game, and a form of positive-sum entertainment, and I was happy to participate and help ensure the sophisticated customer got a high quality product. I knew it wasn’t the most socially valuable enterprise, but I certainly thought it was net positive.

When sports gambling was legalized in America, I was hopeful it too could prove a net positive force, far superior to the previous obnoxious wave of daily fantasy sports.

It brings me no pleasure to conclude that this was not the case. The results are in. Legalized mobile gambling on sports, let alone casino games, has proven to be a huge mistake. The societal impacts are far worse than I expected.

  1. The Short Answer.

  2. Paper One: Bankruptcies.

  3. Paper Two: Reduced Household Savings.

  4. Paper Three: Increased Domestic Violence.

  5. The Product as Currently Offered is Terrible.

  6. Things Sharp Players Do.

  7. People Cannot Handle Gambling on Smartphones.

  8. Yay and Also Beware Trivial Inconveniences (a future full post).

  9. How Does This Relate to Elite Hypocrisy?.

  10. The Standard Libertarian Counterargument.

  11. What About Other Prediction Markets?.

  12. What Should Be Done.

Joe Weisenthal: Why is it that sports gambling, specifically, has elicited a lot of criticism from people that would otherwise have more laissez faire sympathies?

This full post is the long answer.

The short answer is that it is clear from studies and from what we see with our eyes that ubiquitous sports gambling on mobile phones, and media aggressively pushing wagering, is mostly predation on people who suffer from addictive behaviors.

That predation, due to the costs of customer acquisition and retention and the regulations involved, involves pushing upon them terrible products offered at terrible prices, pushed throughout the sports ecosystem and via smartphones onto highly vulnerable people.

This is not a minor issue. This is so bad that you can pick up the impacts in overall economic distress data. The price, on so many levels, is too damn high.

We start with discussion of one of several new working papers studying the financial consequences of legalized sports betting. The impacts include a 28% overall increase in bankruptcies (!).

Brett Hollenbeck: *Working Paper Alert*: “The Financial Consequences of Legalized Sports Gambling” by Poet Larsen, @dade_us and myself.

We study how the widespread legalization of sports gambling over the past five years has impacted consumer financial health.

In 2018, SCOTUS ruled that states cannot be prohibited from allowing sports betting, and 38 states have since legalized sports gambling. This has led to a large new industry and a large increase in gambling accessibility. Roughly $300 billion has been bet and is growing fast.

While for most gamblers it is a harmless form of recreation, we know that some fraction become problem gamblers with potentially severe financial consequences.

We study these financial outcomes using a large and comprehensive dataset on consumer finances known as the UC Consumer Credit Panel (maintained by @CAPolicyLab). This allows us to track all credit and debt outcomes for roughly 7 million Americans.

We leverage this data and compare states implementing sports gambling to those that don’t and study both sports gambling of any type as well as online/mobile gambling specifically. We study 8 financial/debt outcomes and find the following results:

First, credit scores, a summary metric of overall creditworthiness, decrease by modest but statistically significant amounts (~1%). We also test for evidence of pre-trends between treated/control states and find none.

…

Second, several measures of excessive debt increase substantially. We find a roughly 28% increase in bankruptcies and an 8% increase in debt transferred to debt collectors. Similarly, auto loan delinquencies increase substantially as does use of debt consolidation loans.

Interestingly, we find that banks restrict access to credit on average in affected states. Credit card limits decrease and the ratio of secured to unsecured loans increases. After three years post-legalization we actually find a decrease in credit card delinquencies as a result.

I expected some negative impacts. But a 28% increase in bankruptcies is far more than I would have predicted. The typical adult bankruptcy rate is about 0.16%, so this would mean about 4bps (0.04%)/year of additional bankruptcies, or an over 1% additional chance a typical person goes bankrupt during their lifetime.

Alternatively as a sanity check, that’s on the order of 100,000 additional bankruptcies a year, which will rise over time if we don’t intervene. We are talking about an average handle of maybe 120 billion in 2023, but on average lower during this time period, let’s say average of 70 billion, with a likely sportsbook hold (before expenses) of something like 10% if we exclude advantage betters who are definitely not going bankrupt, given all the parlays and shaded lines and in-game betting and generally atrocious odds, so total net losses to ‘normal gamblers’ of 7 billion per year.

That suggests that for every $70k in net sportsbook gross profits from regular gamblers, someone filed for bankruptcy. That seems like a lot? It means those who are inclined to bet on sports are either often doing it out of desperation, or that the same causes that lead them to bet on sports and pushing them to the financial edge in other ways as well, and this is the straw breaking the camel’s back. Claude found it all plausible when I had it do a bunch of estimations. I do notice I am skeptical.

The result is clear. A bankruptcy is extremely socially expensive, on the order of $200k. That alone is almost triple the profits, and clearly wipes out all the social gains.

Legalized online sports betting is currently a deeply, deeply horrible deal.

I wish it were different. I am all for letting people do things, and I have enjoyed and benefited greatly from the ability to bet on sports.

And yes, I do think the majority of people who play plausibly get their money’s worth in entertainment, even at the outrageous prices charged. The problem is if a majority get a small benefit, and others get a huge loss, that is on net a disaster.

I can’t look at these findings, even if I don’t fully believe them, and not see a huge disaster from these effects alone.

I also can’t see a way in which the positive-sum benefits could justify that disaster.

We can then add a second paper, “Gambling Away Stability: Sports Betting’s Impact on Vulnerable Households.” They found that sports betting greatly reduced traditional net investments, while traditional gambling stays unchanged.

Maxwell Tabarrok: The negative effects on investment are large relative to the sample mean. The average household invests about $360 a quarter so a $50 decrease in investment is a loss of 14%.

This includes households that never bet.

If this is fully real, that’s holy territory. It’s an apocalypse. We are decreasing net household investment by 14%? Can there possibly be compensation for that? Alex Tabarrok notes that various details seem like they prove too much, and I agree it seems unlikely the effects are this large. But it can be a lot smaller than that, and still way too high.

There are a variety of goods households can choose to consume, including traditional gambling. If sports gambling were a regular consumption good that consumers were choosing because they enjoy it more, it wouldn’t be having these effects. Eating dramatically into savings rather than shifting the consumption basket, while not even reducing traditional gambling, says that consumers are clearly not responding rationally, and do not understand the choices they are making.

Here’s a third paper, showing that sports betting increases domestic violence. When the home team suffers an upset loss while sports betting is legal, domestic violence that day goes up by 9% for the day, with lingering effects.

It is estimated 10 million Americans are victims of domestic violence each year.

Claude estimates if you extrapolate from this result that there might be a 3% overall increase in domestic violence as the result of legalized sports betting, which seems non-crazy given that betting on NFL home favorites is only a tiny portion of overall losses.

Again, this is an overall effect for the entire population. The percentage of people who bet on sports is rising rapidly, but even so only 34% said they placed even one bet in 2023, and many of those will be limited to nominal wagers on things like the Super Bowl and March Madness. This survey has 39% sports betting participation, with about 35% of betters betting at least once a week. So again, the effects on the households that actually gamble are far higher.

This is a huge direct cost to bear. Domestic violence ruins lives. It also is a huge indicator that this is causing large amounts of distress in various forms, and that those gambling on sports are not making rational or wise consumption decisions.

Meanwhile, frankly, the product emphasis and implementation sucks. Almost all of the legal implementations (e.g. everyone I know about except Circa) are highly predatory. That’s what can survive in this market.

Why? Predation is where the money is. There is no physical overhead at an online casino, but after paying for all the promotions and credit card payments and advertisements and licenses and infrastructure, the only way to make all that back under the current laws and business models is the above-mentioned 10%-style hold that comes from toxic offerings.

Thus high prices even on the main lines, even higher ones on parlays and in-game betting. Whenever I see lines on the TV I usually want to puke at how wide the prices are. In game odds are beyond obnoxious. Anyone this drives away is a customer they have decided not to want.

This is what the in-game odds look like when they’re relatively reasonable, and seriously, ow my balls:

(This still shows how crazy the ‘win probability’ calculation they do is, given it’s well outside the odds they themselves are offering and also makes no sense, although an inning later it went far more insane and I can’t help but share, then aside over…)

All this is complemented by a strategy centered around free bet promotions (which makes the bonuses sound a lot bigger than they are), advertisements, promotional texts and emails and especially a barrage of push notifications.

Anyone showing any skill? They are shown the door.

I don’t think this is central to the case that current legal sports betting is awful, but it is illustrative what pros do in order to disguise themselves and get their wagers down. That to do that, they make themselves look like the whales. Which means addicts.

I’m used to stories like this one, that’s normal:

Ira Boudway (Bloomberg): If I open an account in New York, maybe for a few weeks I just bet the Yankees right before the game begins,” says Rufus Peabody, a pro bettor and co-host of the Bet the Process podcast. If this trick works, the book sees these normie, hometown bets as a sign that it’s safe to raise his limits.

It seems players have upped their game.

One pro bettor I know set up a bot which logs in to his accounts every day between 2 and 4 a.m., to make it seem like he can’t get through the night without checking his bets. Another withdraws money and then reverses those withdrawals so it looks like he can’t resist gambling.

Simulating addictive behavior, says Peabody, is an effective way to get online sportsbooks to send you bonus money and keep your accounts open. This isn’t necessarily because operators are targeting problem bettors, he says; they’re simply looking to identify and encourage customers who are likely to spend—and lose—the most. This just happens to be a good way to find and enable addicts, too.

The rest of the post is filled with the usual statistics and tragic stories.

What I find interesting about these examples is that they are very level-1 plays.

As in, this is exactly what someone would do if they thought they were up against a system that was looking for signs of what type of player you are, but only in the most mechanical and simple sense. For this type of thing to work, the book must not be looking at details or thinking clearly or holistically.

If you had tried this stuff on me when I was watching customers, to the extent I noticed it at all, I am pretty sure I would if anything have caught you faster.

Vices and other distractions are constant temptations. When you carry a phone around with you, that temptation is ever present.

Indeed, I recently got a Pixel Watch, and the biggest benefit of it so far is that I can stay connected enough to not worry, and not be tempted to check for things, without the pull of what a phone can do. And we have repeatedly seen how distracting it is for kids in school to have the smartphone right there in their pocket. I have learned to be very, very careful with mobile games, even ones with no relevant microtransactions.

Putting gambling in your pocket makes the temptation to gamble ever-present. Even for those who can resist it, that is a not so cheap mental tax to pay, and likely to result in the occasional impulse bet, even without the constant notifications. First hit’s free. Constant offers that adjust to your responses, to get you to keep coming back.

Now consider that at least several percent of people have an acute gambling addiction or vulnerability. For them, this is like an alcoholic being forced to carry a flask around in their pocket 24/7, while talk of what alcohol to choose and how good it would be to use that flask right now gets constantly woven into all their entertainment, and they by default get notifications asking if now is a good time for a beer. You can have the apps back up and running within a minute, even if you delete them.

It was plausible that this was an acceptable situation, that people could mostly handle that kind of temptation. We have now run the experiment, and it is clear that too many of them cannot.

I am coming around to a generalized version of this principle. There is a vast difference between:

  1. Something being legal, ubiquitous, frictionless and advertised.

  2. Something being available, mostly safe to get, but we make it annoying.

  3. Something being actively illegal, where you can risk actual legal trouble.

  4. Something being actively illegal and we really try to stop you (e.g. rape, murder).

We’ve placed far too many productive and useful things in category 2 that should be in category 1. By contrast, we’ve taken too many destructive things, too many vices, that we long had the wisdom to put in category 2, and started putting them in category 1.

Prohibitions, putting such things into categories 3 and especially 4, tends to work out extremely poorly. Don’t do that unless absolutely necessary. Let people do privately destructive things if they want to do that.

Often, it is important that you make doing the wrong thing a little annoying. It is especially important to not make it annoying to do the productive things, and not annoying to instead do the destructive things.

The elite refrains from irresponsible gambling, but here sets up conditions where such irresponsible actions are the inevitable result. The actual big elite hypocrisy is not the failure to impose paternalistic rules on the non-elite, it is that we constantly imposing extreme and expensive consumption requirements and restrictions on the non-elite when they are trying to live their lives and get their needs met. We impose these deeply restrictive, expensive and stupid elite norms on others all the time.

This paternalism severely damages their lives in numerous ways. This is the core reason why it is so difficult for ordinary people to pay their bills or raise families, despite earnings that would make them rich elsewhere or elsewhen.

These productive actions are severely restricted, because if you are going to be productive then you have to do so ‘correctly’ and obey all sorts of rules and requirements. Whereas if your actions are destructive, well then, go ahead, and it would be wrong of us to even enforce existing law.

That is a deeply toxic approach. We should reverse it. We should allow people to do productive actions as freely as possible, and put up frictions to sufficiently destructive actions.

Mobile gambling has shown itself to be a highly destructive action for its users, well in excess of any profits earned, sufficiently so as to substantially damage economic conditions. A that point, we need to draw the line.

Maxwell Tabarrok makes the contrary case that sports gambling is ordinary consumption, and we should not assume that so-called ‘vulnerable populations’ need protections from deciding to increase their consumption. He says the evidence is not compelling here.

His view is that this is no different from people buying Taylor Swift tickets.

In general I am highly sympathetic to this argument. I am not looking to tell people how much to invest or what goods to consume. But here I must strongly disagree.

I’ve certainly enjoyed consuming gambling, including in a few narrow small stakes cases where I wasn’t trying to be an advantage player. I think many others do so in ways that are not mistakes, or are mistakes we should allow them to make.

But ‘this is normal consumption’ seems to me like an absurd interpretation of the evidence above, and fails to understand the nature of the consumption being offered. You can’t place this ability to wager directly onto everyone’s phones at all times, putting the temptation at arm’s reach, see these consequences, and pretend these consequences are merely revealed preferences.

Most other prediction markets do not pose the same problems. They would not even if they greatly expanded and became more ‘normie’ friendly.

In particular, sports markets are highly related to and integrated into the most ‘normie’ of activities and into the related media, and they pay off quickly, and they’re ubiquitous, with something for you every day.

The legalized mobile online sports betting experiment is a clear failure. It should end.

You should need to go to a physical location to place fully legal bets of a non-trivial size, or at least interact with a human or bear some other cost or risk.

I’m fine with that location being the local sports bar, especially if the bar gets to book your action. Yes, I realize that will mean more illegal and untaxed online sports betting, but it is what it is. The barriers to doing that would do a lot of good work.

At a bare minimum, the advertising and dark pattern complexes feeding this must be disempowered. The Federal Government should do what it can. The states should realize they are not doing themselves any favors and resist or undo this cash grab.

Legalized online casino gaming, allowing roulette or similar games from one’s phone, is of course far worse. That certainly should not be allowed via the internet. I am not keen to be expansive in what ‘counts as gambling’ but the obvious gambling that resolves in seconds and pays real money absolutely must go. We will need to figure out where to draw the line on ‘loot boxes’ and other game features, but if the more obnoxious and toxic versions of that got banned as well, that would be good too.

Ben Krauss and Milan Singh reach the same conclusion at Slow Boring, although they are less willing to fully bite the bullet. Kelsey Piper, who similar to me is loathe to tell people what they cannot do, does bite the bullet. Here Saagar Enjeti bites the bullet. Here Charles Fain Lehman at The Atlantic bites the bullet.

Otherwise, as the amount of gambling expands, it is only going to get worse.

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