Letting kids be kids seems more and more important to me over time. Our safetyism and paranoia about children is catastrophic on way more levels than most people realize. I believe all these effects are very large:
It raises the time, money and experiential costs of having children so much that many choose not to have children, or to have less children than they would want.
It de facto forces children to use screens quite a lot.
It instills a very harmful style of paranoia in all concerned.
This should be thought of as part of the Cost of Thriving Index discussion, and the fertility discussions as well. Before I return to the more general debate, I wanted to take care of this aspect first. It’s not that the economic data is lying exactly, it’s that it is missing key components. Economists don’t include these factors in their cost estimates and their measures of welfare. They need to do that.
I want a distinct marker for this part of the problem I can refer back to, thus this will include highlights of past discussions of the issue from older roundups and posts.
Why are so many people who are on paper historically wealthy, with median wages having gone up, saying they cannot afford children? A lot of it is exactly this. The real costs have gone up dramatically, largely in ways not measured directly in money, also in the resulting required basket of goods especially services, and this is a huge part of how that happened.
Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids focuses on the point that you can put in low effort on many fronts, and your kids will be fine. Scott Alexander recently reviewed it, to try and feel better about that, and did a bunch of further research. The problem is that even if you know being chill is fine, people have to let you be chill.
This is in addition to college admissions and the whole school treadmill, which is beyond the scope of this post.
We have the Housing Theory of Everything, which makes the necessary space more expensive, but not letting kids be kids – which also expands how much house you need for them, so the issues compound – is likely an even bigger issue here.
The good news is, at least when this type of thing happens it can still be news.
Remember, this is not ‘the kid was forcibly brought home and the mother was given a warning,’ which would be crazy enough. The mother was charged with ‘child neglect’ and was being held in jail on bond.
A civilization with that level of paranoia seems impossible to sustain.
WBOY 12News: A woman has been charged after a young child was found walking alone on the side of the road in Glenville.
Gov Deeply: > The child, who was described as being about 7 years old, told officers that he had walked from a residence on North Lewis Street to McDonald’s, which is more than a quarter mile.
> Fraley has been charged with child neglect. She is being held in Central Regional Jail on $5,000 bond.
If that’s the full story: ridiculous!
Make Childhood Great Again. Set our children free. (And punish cops & prosecutors who get in the way.)
I was curious so looked it up: we walked 0.7 miles to & from elementary school each day, sun or rain or snow. Half the stretch was a somewhat busy road.
Definitely starting in first grade; maybe Kindergarten. Not a big deal.
vbgyor: The charge should be for letting her child eat at McDonalds.
These objections can be absolute, in this next case at least they didn’t arrest anyone:
John McLaughin: My 9 year old son was brought home in back of a police car Monday. He went to Publix, literally 500 ft from our home, to buy a treat w/ his own money. He’d done this several times before. The officer at the store that day decided he was too young to shop alone. It was infuriating.
Luckily, they didn’t arrest me or my wife like they did the other lady in GA last year, but it was still infuriating. They did write a report and have an ambulance come out to check him. It was over the top and of course their basis for this was “endangerment.”
Yes, the store is familiar with him. We are regulars and he’s gone by himself on several occasions. He said after asking him why he was there and where his parents were, the officer said “I don’t want you here alone.”
Those are the most recent ones, here are some flashbacks (remember when I used italics?).
Childhood Roundup #1: Sane 2022 parents of 10-year-olds: I would like to let you go outside without me. I am terrified that someone will call the cops and they will take you away from me.
As they stood on her porch, the officers told Wallace that her son could have been kidnapped and sex trafficked. “‘You don’t see much sex trafficking where you are, but where I patrol in downtown Waco, we do,'” said one of the cops, according to Wallace.
Did things get more dangerous since 1980, when we were mostly sane about this? No. They got vastly less dangerous, in all ways other than the risk of someone calling the cops.
The numbers on ‘sex trafficking’ and kidnapping by strangers are damn near zero.
The incident caused ‘ruin your life’ levels of damage.
Child services had the family agree to a safety plan, which meant Wallace and her husband could not be alone with their kids for even a second. Their mothers—the children’s grandmothers—had to visit and trade off overnight stays in order to guarantee the parents were constantly supervised. After two weeks, child services closed Wallace’s case, finding the complaint was unfounded.
…
Wallace’s sister has started a GoFundMe for her. She is in debt after losing her job and paying for the lawyer and the diversion program. She also hopes to hire a lawyer to get her record expunged so that she can work with kids again.
One of my closest friends here in New York is strongly considering moving to the middle of nowhere so that his child will be able to walk around outside, because it is not legally safe to do that anywhere there are people.
Update on that friend: They did indeed move out of New York for this reason, and then got into trouble for related issues when they were legally in the right, because that turns out not to matter much if the police decide otherwise.
Neighbor writes in to the newspaper because they are concerned that a 13-year-old is left alone in their house on Saturdays, to ask if perhaps they should call child protective services about this? Yes, we are completely insane.
Billy Binion: I can’t get over this story. A local law enforcement agency is trying to force a mom to put a location tracker on her son—and if she doesn’t, they’re threatening to prosecute her. Because her kid walked less than a mile by himself. It’s almost too crazy to be real. And yet.
Here is the traditional chart of how little we let our kids walk around these days:
Scott Alexander goes into detail about exactly how dangerous it is to be outside, but all you need to know is that not only is it not more dangerous today, it is dramatically safer now than it ever was… except for the danger of cops or CPS knocking at your door.
What we need continue to need are clear, hard rules for exactly what is and is not permitted, where if you are within the rules you are truly in the clear and if the police or others hassle you non-trivially there are consequences for the police and others.
Scott Alexander: I can’t reach Caplan’s specific source (Bianchi et al, Changing Rhythms Of American Family Life), but his claims broadly match the data in Dotti Sani & Treas (2016):
My wife eventually found Wilkie and Cullen (2023), an alternate data source which bins responses by child age.
Then from BLS:
Adults living in households with children under age 6 spent an average of 2.3 hours per day providing primary childcare to household children … primary childcare is childcare that is done as a main activity, such as providing physical care or reading to children. (See table 9.)
Adults living in households with at least one child under age 13 spent an average of 5.1 hours per day providing secondary childcare – that is, they had at least one child in their care while doing activities other than primary childcare. Secondary childcare provided by adults living in households with children under age 13 was most commonly provided while doing leisure activities (1.9 hours) or household activities (1.3 hours).
Even secondary care is a dramatic reduction in flexibility and productivity. And we’re talking about a total of 7.4 hours per day, with 19 hours on weekends between both parents. That’s full time jobs. Weekends are supposed to be break time, but often they’re not anymore.
If we assume that the BLS statistics Scott cites are accurate, and that the ratios in the first graph are also accurate, and that the trends are likely continuing and should be expected to continue getting worse, this is a nightmare amount of supervision time.
The problem for parents like John McLaughin and Brittany Patterson is, random safetyists will still call the police, and when they do the police often simply ignore such laws, as my friend found out in Connecticut. Even when the conduct in question is explicitly legal, that often won’t save you from endless trouble, and if things get into the family courts you absolutely get punished if you try to point out you didn’t do anything wrong and are forced to genuflect and lie.
Ultimately, this all comes down to tail risk. You can’t do obviously correct fully sane things, if there’s even a tiny chance of the law coming in and causing massive headaches, or even ruining your life and that of your children.
The amount of paranoia about having your child taken away, or potentially (see above cases) the parent even being outright arrested, has reached ludicrous levels, mostly among exactly the people who you do not want worrying about this. Even a report that causes no action now can be a big worry down the line.
And the reports are very common. Consider that 37% of children are reported, at some point, to CPS, this is from my Childhood Roundup #3, which also has more CPS examples in it:
Jerusalem: This is… a wild stat. 37 percent of all US children are subjects of CPS reports (28% of white children and 53% of Black children experience CPS involvement before their 18th birthday).
Abigail: I had a neighbor threaten to call cps beccause I let my kid play in my fully fenced backyard while I watched from inside. She came over, banged on my door, threatened it in front of that kid. People these days call over nothing. Everyone’s scared of it. Moms talk about the fear a lot in my experience.
So what could we do about this?
Matt Bateman: Besides changing norms and laws around child safetyism, a good reform would be: make it trivial to appeal and correct reports.
There is a system of ghost convictions that happens by records—police reports, CPS referrals, medical records, school records—that ~cannot be fought.
Shin Megami Boson: CPS removes around 200k children from the care of their parents each year. most of those children are reunited with their parents after an investigation. about 350 kids are victims of non-family abductions a year.
By napkin math, CPS is responsible for over 99.6% of annual non-parental kidnappings in the US.
Because of semi-coercive “safety plans” this is potentially a substantial underestimate.
Actually I gave them a bit of the benefit of the doubt and assumed half of all investigated cases were real cases of abuse. their actual number of substantiated investigations is closer to 22%.
The Rich: CPS removes 200k from their parents??????????
every year?????
Ben Podgursky: there are a lot of really, really, really bad parents this is tough because parents should get the benefit of the doubt, but the sad fact is that the CPS abuse-of-power cases (which yes, are bad) are like 10%… it’s mostly kids in unbelievable neglect
Memetic Sisyphus: Before anyone gets upset by this number, go to your local mom’s Facebook group and look at the moms fighting with CPS.
Mr. Garvin: Every story about CPS is spun as “the government/hospital is kidnapping my baby for no reason” because of HIPAA Important details like “the baby was literally starving to death” or “the toddler ate a whole package of weed gummies that mom left out” can’t be publicly disclosed.
You would have no idea how common it is for CPS to come on the very day the parents were about to go out and buy their kids a bed or set of diapers.
It seems like there is a very easy, very clear way to distinguish between the horrible cases we’re talking about where children are lacking very basic needs or something truly horrible is happening, where CPS apparently often still has trouble making the removal stick, and cases of safetyism concerns since only 22% of cases are substantiated.
And yet here we are.
Hermit Yab: 10% of 200k is a lot I would not be OK losing my kids to some psycho social worker because 9 other shitheads were bad parents. Actually it would make me even angrier.
I mean, yeah, okay, fine, let’s say it’s 20k kids being kidnapped out of 75.2 million per year where there was nothing seriously wrong, often because of some other person’s safetyism paranoia followed by a capricious decision, and this is being used as essentially a terrorism campaign, and we’re down from 99.6% of kidnappings to 96%, with a lot of them basically justified by blaming the other 4%, despite most of the other 4% being from custodial disputes.
Still seems pretty not great, especially given what then happens to the kids.
Wayne: The counterpoint to my position on CPS is that maybe we should be happy to see people on the side of victims, for once, and perhaps should want to see more of that, not less.
The problem with this, though, is that there’s no magical place to put kids who live with parents who are just kind of shitty. Nobody is dying to raise those kids. They go into foster care, where rates of abuse and neglect are even higher.
I suppose one silver lining is that if you have a backup place for them in an emergency it’s a lot less bad? But still horribly bad.
Mason: It gives me some comfort to know that if our kids were ever removed by CPS there would be multiple close relatives we trust clamoring to take them on literally zero notice.
That so many of these kids have nobody like this, not one loving soul, is emblematic of a greater failing.
When I was very little my mom was accused of inviting men over to sexually abuse me, by a mentally ill babysitter she had fired.
Obviously traumatic for all of us, but what do you do, not investigate that? I was never put in foster care, there was family. Small blessings.
You want to tell your kids, go out and play, be home by dinner, like your father and his father before him. But if you do, or even if you tell your kids to walk the two blocks to school, eventually a policeman will show up at your house and warn you not to do it again, or worse. And yes, you’ll be the right legally, but what are you going to do, risk a long and expensive legal fight? So here we are, and either you supervise your kids all the time or say hello to a lot of screens.
Parents Mag’s “Top Pick” for a kid’s “1st Phone” lets parents “monitor all incoming & outgoing text messages…track location & GET ALERTS ANY TIME THEIR CHILD LEAVES A SPECIFIED LOCATION ZONE.”
My First Ankle Monitor!
Parents Magazine: The parental controls available through Pixel’s Caregiver Portal are particularly impressive. They allow parents to approve contacts and app downloads, monitor all incoming and outgoing text messages (including images), track their child’s location, and get alerts any time their child leaves a specified location zone.
“I really liked that feature and that strangers can’t contact my kids, even their friends, unless I approve them.” —Jessica, mom of four
That’s unfortunately what parents want these days, partly for fear of law enforcement. And as this post documents, that fear of law enforcement is highly reasonable.
In situations like this, it is not obvious in which direction various powers go.
The powers can be used for good, even from a freedom perspective, in several important ways.
If you can track location, and especially if you get alerted when they stray, then you can give the child much wider freedom of movement, knowing they cannot get meaningfully lost, and without worrying that something happened to them or that you’ll never know where they went.
Your ability to track location is a defense against law enforcement, or against other paranoid adults.
The other abilities are similarly double edged swords, and of course you don’t have to use your powers if you do not want them. The tricky one is monitoring messages, since you will be very tempted to use it, the kid will know this, and this means they don’t have a safe space, and also you know they can just make a phone call. I don’t love this part.
I can see saying you want to only monitor images, since that’s a lot of the potential threat model and relatively less of what needs to be private.
An actually good version is likely to use AI here. An AI should be able to detect inappropriate images, and if desired flag potentially scary text interactions, and only alert the parents if something is seriously wrong, without otherwise destroying privacy. That’s what I would want here.
I actively think it’s good to require approval on app downloads and contacts (and to then only let them message and call contacts), at whatever time you think they’re first ready for a phone – there’s clearly a window where you wouldn’t otherwise want them to have a phone, and this makes it workable. Later of course you will want to no longer have such powers.
New York City continues to close playgrounds on the slightest provocation, in this case an ‘icy conditions’ justification when it was 45 degrees out. Liz Wolfe calls this NYC ‘hating its child population.’ And that they tried to fine her when she tried to open a padlocked playground via hopping the fence.
I wouldn’t go that far, and I presume fear of lawsuits is playing a big part in these decisions. There has to be a way to deal with that. The obvious solution is to pass laws allowing the city to have a ‘at your own risk’ sign when conditions are questionable, but the courts have a nasty habit of not letting that kind of thing work – we really should do whatever it takes to fix that, however far up the chain that requires.
And that emphasizes that hopefully correct legal strategy is to padlock the playground, if legally necessary, and then if the parents evade that, you let them? Alternatively, the city hadn’t gotten around to reopening the playground yet, which obviously is a pretty terrible failure to prioritize – the value lost is very high and you still have to reopen it later. And it’s all the more reason to look the other way.
Liz notes that NYC’s under 5 population has fallen 18% since April 2020. I still think NYC is actually a pretty great place to raise kids if you can afford to do it, and I haven’t found the playgrounds to be closed that often when you actually want them to be open, but I certainly understand why people decide to leave.
Thread where Emmett Shear asks how our insane levels of safetyism and not letting kids exist without supervision could have so quickly come to pass.
Rowan: I found out yesterday that one of my coworkers was briefly separated from their parents as a child by CPS because a neighbor found out he was walking two blocks to school every day
Tetraspace: this is the kind of egregious thing that right-wing tetratopians really emphasise on their anti-earth propaganda. But the propaganda is, like, really well cited.
The safety arms race is related to and overlaps with the time investment arms race.
Cartoons Hate Her: I think there’s a parental safety arms race happening where a fringe group decides something is super dangerous, slightly less crazy people are convinced, and within 5 years so few people are doing it that people call the cops on you for it.
I am probably one of the crazy people btw. But I’m self aware!
Like at some point we will be in a place where parents are having CPS called on them for letting their kid sleep at a friend’s house.
This already happened with letting your kids walk to school btw
Even if you pass a ‘free range child’ or similar law requiring sanity, that largely doesn’t even do it, unless the police would actually respect that law when someone complains. Based on the anecdata I have, the police will frequently ignore that what you are doing is legal, and turn your situation into a nightmare anyway. And here’s Scott Alexander with another example beyond what I was referring to above:
Scott Alexander: I live next to a rationalist group house with several kids. They tried letting their six-year old walk two blocks home from school in the afternoon. After a few weeks of this, a police officer picked up the kid, brought her home, and warned the parents not to do this.
The police officer was legally in the wrong. This California child abuse lawyer says that there are no laws against letting your kid play (or walk) outside unsupervised. There is a generic law saying children generally need “adequate” supervision, but he doesn’t think the courts would interpret this as banning the sort of thing my friends did.
Still, being technically correct is cold comfort when the police disagree.
Even if you can eventually win a court case, that takes a lot of resources – and who’s to say a different cop won’t nab you next time? To solve the problem, seven states (not including California) have passed “reasonable childhood independence” laws, which make it clear to policemen and everyone else that unsupervised play is okay. There is a whole “free range kids” movement (its founder, Lenore Skenazy, gets profiled in SRTHMK) trying to win this legal and cultural battle.
Exactly. Scott’s proposed intervention of providing evidence of the law is fun to think about, and the experiment is worth running, but seems unlikely to work in practice.
RFH: The amount of time women are spending with children today is historically unprecedented and making both women and children insane.
Working moms today spend more time on childcare than housewives did in the 50s and no one seems to think that this is a serious problem and likely contributing to women no longer wanting to be moms, the workload and the pressure of motherhood has gotten out of control.
Zvi: If this was because the extra time brought joy, that would make sense. It isn’t (paper), at least not the extra time that happens when the mother is college-educated.
They can handle a lot more than people think, remarkably often.
Not all 12 year olds, and all that, but yes. This is The Way, all around. Don’t simply not arrest the parents if the kids walk to the store, also let the kids do actual real things.
In You Endohs: Just overheard a father explaining that it’s better to start a casino than a restaurant given the stronger revenue model—but that casinos are harder to set up from a regulatory perspective—to his FIVE YEAR OLD SON.
Emma Steuer: This is literally why I know everything about everything. Starting from infancy my dad would just talk to me like a regular person. I’m pretty sure I know everything he knows at this point
In You Endohs: Oh it rocks.
Henrik Karlsson: I’ve never understood why not everybody talks to kids this way, they love it.
I’ve seen exceptions, yeah. But they are quite rare ime.
When I worked at the art gallery, we had a 19-yr-old do an internship with us, which my boss handled, and I brought along a 12-yr-old as my intern. My boss put the 19-yr-old in the café and complained it was so hard to deal with kids. I taught the 12-yr-old to do our accounting.
I literally can’t understand why ppl behave so weirdly around kids. They are just slightly smaller humans. They like to be useful, they understand things well if you just explain it with enough context. They are fun to have around when you work.
Adam: I could teach a 13 year old to be a capable CAD architectural draftsman. Probably be a project manager by 18.
I mean, yeah, don’t start a restaurant, that never works out. Kids need to know.
Most of all:
Because that’s what they are. People. Some people take this too far. Only treat kids as peers in situations where that makes sense for that situation and that kid, but large parts of our society have gone completely bonkers in the other direction. For example:
Nicolas Decker: I’m ngl I find this sort of thing disgusting. God forbid someone treat a minor like a human being.
Kelsey Piper: I also worry that if you tell all adults with good intentions to absolutely never treat teenagers as peers, then the only people who are willing to treat them like peers are those with sketchy intentions.
Teenagers have a very strong desire to be intellectually respected and treated as peers and “no, never do that, because they value it so highly they can be vulnerable to adults who offer it” strikes me as the wrong way to respond
Sarah Constantin: yeesh this is from MIT?
Sufficiently talented minors *areadults’ peers at intellectual work. they deserve to be real collaborators! Starting to think it’s a red flag for…something when adults repress any identification with “what I would have wanted when I was a kid/teen.”
I have heard enough different stories about MIT letting us down exactly in places where you’d think ‘come on it’s MIT’ that I worry it’s no longer MIT. The more central point is that peers are super great, confidants are great, and this is yet another example of taking away the superior free version and forcing us to pay for a formalized terrible shadow of the same thing.
How do we more generally enable people to have kids without their lives having to revolve around those kids? How do we lower the de facto obligations for absurd amounts of personalized attention for them?
The obvious first thing is that we used to normalize kids being in various places, and how if you take your kids to almost anything people at best look at you like you’re crazy. We need to find a way to have them stop doing that, or to not care.
Salad Bar Fan: Comment I saw on Reddit that caught my attention. I recall reading a post by Scott Sumner echoing the same sentiment of there being less mixing of adults and kids in his childhood with each operating in their own little world apart from one another.
Pamela Hobart: Things revolving around the kids seemed to happen almost automatically by the time we had 3 under age 4.
I’ve never done things like cook separate meals or refuse hiring a babysitter to go out w/o kids. But just bringing them along to whatever the adults want to do is really hard and not always acceptable to others. What specifically made this attitude easier in the past? Just that there were so many more kids?
Like a few weeks ago I had to bring my 7 and 5yos to the tax office to renew an auto registration, it was midday on a Wednesday. They were home on break from private school i.e. not the spring break most families had.
Bunch of old folks in there glaring at me like they’d never seen a kid before?
The thing is this also relies upon the children being able to handle it. My understanding is that we used to focus less attention on children, and also to enforce behavior codes on them that were there to benefit adults rather than the children, and got them used to being bored and having nothing to do, and also they got used to being able to play on their own.
While I don’t fully want to go back to that amount of boredom, I do think that it would be a fair and net worthwhile trade to have kids accept far more ‘bored time,’ or ‘here at an adult event they don’t fully understand and have to behave time,’ and to normalize that as good and right. We used to be willing to trade really a ton of kid bored time to save adult time, now we do the opposite. We need middle ground.
Phones in schools is beyond the scope of today’s post, but overall screen time is not. Screen time is one of the few ways to reduce the time burden on caregivers.
Sebastiaan de With: This shit is evil. Plain and simple. I feel like we’ve crossed a point where we have stopped calling out others doing work that’s simply a huge harm to mankind and it’s time for that to change.
Felix (quoting): It’s audience research day at Moonbug Entertainment, the London company that produces 29 of the most popular online kids’ shows in the world, found on more than 150 platforms in 32 languages and with 7.8 billion views on YouTube in March alone. Once a month, children are brought here, one at a time, and shown a handful of episodes to figure out exactly which parts of the shows are engaging and which are tuned out.
For anyone older than 2 years old, the team deploys a whimsically named tool: the Distractatron.
It’s a small TV screen, placed a few feet from the larger one, that plays a continuous loop of banal, real-world scenes — a guy pouring a cup of coffee, someone getting a haircut — each lasting about 20 seconds. Whenever a youngster looks away from the Moonbug show to glimpse the Distractatron, a note is jotted down.
We have had a moral panic about screens in one form or another since we had screens, as in television.
I reiterate, once again, that this panic was and is essentially correct. The TV paranoia was correct, it brought great advantages but the warnings of idiot box, ‘couch potato’ and ‘boob tube,’ and crowding out other activities and so on were very much not wrong.
Modern screens have even huger downsides and dangers, and most of what is served to our kids is utter junk optimized against them, which is what they will mostly choose if left alone to do so.
Even when you are careful about what they watch, and it is educational and reasonable, there are still some rather nasty addictive behaviors to watch out for.
One can imagine ‘good’ versions of all this tech, but right now it doesn’t exist. It seems crazy that it doesn’t exist? Shouldn’t someone sell it? Properly curated experiences that gave parents proper control and steered children in good ways seem super doable, and would have a very large market with high willingness to pay. The business model is different, but also kind of obvious?
Is it going to be fine the way it is? Yeah, sure, for some value of ‘fine.’ And with AI I’m actually net optimistic things will mostly get better on this particular front. But yeah, Cocomelon is freaking scary, a lot of YouTube is far worse than that, giving children access to tablets and phones early will reliably get them addicted and cause big issues, and pretending otherwise is folly.
Trump has immediately appealed the ruling and is expected to take the case to the Supreme Court. He’s arguing that the court cannot define what constitutes a “national emergency,” which is a political question he believes only Congress can address.
White House spokesperson Kush Desai has made it clear that Trump remains “committed to using every lever of executive power to address” the “crisis” of trade deficits, CNN reported, which he claimed have “decimated American communities, left our workers behind, and weakened our defense industrial base.”
But the three-judge panel has already indicated that Trump may be focusing on the wrong question in seeking to further his case, noting that the “question here is not whether something should be done; it is who has the authority to do it.” According to the court, Trump does not.
Americans celebrate Trump loss
Ultimately, the judges agreed with US plaintiffs who alleged that tariffs risked vast harms to Americans, including spiking prices on their goods. Earlier this month, the Consumer Technology Association forecasted that Americans could pay more than $123 billion more annually for just 10 common gadgets hit with tariffs.
Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield, among other state enforcers who are suing, issued a statement criticizing Trump’s previously “unchecked authority” that he said threatened to “upend the economy” and celebrating the win for “working families, small businesses, and everyday Americans.”
“President Trump’s sweeping tariffs were unlawful, reckless, and economically devastating,” Rayfield said. “They triggered retaliatory measures, inflated prices on essential goods, and placed an unfair burden on American families, small businesses and manufacturers.”
Problems with sourcing and pricing were decreasing orders even to American businesses, suing US firms said, and for many, the sudden spike in costs at the border caused “a large, immediate, strain” on cash flow. At least one plaintiff alleged they could go out of business and be unable to pay employees without an injunction soon. One cycling store feared tariffs might cost it about $250,000 by the end of 2025.
The Department of Health and Human Services—under the control of anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—has canceled millions of dollars in federal funding awarded to Moderna to produce an mRNA vaccine against influenza viruses with pandemic potential, including the H5N1 bird flu currently sweeping US poultry and dairy cows.
Last July, the Biden administration’s HHS awarded Moderna $176 million to “accelerate the development of mRNA-based pandemic influenza vaccines.” In the administration’s final days in January, HHS awarded the vaccine maker an additional $590 million to support “late-stage development and licensure of pre-pandemic mRNA-based vaccines.” The funding would also go to the development of five additional subtypes of pandemic influenza.
On Wednesday, as news broke that the Trump administration was reneging on the contract, Moderna reported positive results from an early trial of a vaccine targeting H5 influenza viruses. In a preliminary trial of 300 healthy adults, the vaccine candidate appeared safe and boosted antibody levels against the virus by 44.5-fold.
An HHS spokesperson said that the decision to cancel the funding—which would support thorough safety and efficacy testing of the vaccines—was because the vaccines needed more testing.
“This is not simply about efficacy—it’s about safety, integrity, and trust.” HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon told The Washington Post. “The reality is that mRNA technology remains under-tested.”
Nixon went on to claim that the Trump administration wouldn’t repeat the “mistakes of the last administration, which concealed legitimate safety concerns.” The accusation refers to mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines, which were developed and initially released under the first Trump administration. They have since been proven safe and effective against the deadly virus.
It was a diagnostic challenge, and doctors began reviewing the list of possibilities that could match his condition. The first guess of pneumonia could explain some of his respiratory findings, but he didn’t have a cough, had tested negative for common respiratory pathogens, and the lung imaging didn’t quite fit, making it seem unlikely. Blood cancers, such as polycythemia vera, might be able to explain the high concentrations of blood cells. And it might also make him more vulnerable to opportunistic lung infections, like a fungal infection that could explain the halo sign. But blood cancers were also deemed unlikely given that he didn’t have enlarged organs, which is often seen with such conditions. Another possibility was pulmonary–renal syndrome, but that also didn’t line up with the man’s case.
Diagnosis
There was one other possibility that seemed to tick all the boxes: fever, gastrointestinal symptoms, low oxygen saturation, pulmonary edema, and shock—a hantavirus infection.
Hantaviruses are RNA viruses that infect rodents worldwide. They typically cause asymptomatic, chronic infections in the animals, which spread the virus widely into their environments through their urine, feces, and saliva. Humans get infected when virus particles from rodent-contaminated areas are stirred up into the air and inhaled or through direct contact with the virus via the eyes, nose, mouth, or cuts.
In humans, the viral infection is anything but asymptomatic. While the disease mechanism isn’t entirely understood, the virus appears to be able to modulate immune responses in humans, causing blood vessels and capillaries in various places in the body to start leaking plasma. This leads to fluid building up in the lungs (the pulmonary edema) and systemic circulatory collapse.
A cardiopulmonary hantavirus infection typically has four stages: the incubation period, which can last up to 45 days after virus exposure; a prodromal phase of up to 12 days, which is marked by fever, fatigue, and pains; the cardiopulmonary phase, where breathing trouble, low oxygen saturation, and shock can develop; then, if you make it, the fourth stage, in which respiratory symptoms improve, but there’s lingering fatigue and the kidneys make abnormally large amounts of urine.
Automaker Stellantis and retail and web services behemoth Amazon have decided to put an end to a collaboration on new in-car software. The partnership dates back to 2022, part of a wide-ranging agreement that also saw Stellantis pick Amazon Web Services as its cloud platform for new vehicles and Amazon sign on as the first customer for Ram’s fully electric ProMaster EV van.
A key aspect of the Amazon-Stellantis partnership was to be a software platform for new Stellantis vehicles called STLA SmartCockpit. Meant to debut last year, SmartCockpit was supposed to “seamlessly integrate with customers’ digital lives to create personalized, intuitive in-vehicle experiences,” using Alexa and other AI agents to provide better in-car entertainment but also navigation, vehicle maintenance, and in-car payments as well.
But 2024 came and went without the launch of SmartCockpit, and now the joint work has wound down, according to Reuters, although not for any particular reason the news organization could discern. Rather, the companies said in a statement that they “will allow each team to focus on solutions that provide value to our shared customers and better align with our evolving strategies.”
Since Claude 4 Opus things have been refreshingly quiet. Video break!
First up we have Prompt Theory, made with Veo 3, which I am considering the first legitimately good AI-generated video I’ve seen. It perfectly combining form and function. Makes you think.
What does it say about the medium, or about us, that these are the first legit videos?
This was the second clearly good product. Once again, we see a new form of storytelling emerging, a way to make the most of a series of clips that last a maximum of eight seconds each. The script and execution are fantastic.
I predict that will be the key for making AI videos at the current tech level. You have to have a great script and embrace the style of storytelling that AI can do well. It will be like the new TikTok, except with a higher barrier to entry. At this level, it is fantastic for creatives and creators.
Or you can do this (thread has a bunch more):
Tetraspace: finally we made the most beautiful woman in the world saying I love you from the famous QC short story Don’t Do That.
Sound is a game changer, and within an eight second clip I think we’re definitely ‘there’ with Veo 3 except for having more fine control and editing tools. What we don’t see yet is anyone extending the eight second clips into sixteen second clips (and then more by induction), but it feels like we’re only a few months away from that being viable and then the sky’s the limit.
Is Veo 3 too expensive for ‘personal fun’ uses?
Near Cyan: veo3 is far too pricey to use just for personal fun all the time, so the primary high-volume use case will be for bulk youtube shorts monetization. this is the first time (i think?) an sota genai model provider also owns the resulting distribution of much of what users will make.
For now, basically yes, once you run through your free credits. It’s $21 marginal cost per minute of silent video or $45 with sound, and any given generation might not be what you want. That’s not casual use territory. If you can produce a good two-hour movie for $10k (let’s say you get to use about half the footage?) then that’s obviously great, but yeah you gotta be going for real distribution here.
I predict that sometime soon, someone will make a good Veo 3 rules video, about the existential situation of the actors involved being AI, where the twist is that the video was made by human actors. I also predict that the cost of making this video will be, shall we say, not small in relative terms.
Hasan Can: $0.17 per image for OpenAI’s GPT Image 1 model is insanely expensive. How are developers supposed to use this at scale without going broke? OpenAI seriously needs to cut costs and optimize this model. In its current form, it’s just not viable for indie developers.
Rijn Hartman: INSANELY expensive – I tried building on it and while testing alone is costed $15. Not worth.
Insanely expensive? My lord is this ‘everything is amazing and nobody’s happy.’ You’re getting a complete artistic image for $0.17. Can you imagine you can commission art to your specifications for $0.17? Hot damn. Compare that to the previous options for an indie (game) developer. I get that you might want to use a different option now that’s cheaper, or that you might want to disable your users from using it if you can’t charge. And of course who is to say the images are any good. But we have a huge bug in our understanding of value.
Seb thinks all this is good, actually. I think it could be, but I’m highly unsure.
We should beware the further shattering of the cultural commons, for many reasons, and also a lack of sufficient incentives to drive creatives, even if their costs are down. And a lot of this will depend on our ability to use AI or rely on others to do selection. That seems like a highly solvable problem, and we’ve made great strides in solving it for some areas but we still struggle a lot, especially with the inability to make the selection mechanism be maximizing user experience rather than work for a platform.
Another big issue Gwern raises is that ‘bad money crowds out good’ is totally a thing.
Gwen: The higher-order effects here are going to be a problem. You could run the same argument about LLMs: “if you don’t like ChatGPTese creative writing, you don’t have to read it; therefore, everyone is strictly better off for it.”
In the current landscape, does that seem true?
(You might defend it on net, but there are obviously lots of places where things have gotten worse, and there are compounding effects: what is the long run effect on creative writing of all the young people learning to write like ChatGPT, rather than themselves?)
I think we are definitely better off at least for now on both video and text, but yeah there isn’t going to be any getting around it, especially for people who scroll TikTok or Instagram, unless we get good widely distributed AI filtering.
Seb Krier: Yes I don’t think it will be without cost for sure. I think we’re still in the early days and I imagine we’ll come up with more tools, UIs, customisation options, finetuned models, ways of teaching writing, and other tricks that could help incentivise diversity. Some degree of homogenisation is likely but I’m not sure it’s permanent or the only way things go.
Even today I’m finding it boring and bland when I read ChatGPTese and it turns me off from the rest of the text (sometimes). I assume many will feel that way and that might incentivise different styles, particularly in domains where individuality matters.
But it’s true that you might get a lot of slop music and slop art; for those who don’t want it I assume we’ll also get better at developing curation tools and communities. Today even if one doesn’t like Spotify recs, there are so many ways of accessing more interesting music!
Yes, this is true, you can work around Spotify recs being bad, but in practice it is so so much better if the recs that are natural and easy to access are good. Netflix illustrates this even more clearly, yes you can in theory do a search for anything you want, but who will do that? How they organize your list and recommendations determines (I think?) most of what most people watch.
Until Veo 3, nothing anyone made with AI video was interesting to me as more than a curiosity. Now, we have a few good meta things. Soon, it’s going beyond that.
Also, in sort of related news, here’s a funny thing that happened this week:
Anthropic’s Long Term Benefits Trust appoints Reed Hastings, chairman and cofounder of Netflix, to Anthropic’s board. That’s certainly a heavy hitter, he clearly does worry about AI and has written a $50 million check to prove it. The only worry is that his concerns could be too focused on the mundane.
Also I’d love to see a Netflix-Anthropic partnership, Claude giving me my Netflix recommendations and having full access to their catalogue with subscription when?
“Meta is a proud American success story, and we look forward to continuing to innovate and serve the people and businesses who love our services,” Meta’s spokesperson said.
Experts aren’t so sure Meta has clinched it
Boasberg has said that the key question he must answer is whether the FTC’s market definition is too narrow.
Arguing against the market definition, Meta has said that connecting friends and family isn’t even Meta apps’ “core use” anymore, as an evolving competitive social media landscape has forced Meta to turn its newsfeeds into discovery engines to rival TikTok. Justin Teresi, an antitrust analyst, told Bloomberg that because the FTC failed to show that users primarily come to Meta apps to connect with friends and family, it may have strengthened Meta’s case.
Rebecca Allensworth, a Vanderbilt law professor and antitrust expert, told Bloomberg that the “FTC’s narrowly defined market was always the weakest part of its case,” but the government “has done a nice job of minimizing that weakness” by showing that apps that don’t connect friends and family aren’t adequate substitutes for Meta’s apps.
“This was evident when Meta saw spikes in usage on holidays,” Allensworth suggested, which is perhaps “a sign people were turning to its products to connect with loved ones.”
Teresi thinks Meta has a 60 percent shot at winning the trial, although he criticized Meta’s seeming defense that any company competing for online ad dollars competes with Meta. That argument may have broadened the market definition too much, he suggested.
“If you’re saying that the relevant market here is competing for advertising dollars, then you could throw anything in there,” Teresi said. “You could throw TV in there, you could throw print in there if you wanted to, and there’s really no end to that concept.”
Allensworth was less confident in Meta’s chances, telling Bloomberg, “I really actually think this could go either way.”
Could the similarities confuse California residents who might mistake a sonic boom for an earthquake? Perhaps, at least until residents learn otherwise. “Since we’re often setting up in people’s backyard, they text us the results of what they heard,” said Gee. “It’s fantastic citizen science. They’ll tell us the difference is that the walls shake but the floors don’t. They’re starting to be able to tell the difference between an earthquake or a sonic boom from a launch.”
Launch trajectories of Falcon 9 rockets along the California coast. Credit: Kent Gee
A rocket’s trajectory also plays an important role. “Everyone sees the same thing, but what you hear depends on where you’re at and the rocket’s path or trajectory,” said Gee, adding that even the same flight path can nonetheless produce markedly different noise levels. “There’s a focal region in Ventura, Oxnard, and Camarillo where the booms are more impactful,” he said. “Where that focus occurs changes from launch to launch, even for the same trajectory.” That points to meteorology also being a factor: certain times of year could potentially have more impact than others as weather conditions shift, with wind shears, temperature gradients, and topography, for instance, potentially affecting the propagation of sonic booms.
In short, “If you can change your trajectory even a little under the right meteorological conditions, you can have a big impact on the sonic booms in this region of the country,” said Gee. And it’s only the beginning of the project; the team is still gathering data. “No two launches look the same right now,” said Gee. “It’s like trying to catch lightning.”
As our understanding improves, he sees the conversation shifting to more subjective social questions, possibly leading to the development of science-based local regulations, such as noise ordinances, to address any negative launch impacts. The next step is to model sonic booms under different weather conditions, which will be challenging due to coastal California’s microclimates. “If you’ve ever driven along the California coast, the weather changes dramatically,” said Gee. “You go from complete fog at Vandenburg to complete sun in Ventura County just 60 miles from the base.”
Don’t worry about the “mission-driven not-for-profit” College Board—it’s drowning in cash. The US group, which administers the SAT and AP tests to college-bound students, paid its CEO $2.38 million in total compensation in 2023 (the most recent year data is available). The senior VP in charge of AP programs made $694,662 in total compensation, while the senior VP for Technology Strategy made $765,267 in total compensation.
Given such eye-popping numbers, one would have expected the College Board’s transition to digital exams to go smoothly, but it continues to have issues.
Just last week, the group’s AP Psychology exam was disrupted nationally when the required “Bluebook” testing app couldn’t be accessed by many students. Because the College Board shifted to digital-only exams for 28 of its 36 AP courses beginning this year, no paper-based backup options were available. The only “solution” was to wait quietly in a freezing gymnasium, surrounded by a hundred other stressed-out students, to see if College Board could get its digital act together.
I speak, as you may have gathered, from family experience; one of my kids got to experience the incident first-hand. I was first clued into the problem by an e-mail from my school, which announced “a nationwide Bluebook outage (the testing application used for all digital AP exams)” for all AP Psych testers. Within an hour, many students were finally able to log in and begin the test, but other students had scheduling conflicts and were therefore “dismissed from the testing room” and given slots during the “late test day” or “during the exception testing window.”
On Reddit, the r/APStudents board melted down in predictable fashion. One post asked the question on everyone’s mind:
HOW DO U NOT PREPARE THE SERVERS FOR THE EXAM WHEN U KNOW WE’RE TAKING THE EXAM HELLO?????? BE SO FR
i was locked in and studied like hell for this ap psych exam ts pmo like what the actual f—nugget???
Now, I’m old enough not to know what “BE SO FR,” “TS,” or “PMO” mean, but the term “f—nugget” comes through loud and clear, and I plan to add it to my vocabulary.
As Google moves the last remaining Nest devices into the Home app, it’s also looking at ways to make this smart home hub easier to use. Naturally, Google is doing that by ramping up Gemini integration. The company has announced new automation capabilities with generative AI, as well as better support for third-party devices via the Home API. Google AI will also plug into a new Android widget that can keep you updated on what the smart parts of your home are up to.
The Google Home app is where you interact with all of Google’s smart home gadgets, like cameras, thermostats, and smoke detectors—some of which have been discontinued, but that’s another story. It also accommodates smart home devices from other companies, which can make managing a mixed setup feasible if not exactly intuitive. A dash of AI might actually help here.
Google began testing Gemini integrations in Home last year, and now it’s opening that up to third-party devices via the Home API. Google has worked with a few partners on API integrations before general availability. The previously announced First Alert smoke/carbon monoxide detector and Yale smart lock that are replacing Google’s Nest devices are among the first, along with Cync lighting, Motorola Tags, and iRobot vacuums.
If that kind of nostalgia were all there was to Desktop Survivors 98, it would probably not be worth much more than a 15-minute demo. But the underlying game actually takes the developing Survivors-like genre in some interesting directions.
As usual for the genre, the gameplay here centers around navigating through throngs of encroaching enemies (and their projectiles), all while herding those enemies together so your auto-firing weapons can take them out. Defeated enemies drop gems that are crucial to gaining new weapons and powers that also lean heavily on nostalgic computing gags—I particularly liked one weapon based on the “flower box” screensaver and another based on the “bouncing cards” at the end of a successful Solitaire game.
Theming aside, the main element that sets Desktop Survivors apart from its predecessors in the genre is the mouse-based controls. Your old-school mouse pointer is your character here, meaning you get to precisely dodge and dart around the screen with all the speed and accuracy you’d expect from such a flexible input device.
Once you move through these dungeons with a mouse, you won’t want to go back to a joystick.
Once you move through these dungeons with a mouse, you won’t want to go back to a joystick.
While there is a serviceable Steam Deck mode designed for analog stick-based movements, it’s a hard control paradigm to return to after experiencing the freedom and speed of mouse movements. Decades of mouse use have likely been preparing you for just this moment, training you to weave your pointer through the tight, quickly closing spaces between enemies without really having to think about it.
More of the same?
Desktop Survivors also sets itself apart by taking place on a series of single-screen battlefields rather than smoothly scrolling maps. These rooms don’t feature any significant obstacles or walls to block your movements, either, making each enemy room play kind of similarly to the ones you’ve seen before it. This also makes it a little easier to avoid many enemies simply by scrubbing your mouse pointer in a wide circle, causing the enemy horde to bunch up in comical blobs.
Under those circumstances, the rest of the difference will be made up for with fossil fuels. Running counter to recent trends, the use of natural gas dropped during the first three months of 2025. This means that the use of coal rose nearly as quickly as demand, up by 23 percent compared to the same time period in 2024.
Despite the rise in coal use, the fraction of carbon-free electricity held steady year-over-year, with wind/solar/hydro/nuclear accounting for 43 percent of all power put on the US grid. That occurred despite small drops in nuclear and hydro production.
Solar power also passed a key milestone in 2025, although it requires digging through the statistics to realize it. In terms of power on the grid, there was less solar than hydro. But the Energy Information Agency also estimates the production from small-scale solar, like the kind you’d find on people’s roofs. Some of this never enters the grid and instead simply offsets demand locally (in that it gets used by the house that sits beneath the panels). If you combine the TW-hr produced by small- and grid-scale solar, however, they surpass the production from hydropower by a significant margin.
This surge in solar comes on top of a 30 percent increase in production the year prior. The growth curve is clearly not slowing down.
That dynamic is also not likely to change immediately in response to cuts to tax breaks for renewable power that were part of the budget package passed by the House of Representatives on Thursday, and not only because it’s possible that some Republican Senators might object to budget changes that will harm their states. Solar power in most areas is now cheaper than alternatives, even without subsidies, and any power plant (renewable or otherwise) will likely see its costs rise due to the tariff environment. Finally, the tax breaks don’t expire immediately, and most power plant construction requires significant advanced planning.
All of those factors should continue the solar boom for at least a couple more years before all of the expected changes apply the brakes.
