This week we talk about flesh-eating screwworms, weeds, and the US cattle industry.

We also discuss genetic modification, procreation, and tsetse flies.

Recommended Book: 1177 BC by Eric H Cline

Transcript

The term ‘autocidal control‘ refers to a collection of techniques that are meant to control populations of some type of living thing, animal or plant, by disrupting their procreationary capacity.

So rather than attempting to control pest by spraying poisons all over the place, or controlling plants you consider to be invasive weeds by launching huge weed-pulling efforts in the afflicted areas, you might instead figure out how to keep this current generation of pests and weeds from having as many offspring as they might otherwise have, and then repeat the process with the next generation, and the next, and so on, until the unwanted species is either eradicated in the relevant region, or reduced to such a small number that its presence is no longer such a big deal.

There are all kinds of approaches one might take in trying to achieve this sort of outcome.

Experimental genetic modification measures, for instance, have been tried in, so far at least, limited ways, the idea being to either make the disliked species less competitive in some way (by making them slower, and thus more likely to be eaten by predators, maybe), or by making them less likely to have offspring, or less likely to have fit offspring—the next generation becomes super slow and clumsy, or they’re carriers of a gene that keeps them from procreating as much, or at all.

That approach seems like it could be effective, and there are quite a few efforts, globally, that’re working to refine and perfect it with mosquito species in particular, specifically the ones that are carriers of malaria-causing parasites and similar maladies that cause immense harm to local human (and other mammal) populations.

There have also been attempts to spray mating grounds with pheromones that disrupt mating behavior, or to use what’s called the Autodissemination Augmented by Males, or ADAM approach, which has been used to decent effect in some trials, and which involves basically just sprinkling a bunch of male mosquitos with pesticide, releasing them into mosquito mating grounds, and then having them deliver those pesticides to the females they mate with.

All of these efforts are meant to reduce populations via some procreationary mechanism, while also attempting to ameliorate some of the other issues associated with other, widely used pest- and weed-control approaches. Most of which rely on some kind of chemical being introduced into the right environment, that chemical helping to kill or disrupt these populations, but in many cases also leading to unwanted, and often initially unforeseen side effects, like those chemicals messing with other species, getting into the groundwater and possibly being associated with maladies in humans, and so on.

What I’d like to talk about today is another approach, the sterile insect technique, why it’s become so popular in recent decades, and how it’s being used, today, to address a burgeoning population of a pest that was previously eliminated in North America using this technique, but which has recently become a problem, once more.

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The New World screwworm fly is thus named because its larvae, its baby offspring, are planted in warm-blooded animals. These offspring eat not just dead tissues, like the maggots of other flies, but healthy tissues as well.

These maggots are often deposited near wounds, like cuts or scrapes, but also injuries caused by the castration or dehorning of cattle, or orifices and other sensitive areas with soft tissue, like the corner of a host’s eye.

They don’t typically infest humans, but it does happen, and they’re most likely to be found on wild and domesticated mammals, the females of the species depositing somewhere between 250 and 500 eggs in the flesh of their hosts, the maggots screwing their way deeper into their host’s flesh as they grow, burrowing and eating for the next three to seven days, at which point they fall off and enter the next stage of their lifecycle. By that point the host may already be dead, depending on the extent of the damage these things manage to cause in the interim.

These flies were originally found across the Americas and on some Caribbean islands, and they have long been a headache for cattle ranchers in particular, as they will sometimes infect one cow or goat, and then work their way through the entire herd in relatively short order, causing enough damage to seriously injure or kill a whole lot of the rancher’s stock.

As a result, humans have been trying to get rid of these things for ages, but nothing seemed to make much of a dent in their populations until the emergence of what’s called the sterile insect technique, which is exactly what it sounds like: a method of autocidal control that involves sterilizing members of the species, usually the males, and then releasing them back into the population.

Variations on this concept were developed by a few different researchers in a few different places around the world in the lead-up to WWII, but just after that conflict, scientists working at the US Department of Agriculture realized that they could use x-rays to reliably sterilize male screwworm flies, and that if they did this to a large number of them, then released those males into the local population of screwworm flies, to the point where there are more sterilized males than non-sterilized ones, that would serve to dramatically reduce the size of the next generation. If you then repeat this over and over again, you can eventually wipe out the species in a given region, as they successfully showed in the early 1950s by eradicating all the screwworms on Sanibel Island in Florida.

The same technique was then used to kill all the screwworms on the island of Curacao, off the coast of Venezuela—that kill-off achieved in just seven weeks. Over the next few decades, sterilized male flies were then released across other afflicted US states, and both Mexico and Belize were able to kill all their screwworms in the 1980s, followed by Central America in the 1990s.

This approach was also applied to other pests, almost always those that either spread disease to humans, or threatened local industries, like cattle or agricultural industries.

For instance, tsetse flies, carriers of a parasite that causes sleeping sickness, were entirely or almost entirely eradicated from Tanzania, Zanzibar, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, and Uganda between the 1940s and late-1990s, Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, the carriers of dengue and yellow fever, were sterilized by a bacteria called Wolbachia in Queensland, Australia, in the late-20-teens, which reduced the populations of this disease-carrier in trial areas by 80%, and Japan eradicated the melon fly, an agricultural pest, in 1993.

This approach to pest-control has become so popular that dozens of facilities have been set up in countries around the world, exclusively to breed and sterilize different species, which can then be shipped to where they will be released. The first of these facilities was built in Mexico in the 1960s, where Mexican fruit flies were bred and then shipped for release in Texas.

It’s maybe fitting then that a new round of construction is happening, today, intending to combat the renewed presence of screwworms in Mexico, which have been making their way up into Texas via these two nations’ cattle industries.

The US Department of Agriculture recently announced that it will be building a sterile screwworm fly facility in Texas, which has suffered due to the US’s recent decisions to halt the import of cattle from across the border in Mexico due to issues with screwworms hitching a ride on that cattle stock, and thus infiltrating US herds. The government tried several times to drop this cessation of imports, as the US cattle industry is pretty reliant on those imports, but each time they tried, new screwworm infestations were found, and the import halt was put back into place.

US cattle populations are already at their lowest level in decades, and that’s impacting meat and dairy prices, while also putting other warm-blooded animals in the afflicted regions, especially Texas, at risk.

The folks behind the new facility have said they hope to be up and running in relatively short order, aiming to be releasing sterile male New World screwworms into the wild within a year. This deployment will operate in tandem with other, more direct efforts, like fly traps and parasite-sniffing dogs stationed at ports of entry.

The concerns here are not just theoretical: screwworms alone cause an estimated $1.5 billion in damage each year, and the cost of implementing a sterilization program of this kind usually adds up to something like a billion dollars, spread across decades; not a bad return on investment.

These programs are not universally effective, though, as in some rare cases non-irradiated males have accidentally been shipped to their intended mating location, temporarily inflating rather than deflating population numbers. And while these programs are relatively cheap to operate on scale, the cost of producing enough sterilized males to make such an effort effective can be prohibitive when aimed at smaller regions, or when attempted by governments or agencies without the budget to see what can sometimes be a long-term project through.

That said, this approach does seem to work very well when done correctly, and while its ecosystem impact is not zero, as, for instance, predators who eat these pests might suddenly find themselves without one of their staple food sources, which can lead to knock-on effects across the food web, it does seem to be one of the least foodweb ripple-producing approaches, as genetic modifications can theoretically lead to far more elaborate unforeseen consequences, and the widespread spraying of chemicals has semi-regularly led to die-offs and maladies in other local species, in addition to sometimes causing long-term, even fatal health problems for humans who rely on local food or water sources.

Show Notes

https://archive.is/20250815192422/https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/usda-build-texas-facility-fight-flesh-eating-screwworms-2025-08-15/

https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2025/08/how-to-stop-flesh-eating-parasite-from-devastating-us-cattle-government-will-breed-billions-of-flies.html

https://apnews.com/article/fly-factories-flesheating-parasite-cattle-texas-429ce91225bbab4a45c9040f1be356a5

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochliomyia_hominivorax

https://archive.is/14Rdk

https://archive.is/afmt2

https://archive.is/QfTvG

https://archive.is/dxbcZ

https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2025/08/how-to-stop-flesh-eating-parasite-from-devastating-us-cattle-government-will-breed-billions-of-flies.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterile_insect_technique

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sterile_insect_technique_trials

https://web.archive.org/web/20210416164524/http://www-iswam.iaea.org/drd/refs_files/195_The-Area-wide-SIT-Screwworm.pdf

https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/sterile-insect-technique-used-to-suppress-mosquito-disease-vectors-in-florida

https://www.cdc.gov/mosquitoes/mosquito-control/genetically-modified-mosquitoes.html

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-30722-9

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4313646/

This week we talk about tech bubbles, building moats, and infrastructure investment.

We also discuss capital expenditure, data centers, and employee compensation.

Recommended Book: The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker

Transcript

Many technology booms have early periods in which innovators have a first-mover advantage, and a lot of what happens in their industry is informed by the decisions those innovators make.

After that—depending on the technology, but this is common enough to be considered a trend—after that there tends to be a period of build-out and consolidation amongst the people and business entities that survived that initial, innovation-focused throw-down.

In the context of personal computers, this moment saw computer-makers like Microsoft and Apple scramble to pivot from figuring out what an operating system should look like and whether or not to use mice to navigate user interfaces, to a period in which they were rushing to scale-up the manufacture of now-essential, but previously comparably rare components: suitable screens for their monitors, chips that could power their increasingly graphical machines, and the magnetic materials necessary to produce floppy disks and spindle-based hard drives.

There’s an initial period in which new ideas and approaches provide these entities with a moat that protects them against competition, in other words, but then the game they’re playing changes, the rules are more fully understood and to some degree locked into place and agreed upon, and instead of competing for the biggest, most brazen new ideas, they lock onto one set of ideas that seemed to be the best of what’s available at that moment and build on those, iterating them at a regular cadence, but focusing especially on scaling them.

So at this second stage, they’re investing in the ability to out-produce their competition in some way, so they can eventually bypass that competition and (they hope) safely increase their prices and make a profit, as opposed to just larger and larger revenues with equal or greater expenses, continuing to be reliant on investor injections of capital, rather than generating their own surplus returns.

By many analysts’ and insiders’ estimates, we’ve just entered that second stage in the generative AI industry. That’s the sort of AI that generates text and images and code and such, and it’s increasingly becoming a sort of commodity, rather than a new, hot things that few companies can offer the market.

What I’d like to talk about today are the increasingly massive financial figures associated with this industry’s shift to that second stage of development, and why some of those insiders and analysts are voicing fresh concerns that this could all lead to a bubble, and possibly an historically large one.

—

There are many ways we could measure the growth of the AI industry over the years.

The US market size, for instance, which is a measure of the value of AI-oriented companies based on how much shares of their company cost or would cost on the open market, has ballooned from just over $100 billion in 2022 to an estimated $174 billion in 2025. That figure is expected to grow at a not quite 20% compound annual growth rate through 2034, which, if accurate, would put this market, in the US alone, at more than $850 billion.

Another metric we might use is that of capital expenditure, or capex, in this corner of the tech industry, which refers to the amount of money AI companies are using to buy, upgrade, or maintain their long-term assets, like new computer chips or the data centers they fill with those chips.

The seven most valuable US tech companies—Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, NVIDIA, and Broadcom (that last spot formerly held by Tesla, which was dropped from this designation in late-2024)—just those seven companies have spent $102.5 billion on capex this last financial quarter (and most of that was from just four of them, Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon, the remainder only spending something like $6.7 billion).

That’s a staggering amount of money, and due to a recent drop in consumer demand—the money individual US citizens spend on things like food and clothes and smartphones and cars and all the other things people buy—AI-related capex, spending by these massive US tech companies, has added more to GDP growth than consumer spending for the past two quarters.

All the things all the people in the US bought over the past two quarters did not cost as much, in aggregate, as what these companies spent during the same period, on new and existing assets. That’s pretty wild.

And it’s the consequence, partly, of the shift in these companies’ focus from providing goods and services that relied heavily on people—salary and stock compensation, basically, which is not a capex expense, because its spent on employees, not stuff—to spending heavily on all that infrastructure that they believe will be required to help them compete with those other companies that are also frantically investing in the same.

Whomever can built the biggest, baddest, most reliable and powerful data centers, and can get the AI-optimized chips to fill them, will have an advantage over their opponents in the new, developing tech world paradigm, it’s thought, so they’re pumping gobs of resources into exactly those sorts of assets, hoping to get ahead, build an insurmountable advantage, and put their competition out of business—or failing that, to establish themselves as the AI Coca-Cola, versus their opposition’s AI Mr. Pip.

Similar dynamics are playing out elsewhere, especially in China, where the market could reach a value approximating today’s US AI market in 3-5 years, and several times that, up to $1.4 trillion, by 2030—though like all of these figures, it depends on how we choose to measure these sorts of things, including what counts as an AI company, and in China, several of their major AI players are heavily involved in automation, robotics, which itself is expected to be a $5 trillion industry in that country by 2050.

Europe’s market is comparably smaller, as is its overall tech industry, but the AI market is now just shy of 15% of its total tech sector, up from 12% in 2022, and AI startups are attracting about a quarter of all VC funding in the bloc right now—so they’re starting from a less spendy start, but like pretty much everywhere the necessary knowledge and manufacturing base exists at the moment, the European AI market is growing a lot faster than anyone would have expected even just five years ago.

And there are real-deal innovations coming out of this tech; these investments are flooding into AI companies because these technologies, this version of them, the generative AI stuff, has completely rewired the programming world, AI bots and agents helping coders achieve a lot more, faster, and non-coders make things they wouldn’t have been able to build lacking these tools, imperfect as many of those tools are, under the hood.

We’re also seeing an explosion of other sorts of generated content, and the injection of these tools that make such content into Hollywood studios and consulting firms and government agencies, and everything in between, is causing equal parts panic and excitement, depending on whether you’re one of the people who feels like they might be laid off soon, replaced by software, or if you’re someone who profits from all those layoffs, and the payments from the companies that hope to save money by conducting them, replacing their comparably expensive employees with cheaper AI tools.

Things have gotten so wild that Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has started offering compensation packages ranging from $200 million to more than a billion dollars to top AI talent. Meta’s AI spending is already massive, and could hit $72 billion this year, but the company has said it could hit $100 billion in 2026, while Microsoft’s leadership suggested their 2025 spending of $30 billion could balloon to $120 billion in 2026.

OpenAI recently offered their employees large bonuses, in the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars range, to counter those sorts of overtures from the likes of Meta, but there’s a lot of money flying around from all direction right now, much of it aimed at more AI infrastructure, or the relatively few people on the planet who understand this tech well enough to make a competitive difference in this industry.

That’s…a lot of money. There’s just so much spending happening, so many resources sloshing around in this one space right now, and all this investment is predicated on the idea that AI will change everything, we’re stepping into a new paradigm, and those who control the AI, will basically own the next game. So they’re all trying to set things up so they win the next game, or at least have the best hand possible when it arrives.

There have been increasingly loud arguments, made by long-time generative AI critics, but also, more recently, ardent AI boosters, that we might be running up against a wall of what these things can do for us; this version of the AI concept, at least.

And these arguments got louder with OpenAI’s release of their long-teased GPT-5 model, which some expected to be true AGI, human-grade, flexible, omni-capable intelligence, while others thought it might be a mono-focused superintelligence of some kind: the perfect coder, the perfect image generator, something like that.

What users got was not that. It seems to be better at some things, still not great at others.

This was an incredibly expensive model to produce—the training costs alone are estimated to be something like a half-billion dollars, and that’s just a portion of the total costs of creating this sort of model—and what OpenAI served up, instead of something groundbreaking, was a slightly better, though in some ways seemingly the same or worse version of what everyone’s been playing with for years, now.

There’s room for disagreement on this, as while there are some more objective tests for measuring models’ capabilities, a lot of it is circumstantial, and depends, among other things, on what you’re trying to do, how the systems are prompted, and so on.

There’s also something to be said for cost-reductions and other sorts of benefits of new models, beyond raw power and capability.

But this thud of a launch for what was supposed to be a sea-changing system has led to the ringing of some alarm bells, industry watchers wondering if we might be careening toward a bubble, at a moment in which, again, this segment of the tech industry is contributing more to the US’s GDP than all of consumer spending, combined.

A bubble, to be clear, wouldn’t mean the collapse of the US economy, or even these companies, necessarily. It would mean a lot of AI entities going under, a lot of invested money lost, and a lot of people who suddenly don’t have jobs.

Almost always there are a few players in these bubbly spaces that make it to the other side, though—eBay, for instance, survived the dotcom bubble intact, as did Amazon, PayPal, and Adobe, among many others.

But the grand shakeout, the sifting for those that could survive a mammoth downturn, and the destruction of the rest, that’s a tough moment for those directly connected to the bubble-popping industry, and those adjacent to it: the folks who feed the employees who are now laid off, the suppliers of the light switches that go in all the data centers, etc.

There are ripple effects to this sort of bubble pop moment, then, and though such sifting might be long-term beneficial, because it maybe weeds out some of the dead-weight and makes things more efficient in that space five or ten years in the future, that won’t help the folks who lose a lot of money when the industry shrinks, including those who have their money at banks that made bad bets, or insurance companies that did the same, with their customers resources.

Everything’s great for everyone when these sorts of high-risk, high-reward bets are paying out, but when the golden goose of huge anticipated future profits disappears, that shakeout leaves a lot of entities and people with emptier pockets.

None of which suggests this is going to happen; there’s a chance that we continue to see better and better models using the current, generative AI technology, or that some of these companies successfully pivot to another AI approach that bears better, next-step fruit, and things just keep getting more and more powerful and less and less expensive for everyone; that could theoretically lead to some pretty cool, broadly beneficial things.

This sort of risk is lurking in the background of everything that’s happening, though, and while upbeat marketing messages and predictions about how cool it will all be when the next-step tools arrive can keep things going for a while, even lacking major milestones that can be pointed at to justify those claims, at some point we’ll probably need to see something really, truly different and novel, or the bottom could fall out, leaving those who were more careful tip-toeing into this collection of technologies looking less like they’re being left behind, and more like they took smart precautions and made safe, reliable investments.

Show Notes

https://www.precedenceresearch.com/us-artificial-intelligence-market

https://www.statista.com/outlook/tmo/artificial-intelligence/united-states

https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/23/ai-startups-attracted-25-of-europes-vc-funding/

https://archive.is/20250809000924/https://www.theverge.com/command-line-newsletter/756561/openai-employees-bonus-sam-altman-ai-talent-wars

https://paulkedrosky.com/honey-ai-capex-ate-the-economy/

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/silicon-valley-ai-infrastructure-capex-cffe0431

https://archive.is/20250809000924/https://www.theverge.com/command-line-newsletter/756561/openai-employees-bonus-sam-altman-ai-talent-wars

https://archive.is/20250808224658/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-07/tesla-disbands-dojo-supercomputer-team-in-blow-to-ai-effort

https://fortune.com/2025/08/04/billionaire-anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-ai-staffers-poaching-meta-mark-zuckerberg-100k-six-figure-salaries-openai-sam-altman/

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1e02vx55wpo

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/31/business/dealbook/meta-microsoft-ai-spending-shares.html

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/news-meta-billion-dollars-ai-poaching-failed/

This week we talk about surge pricing, Walmart, and the Robinson-Patman Act.

We also discuss personal data, AC settings, and Delta’s earnings call.

Recommended Book: How the World Became Rich by Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin

Transcript

The US Robinson-Patman Act of 1936 is also called the Anti-Price Discrimination Act, and it was passed to make it illegal for a product supplier to charge different prices to different customers.

So a company that makes candy bars wouldn’t be allowed to charge one price to most of their customers, all the smaller and mid-sized convenience stores and mom-and-pop grocery stores, for instance, and then a lower price to the big stores, the Walmarts and Amazons of the world.

The concern was that these larger players, which at the time this law was passed were burgeoning grocery stores like A&P, would be able to achieve a monopolistic position in the market for these goods, these slightly lower prices giving them one more advantage over their smaller competitors.

During the four decades or so of this Act’s enforcement, small grocery stores has prices that were, on average, about 1% higher than those offered by their large competitors, and the eight largest grocery store chains only captured about 25% of all grocery sales in the US—essentially every city and town of any size had at least one small grocery store, and most had several of them, during this period. It was a very competitive market.

During the Reagan administration in the 80s, though, enforcement was abandoned, as the folks in charge of that enforcement were convinced this Act was holding back growth; they saw it as a handout to small businesses at the expense of big business, so while it technically remained on the books, they just stopped enforcing it, and the big businesses in these spaces got the message pretty quickly.

Walmart was the first big business to really lean into the new powers afforded them by this fresh governmental stance, and that led to it becoming the country’s largest grocery store chain by 2001, and other big grocery brands, like Kroger and Safeway, began to do the same, consolidating all their buying so they could put in huge orders like Walmart was able to put in, and that allowed them to demand lower prices, which in turn allowed them to dramatically increase profits and gobble up their smaller competition.

All of which led to the emergence of food deserts across the country, a term that was coined in 1995 to refer to areas where there are simply no grocery stores within a reasonable distance of relatively large populations of people, because smaller grocery stores can no longer compete, even when they’re the only player in town; folks have to travel to the larger chain stores, and have no real options closer to home, which can result in food precariousness, and situations in which the only nearby food options are unhealthy ones—the snacks at gas stations, for instance.

This same general pattern played out across all retail spaces, including pharmacies and bookstores and athletic supply stores, and between 1982 and 2017, the total market share of independent retailers in the US dropped from 53% to 22%.

Which in some ways is great at the federal level, as—and this is what the Reagan administration seemed to want, back in the 80s—big businesses can grow a lot faster and bigger than small businesses, and that can lead to outsized GDP numbers, and other such macro-scale figures.

Unfortunately, while independent retailers tend to keep nearly half of the revenue they pull in within their local community, major chains only keep something like 14% in the local community—so the shift from independent to chain retailers has had a deleterious impact on communities across the US, in the sense of having less competition, having food and other sorts of product deserts, and in terms of tax revenues and overall economic wealth being sapped from these areas and moved to other places, creating some relatively few winners and a whole lot of losers, in the process.

What I’d like to talk about today is another type of variable pricing, this one more directly aimed at consumers, and enabled, at least in its modern incarnation, by big data and the devices we use every day.

—

Dynamic pricing refers to changing the price of goods or services based on all sorts of variables.

Demand or surge pricing, for instance, might see the price of a bus ticket or rideshare ride with Uber cost more during rush-hour, the idea being that there are only so many bus seats and only so many available rideshare rides to go around, and when everyone’s either trying to get to work or get home from work, there will be a lot more people wanting these finite number of seats and rides than there are seats and rides available.

Upping the prices, then, is a means of determining who wants these things the most, because they’re willing to pay at times massively inflated prices for something that would cost far less in an hour or two, once the rush has subsided.

Similar price-inflation occurs during peak energy-use periods, and energy companies usually explain this price-bump by suggesting that it encourages their customers to use more energy when it’s abundant and cheap, and to use less of it when it’s scarce and expensive.

On very hot days when everyone is using their air conditioners to stay cool, then, inflated energy prices might encourage them to be less aggressive with their AC settings, keeping their indoor temperatures at a more reasonable level, which in turn ensures there’s more energy available for everyone and less risk of brownouts or blackouts.

This pricing strategy is often seen by those on the receiving end of such price-bumps, as price gouging, which refers to companies taking advantage of temporary variables to massively inflate their prices, at times to abusive levels that they can justify by pointing at those variables and a desire to moderate supply and demand.

So if there’s a big convention in town, local hotels can argue that they’re doubling or tripling their prices because there are not enough rooms for everyone who wants rooms on those days, but this could also be construed as a money-grab, these hotel companies knowing that some people won’t be able to avoid paying for a place to stay during the convention they have to attend, so they’re taking advantage of customers who have no choice but to pay up.

We saw similar dynamics play out globally during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when folks who had high-quality masks on hand were able to charge incredible sums for those masks because production hadn’t yet scaled up, so they were relatively scarce and thus precious, and these people and companies with the right product at the right time knew they could get away with charging many times the actual sticker-price of that product, because some people would feel they had no choice but to pay it.

Each situation of this kind will feel reasonable and suitable for the supply-demand situation to some, and completely unreasonable and abusive to others, and it’s possible to have a bit of both in many such situations—the companies in question actually want to manage a scarce supply of something, but are also keen to make as much money as possible while doing it.

Dynamic pricing has become even more common in online marketplaces like Amazon, where it’s not just holidays or events or the sudden emergence of global pandemics that can impact demand and thus, the prices retailers can get away with charging would-be customers.

Amazon has algorithms that keep track of what competitors are charging for the goods they offer, what sort of demand the market is seeing for said goods, what inventory looks like—if they have a lot or very few of something available to sell—and all sorts of other factors that might reasonably impact the price of a product, even a little bit.

As of 2024, the price of a product listed on Amazon changes several times a day, in some cases every 10 minutes, and they make about 2.5 million prices changes every single day, adjusting for those aforementioned micro-scale variables, on a product-by-product basis, but also adjusting their entire catalog so that relatively uncommon goods have higher prices, but common goods have lower prices, which means customers shopping around will tend to see Amazon’s lower-priced goods more often than the higher-priced ones, which in turn can adjust their perception of the company and its marketplace in a favorable, lower-price direction.

Amazon also has access to just a silly amount of data about their customers, some of it scooped up while we surf their sites, and some bought from other data-aggregators. And this allows Amazon, just like most tech companies and retailers, these days to track our behavior, watching what we click on, how long we linger on different products or product types, noticing our searches and contextualizing all of it with where we live, what we’ve purchased in the past, and so on.

The company isn’t very transparent about how it uses all this personal data, but while it’s been been speculated that they might adjust prices based on our individual profiles, most evidence suggests they mostly use it to determine what we’re shown—what products are promoted to us, basically, as opposed to setting prices based on what it thinks we’ll pay, as individuals.

The same generally seems to be true of other retailers right now, though there are concerns that this might change at some point in the near-future, as new technologies, some based on AI, enable the more-rapid and sophisticated crunching of data, and the consequent individualization of prices, even in person.

US airline Delta, for instance, recently announced that it would be using AI to help it boost profits by charging different customers different prices for the same airline seat.

These prices would be based on their customer profile, which means all the data scooped up by Delta from various sources, including things like past purchases, regular flight schedules, and how much money their systems think each customer makes and has available to spend.

The president of the company said on a recent earnings call that they’ve been running a pilot project for this approach that resulted in about 3% of ticket sales being sold based on this model over the past 6 months, and by the end of the year, their goal is to increase that to 20% of tickets.

In theory, this sort of system could be good for some customers some of the time, because it could drop prices on tickets that customers wouldn’t want to, or wouldn’t be able to pay for, otherwise. If I’m considering a trip, but the tickets are more expensive than I want to pay, these systems could theoretically recognize this and offer them to me at a price they can afford to sell them at, and which I can afford. That could lead to more ticket sales, and thus, higher profits.

The evidence on the ground with these sorts of systems usually points at price increases, not decreases, though: the companies using these models to see how much they can get per unit, not using them to sell more units at lower profit margins.

In other words, usually it’s wealthier consumers who get the better deals, as these companies want to keep them coming back, spending larger sums of money on glitzier products and services over time, while poorer consumers have fewer options, and will thus tend to pay whatever they’re told they have to pay.

Delta spent most of July 2025 trying to control the backlash that erupted following that earnings call, and they’re now saying, to the press but also in formal letters to government watchdogs who expressed concerns about what they said they planned to do, that no no no, we misspoke, we’re not using individualized data to set prices, it’s all good, don’t worry about it.

That announcement from Delta came shortly after lawmakers announced they would be pushing to get a new act, the Stop AI Price Gouging and Wage Fixing Act, passed into law, and though some US Senators have said they’ll block such efforts by Delta, other airlines, including Azul, WestJet, Virgin Atlantic, and VivaAerobus are also clients of the Israeli company, Fetcherr, that Delta has been working with to run their AI pricing pilot program—and representatives from Fetcherr have claimed that this pricing model is irresistible to those in charge of these companies, so it will probably take over the airline industry relatively quickly, and they plan to expand into other industries soon.

These sorts of pricing models aren’t typically very popular with customers, and efforts by Walmart and other big grocery chains to remove static in-store pricing labels and replace them with digital versions, or in some extreme cases to remove them entirely and rely on apps on customers’ phone to show prices on goods, raised similar alarm bells, as dynamic pricing can allow the store to more rapidly change their prices based on demand, like Uber’s surge pricing model, but maybe applied to flour or cough medicine instead of rideshare seats, and in-app pricing could allow them to show different prices to different people shopping for the same thing at the same time—again, based on income, buying patterns, and so on.

Walmart and everyone else dabbling in this space has, like Delta, claimed they intend no such dynamism in their pricing, even as their CEOs in some cases continue to brag to investors about the possibilities. As a result, there seems to be a decent chance we’ll see the large-scale deployment of these sorts of models in at least some customer-facing industries within the next year or two, some company deciding to more fully test the regulatory establishment’s appetite for challenging this push into a new pricing paradigm that would, theoretically at least, allow big companies to earn still-higher profits and grow even larger.

Show Notes

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HQoQhvfVv8p0XmOdDIiWTnmd2YM_za07/view

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-price-changes-2018-8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_pricing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_pricing

https://www.archeraffiliates.com/post/amazon-dynamic-pricing

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/delta-denies-using-ai-to-come-up-with-inflated-personalized-prices/

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/will-ai-end-cheap-flights-critics-attack-deltas-predatory-ai-pricing/

https://www.the-sun.com/money/14839597/walmart-kroger-electronic-labels-dynamic-pricing-demand-wendys

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/business/kroger-walmart-facial-recognition-prices.html

https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/finance/what-is-dynamic-pricing

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/12/food-deserts-robinson-patman/680765/

https://www.indieretailermonth.com/statistics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson%E2%80%93Patman_Act

This week we talk about lobbying, Steam, and adult-themed games.

We also discuss cultural influence, extreme ideologies, and itch.io.

Recommended Book: Limitarianism by Ingrid Robeyns

Transcript

In mid-July of 2025, Valve, the company behind the gaming platform Steam, announced that it was tightening its adult-only content guidelines, its not-safe-for-work content, basically, following pressure by the payment processing companies it works with.

Its new policy even says that “content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers” is not allowed on Steam’s network, which in practice means these games will be more difficult to find and purchase, because of Steam’s prominence in the non-console gaming space.

About a week later, the founder of Itch.io, another gaming marketplace that’s similar in some ways to Steam, as it allows creators to sell their games to folks who use the platform, but which is a bit smaller and more focused on indie games, said that itch.io would likewise be removing NSFW, adult-themed games from its catalog, due to concerns that the payment processors they work with have communicated to their company.

In no uncertain terms, he said itch.io wouldn’t be able to operate without these payment processors, so they had to “prioritize our relationships with our payment partners and take immediate steps toward compliance.”

The folks whose games were removed from itch.io as part of this purge were given no warning, and many critics of the decision have pointed to similarities between this gaming-world censorship, as they see it at least, and what happened back in 2018, when social platform Tumblr banned pornographic content, the company’s owner citing pressure from credit card companies as the rationale for that decision—a decision that led to a huge exodus of users from the platform and a whole lot of criticism from creators, users, and folks who keep tabs on censorship-related issues.

There’s been a lot of the same in response to these moves by itch.io, Steam, and similar platforms which have recently decoupled themselves from certain types of adult content, and statements from these companies seems to be illustrative of what’s happening here: they’re completely reliant on these payment processing companies to exist, because without them they can’t easily accept money for what they’re selling. Thus, they’d better comply with what these companies tell them to do, or else.

There have been claims from some folks who have watched this sort of purge occur in other corners of the web over the years that credit card companies are anti-porn and anti-anything-NSFW because the chargeback rate is huge in these spaces—something like 10-times the number of chargebacks, which is what happens when customers say they didn’t buy something, and in some cases then get their money back, after the fact, compared to the next-highest facet of the payment processing industry. And that’s both a pain and potentially expensive.

Others have pointed out that these sorts of purges tend to be political in nature: the groups that push payment processors to adopt these stances are typically vehemently anti-porn, either ultra-conservative or radical-feminist in nature—two ideologies that are oppositional in many ways, but they loop back around when it comes to some topics and have similar, burn it all down ideas about adult content; we don’t approve, so let’s get rid of all this stuff that we don’t approve of by whatever means necessary.

In most cases this means lobbying to get influence in various political spheres, including with politicians who control various governments’ relationships with these payment processors. If they can get the ear of those who make the rules to which these payment processors must adhere, they can then threaten the payment processors—who in many countries, though especially the United States, have pretty sweet deals that allow them to more or less collect a tax on every payment made for everything across every sector—saying, well, we can push our friends in the government to take those sweetheart deals away. So unless you want to suffer that consequence, push these customers of yours to take down this stuff we don’t like.

What I’d like to talk about today are some similar and overlapping movements that are beginning to see censorship-related success across these and other aspects of the web, and the seeming purpose behind these pushes to censor and purge and create the apparatuses by which censorship and purges can be more thoroughly performed.

—

One of the big concerns about banning certain types of games is that games are just content, and if you’re able to find a reliable means of banning one type of content, you can then, in theory at least, using that same lever to ban other types of content, like books, articles, films, and so on. Some of the stuff banned on itch.io were essentially just books, in fact.

If you can reliably ban any type of content, you can shape the information ecosystem to reflect one world view, and that’s the sort of thing that tends to distort entire societies, creating an artificial, unreflective view of the world that adheres to the beliefs, values, and perspectives of one group while ignoring or putting down, or even outlawing the beliefs, values, and perspectives of others.

It’s easy to miss that when talking about the banning of adult-themed video games, and many of the games that were banned on Steam and itch.io contained themes like incest and rape—taboo themes that many people have ideological issues with, not just standard-fair pornography, whatever that even means these days.

That said, this same general approach has been used to great effect by interest groups using the same general language, that we need to protect women, or we need to protect the children, won’t someone think of the children, to ban books that feature any kind of queer content, or adult-adjacent themes; nothing pornographic, but themes that don’t line up, often, with a particularly conservative, Christian, no-sex-before-marriage ideology.

So if you’re in that interest group and have those beliefs, these sorts of bans make a certain kind of sense if you want to enforce those beliefs on others and ensure the media ecosystem reflects your beliefs and nothing else, but if you don’t share those beliefs, well, this lever could be used to ban all the stuff you want to see and learn about and consider, and can be very oppressive.

The group behind the recent Steam and itch.io bans, Collective Shout, is run by an Australian political activist named Melinda Tankard Reist who describes herself as an advocate for women and girls and a pro-life feminist. And she’s dedicated herself, among other things, to banning adult films, blocking musical artists from performing in Australia if their work contains lyrics she doesn’t approve of, and to removing pornographic games from platforms like Steam, alongside games that contain LGBTQ characters or have references to domestic violence, including those that present content meant to help people who have suffered domestic violence recover from that experience.

A very specific ideology, then, that she has dedicated her life to enforcing on the larger media ecosystem, and thus, society as a whole.

There’s a parallel and in some cases interrelated movement happening globally right now, especially in the UK and US, but in some other countries, too, to varying degrees, oriented around age-gating online content.

The British government, for instance, recently approved the Online Safety Act of 2023, which they’ve said is intended to protect children from pornographic content on the internet.

This law is enforced by an age-gate, which means requiring that people who want to access such content prove they are old enough to access it, usually by uploading their government issued ID, taking a selfie, which is then assessed to see if they’re obviously old enough, or uploading something like a bank card that a child wouldn’t have.

This law punishes online platforms that don’t implement these sorts of age-gate systems, though apparently they’re incredibly ineffective and easy to bypass, as all you have to do is use a VPN to make it look like you’re in another country, and the age-gates go away; that loophole might eventually disappear, as this is something that is still being rolled out, but that’s the general concept and intention here.

The problem with these sorts of age-gates, as noted by all sorts of activists across the political spectrum, is that what’s appropriate and not appropriate is often being determined by people with views and beliefs that are in some way radical and different from that of the average person where these laws are being passed—usually those with more conservative, and thus constrictive ideas about what should be allowed—and that means, again, the informational ecosystems in these places are being reshaped to match that of these extremist people, who either found themselves in the right political positions, or who have over time purchased influenced with the politicians who are helping to make these laws.

The situation is similar in some parts of the US, where age-gating laws are beginning to see implementation in conservative states like Texas, where First Amendment challenges to a recently passed age-gate law were rebuffed by the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of those passing the law; the US Supreme Court has a large conservative majority right now, and relationships with some of the folks pushing these laws, so this isn’t terribly surprising.

That law, HB1181, which is one of many currently in the works or recently passed in the US, 21 states have a law similar to this, as of mid-2025, and it will require websites with adult content implement age-gating filters to prove users are 18 or older, or, as in the UK, they will be punished.

Also as in the UK, there are relatively simple workarounds to all of these age verification requirements, but there are fears that these sorts of rulings will mostly fail to protect children from anything, and will predominantly be used by radicals with control over aspects of the government to reshape the media and culture in their ideological image.

The folks behind the ultra-conservative Project 2025 plan, the Heritage Foundation, for instance, have said that this is exactly what they intend; by age-gating content they don’t like, they can shape the next generation, and as a nice side benefit, these sorts of filters becoming common makes online identity verification the default, not the exception. And that means it’s easier to track everyone, adult and non-adult, online, attaching their real identity to their behaviors, which can make it easier to pressure or punish folks who do things they don’t like in the otherwise anonymized online world.

This has raised all kinds of alarm bells with First Amendment and freedom of speech activists, but it’s of-a-kind with those aforementioned efforts by folks trying to ban certain types of content in video games and books; if the idea is to reshape everything so that your views are the only ones people see, and anything else is taken down or outlawed, this is one way to accomplish that, even if at first it might simply seem like an attempt to ensure children don’t see nude bodies or sexual acts in their video games.

Similar filters are being tested, both in the practical sense and the legal and political sense, in five EU nations, and a bunch of other countries around the world right now, often by people with the same conservative political slant as in the US and UK, but in some cases by other characters who have similar ambitions with a slightly different ideological tinge.

There is some evidence that pornographic content influences children in negative ways, and there’s some evidence that porn, in general, is not super great for relationships, societies, and individuals.

That said, almost all of these cases have been brought by people or groups with larger interests in shutting down all sorts of content; so calls to protect the children, while perhaps sometimes true, also seem to almost always be a legal foot in the door that then allows for more, next-step censorship, of things and ideas they don’t like and want to ensure no else can access, in subsequent years.

Show Notes

https://action.freespeechcoalition.com/age-verification-bills/

https://www.theverge.com/internet-censorship/686042/supreme-court-fsc-paxton-porn-age-verification-ruling

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melinda_Tankard_Reist

https://www.rte.ie/news/2025/0704/1521746-meta-eu/

https://web.archive.org/web/20250719204151/https://www.vice.com/en/article/group-behind-steam-censorship-policies-have-powerful-allies-and-targeted-popular-games-with-outlandish-claims/

https://www.readtangle.com/porn-age-verification-law-upheld-by-supreme-court/

https://archive.is/20250715004830/https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/five-eu-states-test-age-verification-app-protect-children-2025-07-14/

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c977njnvq2do

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/protecting-children/enforcement-programme-to-protect-children-from-encountering-pornographic-content-through-the-use-of-age-assurance

https://archive.is/20250725221633/https://www.theverge.com/analysis/713773/uk-online-safety-act-age-verification-bypass-vpn

https://www.polygon.com/news/615910/itchio-steam-sex-adult-games-delisting-pulled-vice-controversy

https://www.theverge.com/news/712890/itch-removes-adult-nsfw-games-steam-payment-providers

https://itch.io/updates/update-on-nsfw-content

https://www.ign.com/articles/valve-pulls-adult-only-games-from-steam-as-it-tightens-rules-to-appease-payment-partners

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23377446/tumblr-matt-mullenweg-post-nsfw-porn-internet-service-moderation-policies

https://www.gamesradar.com/games/it-might-be-porn-games-now-but-they-wont-stop-there-game-devs-join-players-and-artists-rallying-against-credit-card-companies-after-mass-nsfw-game-delisting/

https://www.seamlesschex.com/blog/chargeback-rates-by-industry

This week we talk about the PKK, Turkey, and the DEM Party.

We also discuss terrorism, discrimination, and stateless nations.

Recommended Book: A Century of Tomorrows by Glenn Adamson

Transcript

Kurdistan is a cultural region, not a country, but part of multiple countries, in the Middle East, spanning roughly the southeastern portion of Turkey, northern Iraq, the northwestern portion of Iran, and northern Syrian. Some definitions also include part of the Southern Caucasus mountains, which contains chunks of Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan.

So this is a sprawling region that straddles multiple nations, and it’s defined by the presence of the Kurdish people, the Kurds, who live all over the world, but whose culture is concentrated in this area, where it originally developed, and where, over the generations, there have periodically been very short-lived Kurdish nations of various shapes, sizes, and compositions.

The original dynasties from which the Kurds claim their origin were Egyptian, and they governed parts of northeastern African and what is today Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. That was back in the 8th to 12th century, during which Saladin, who was the sultan of both Egypt and Syria, played a major historical role leading Muslim military forces against the Christian Crusader states during the Third Crusade, and leading those forces to victory in 1187, which resulted in Muslim ownership of the Levant, even though the Crusaders continued to technically hold the Kingdom of Jerusalem for another hundred years or so, until 1291.

Saladin was Kurdish and kicked off a sultanate that lasted until the mid-13th century, when a diverse group of former slave-soldiers called the mamluks overthrew Saladin’s family’s Ayyubid sultanate and replaced it with their own.

So Kurdish is a language spoken in that Kurdistan region, and the Kurds are considered to be an Iranian ethnic group, because Kurdish is part of a larger collection of languages and ethnicities, though many Kurds consider themselves to be members of a stateless nation, similar in some ways to pre-Israel Jewish people, Tibetan people under China’s rule, or the Yoruba people, who primarily live in Nigeria, Benin, and Togo, but who were previously oriented around a powerful city-state in that region, which served as the central loci of the Ife Empire, before the Europeans showed up and decided to forcibly move people around and draw new borders across the African continent.

The Kurds are likewise often politically and culturally powerful, and that’s led to a lot of pushback from leaders in the nations where they live and at times operate as cultural blocs, and it’s led to some very short-lived Kurdish nations these people have managed to establish in the 20th century, including the Kingdom of Kurdistan from 1921-1924, the Republic of Ararat from 1927-1930, and the Republic of Mahabad, which was formed as a puppet state of the Soviet Union in 1946 in northwestern Iran, following a Soviet push for Kurdish nationalism in the region, which was meant to prevent the Allies from controlling the region following WWII, but which then dissolved just a few months after its official formation due to waning support from the Kurdish tribes that initially helped make it a reality.

What I’d like to talk about today is the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, and why their recently declared ceasefire with Turkey is being seen as a pretty big deal.

—

The Kurdistan Worker’s Party, depending on who you ask, is a political organization or a terrorist organization. It was formed in Turkey in late-1978, and its original, founding goal was to create an independent Kurdish state, a modern Kurdistan, in what is today a small part of Turkey, but in the 1990s it shifted its stated goals to instead just get more rights for Kurds living in Turkey, including more autonomy but also just equal rights, as Kurdish people in many nations, including Turkey, have a long history of being discriminated against, in part because of their cultural distinctiveness, including their language, manner of dress, and cultural practices, and in part because, like many tight-knit ethnic groups, they often operate as a bloc, which in the age of democracy also means they often vote as a bloc, which can feel like a threat to other folks in areas with large Kurdish populations.

When I say Kurdish people in Turkey have long been discriminated against, that includes things like telling them they can no longer speak Kurdish and denying that their ethnic group exists, but it also includes massacres conducted by the government against Kurdish people; at times tens of thousands of Kurds were slaughtered by the Turkish army. There was also an official ban on the words Kurds, Kurdistan, and Kurdish by the Turkish government in the 1980s, and Kurdish villages were destroyed, food headed to these villages was embargoed, and there was a long-time ban on the use of the Kurdish language in public life, and people who used it were arrested.

As is often the case in such circumstances, folks who support the Kurdish Worker’s Party, which is often shorthanded as the PKK, will tell you this group just pushes back against an oppressive regime, and they do what they have to to force the government to backtrack on their anti-Kurdish laws and abuses, which have been pretty widespread and violent.

The PKK, in turn, has been criticized for, well, doing terrorist stuff, including using child soldiers, conducting suicide bombings, massacring groups of civilians, engaging in drug trafficking to fund their cause, and executing people on camera as a means of sowing terror.

Pretty horrible stuff on both sides, if you look at this objectively, then, and both sides have historically justified their actions by pointing at the horrible things the other side has done to them and theirs.

And that’s the context for a recent announcement by the leader of the PKK, that the group would be disarming—and very literally so, including a symbolic burning of their weapons in a city in northern Iraq, which was shared online—and they would be shifting their efforts from that of violent militarism and revolution to that of political dialogue and attempting to change the Turkish government from the inside.

Turkish President Erdogan, for his part, has seemed happy to oblige these efforts and gestures, fulfilling his role by receiving delegates from the Turkish, pro-Kurd party, the DEM Party, and smilingly shaking that delegate’s hand on camera, basically showing the world, and those who have played some kind of role in the militant effort against the Turkish government, that this is the way of things now, we’re not fighting physically anymore, we’re moving on to wearing suits and pushing for Kurdish rights within the existing governmental structures.

The founder of the PKK, Abdullah Ocalan, got in on the action, as well, releasing a seven-minute video from prison, which was then broadcast by the PKK’s official media distribution outlet, saying that the fighting is over. This was his first appearance on camera in 26 years, and he used it to say their effort paid off, the Kurds now have an officially recognized identity, and it’s time to leverage that identity politically to move things in the right direction.

Erdogan’s other messages on the matter, to the Kurdish people, but also those who have long lived in fear of the PKK’s mass-violence, have reinforced that sentiment, saying that the Kurds are officially recognized as a political entity, and that’s how things would play out from this point forward—and this will be good for everyone. And both sides are saying that, over and over, because, well, child soldiers and suicide bombings and massacres conducted by both sides are really, really not good for anyone.

By all indications, this has been a very carefully orchestrated dance by those on both sides of the conflict, which again, has been ongoing since 1978, and really picked up the pace and became continuous and ultra-violent, in the 1980s.

There was an attempted peace process back in the 20-teens, but the effort, which included a temporary truce between 2013 and 2015, failed, following the murder of two Turkish police officers, the PKK initially claiming responsibility, but later denying they had any involvement. That led to an uptick in military actions by both groups against the other, and the truce collapsed.

This new peace process began in 2024 and really took off in late-February of 2025, when that aforementioned message was broadcast by the PKK’s leader from prison after lawmakers from the pro-Kurdish DEM Party worked to connect him and the Turkish government, and eventually helped negotiate the resulting mid-May of 2025 disarmament.

Turkey’s military leaders have said they will continue to launch strikes against PKK-affiliated groups that continue to operate in the region, and the PKK’s disarmament announcement has been embraced by some such groups, while others, like the Syrian Democratic Forces, which is tied to the PKK, but not directly affiliated with them, have said this truce doesn’t apply to them.

Most governments, globally, have heralded this disarmament as a major victory for the world and Turkey in particular, though the response within Turkey, and in Kurdish areas in particular, has apparently been mixed, with some people assuming the Turkish government will backtrack and keep the DEM Party from accomplishing much of anything, and worrying about behind-the-scenes deals, including a reported agreement between Erdogan’s government and the DEM Party to support Erdogan’s desire to transform the Turkish presidential system, which would grant him more direct control and power, and allow him to run for another term in office, while others are seemingly just happy to hear that the violence and fear might end.

Also notable here is that a lot of Turkey’s foreign policy has revolved around hobbling and hurting the PKK for decades, including Turkey’s initial hindering of Sweden’s accession to NATO, which was partly a means of getting other nations to give the Turkish government stuff they wanted, like upgraded military equipment, but was also a push against the Swedish government’s seeming protection of people associated with the PKK, since Sweden’s constitution allows people to hold all sorts of beliefs.

Some analysts have speculated that this could change the geopolitics of the Middle East fundamentally, as Turkey has long been a regional power, but has been partly hobbled by its conflict with the PKK, and the easing or removal of that conflict could free them up to become more dominant, especially since Israel’s recent clobbering of Iran seems to have dulled the Iranian government’s shine as the de facto leader of many Muslim groups and governments in the area.

It’s an opportune time for Erdogan to grab more clout and influence, in other words, and that might have been part of the motivation to go along with the PKK’s shift to politics: it frees him and his military up to engage in some adventurism and/or posturing further afield, which could then set Turkey up as the new center of Muslim influence, contra-the Saudis’ more globalized version of the concept, militarily and economically. Turkey could become a huge center of geopolitical gravity in this part of the world, in other words, and that seems even more likely now that this disarmament has happened.

It’s still early days in this new seeming state of affairs, though, and there’s a chance that the Turkish government’s continued strikes on operating PKK affiliated groups could sever these new ties, but those involved seem to be cleaving to at least some optimism, even as many locals continue hold their breath and hope against hope that this time is different than previous attempts at peace.

Show Notes

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/heres-what-to-know-about-turkeys-decision-to-move-forward-with-swedens-bid-to-join-nato

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_PKK%E2%80%93Turkey_peace_process

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013%E2%80%932015_PKK%E2%80%93Turkey_peace_process

https://carnegieendowment.org/emissary/2025/05/turkey-pkk-disarm-disband-impacts?lang=en

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/pkk-claims-deadly-suicide-bombing-turkish-police-station

https://web.archive.org/web/20161016064155/https://hrwf.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Child-soldiers-in-ISIS-PKK-Boko-Haram%E2%80%A6.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurdistan_Workers%27_Party

https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2025/jul/11/kurdistan-workers-party-pkk-burn-weapons-in-disarming-ceremony-video

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/18/turkiye-pkk-analysis-recalibrates-politics

https://time.com/7303236/erdogan-war-peace-kurds/

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/19/unidentified-drone-kills-pkk-member-injures-another-in-iraq

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/unidentified-drone-kills-pkk-member-injures-another-near-iraqs-sulaymaniyah-2025-07-19/

https://www.aljazeera.com/video/inside-story/2025/7/11/why-has-the-pkk-ended-its-armed-struggle

https://archive.is/20250718061819/https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2025-07-17/ty-article-opinion/.premium/how-the-possible-end-to-turkeys-kurdish-problem-could-become-israels-turkey-problem/00000198-1794-dd64-abb9-bfb5dbf30000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurdistan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurds

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Kurdish_dynasties_and_countries

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Kurdish_nationalism

This week we talk about AI therapy chatbots, delusions of grandeur, and sycophancy.

We also discuss tech-triggered psychosis, AI partners, and confident nonsense.

Recommended Book: Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

Transcript

In the context of artificial intelligence systems, a hallucination or delusion, sometimes more brusquely referred to as AI BS, is an output usually from an AI chatbot, but it can also be from another type of AI system, that’s basically just made up.

Sometimes this kind of output is just garbled nonsense, as the AI systems, those based on large language models, anyway, are essentially just predicting what words will come next in the sentences they’re writing based on statistical patterns. That means they can string words together, and then sentences together, and then paragraphs together in what seems like a logical and reasonable way, and in some cases can even cobble together convincing stories or code or whatever else, because systems with enough raw materials to work from have a good sense of what tends to go where, and thus what’s good grammar and what’s not, what code will work and what code will break your website, and so on.

In other cases, though, AI systems will seem to just make stuff up, but make it up convincingly enough that it can be tricky to detect the made up component of its answers.

Some writers have reported asking AI to provide feedback on their stories, for instance, only to later discover that the AI didn’t have access to the stories, and they were providing feedback based on the title, or based on the writer’s prompt—the text the writer used to ask the AI for feedback. And their answers were perhaps initially convincing enough that the writer didn’t realize the AI hadn’t read the pieces they asked them to criticize, and the AI systems, because most of them are biased to sycophancy, toward brown-nosing the user and not saying anything that might upset them, or saying what it believes they want to hear, they’ll provide general critique that sounds good, that lines up with what their systems tell them should be said in such contexts, but which is completely disconnected from those writings, and thus, not useful to the writer as a critique.

That combination of confabulation and sycophancy can be brutal, especially as these AI systems become more powerful and more convincing. They seldom make the basic grammatical and reality-based errors they made even a few years ago, and thus it’s easy to believe you’re speaking to something that’s thinking or at the bare-minimum, that understands what you’re trying to get it to help you with, or what you’re talking about. It’s easy to forget when interacting with such systems that you’re engaged not with another human or thinking entity, but with software that mimics the output of such an entity, but which doesn’t experience the same cognition experienced by the real-deal thinking creatures it’s attempting to emulate.

What I’d like to talk about today is another sort of AI-related delusion—one experienced by humans interacting with such systems, not the other way around—and the seeming, and theoretical, pros and cons of these sorts of delusional responses.

—

Research that’s looked into the effects of psychotherapy, including specific approaches like cognitive behavioral therapy and group therapy, show that such treatments are almost aways positive, with rare exceptions, grant benefits that tend to last well past the therapy itself—so people who go to therapy tend to benefit from it even after the session, and even after they stop going to therapy, if they eventually stop going for whatever reason, and that the success rate, the variability of positive impacts, vary based on the clinical location, the therapist, and so on, but only by about 5% or less for each of those variables; so even a not perfectly aligned therapist or a less than ideal therapy location will, on average, benefit the patient.

That general positive impact is part of the theory underpinning the use of AI systems for therapy purposes.

Instead of going into a therapist’s office and speaking with a human being for an hour or so at a time, the patient instead speaks or types to an AI chatbot that’s been optimized for this purpose. So it’s been primed to speak like a therapist, to have a bunch of therapy-related resources in its training data, and to provide therapy-related resources to the patient with whom it engages.

There are a lot of downsides to this approach, including the fact that AI bots are flawed in so many ways, are not actual humans, and thus can’t really connect with patients the way a human therapist might be able to connect with them, they have difficulty shifting from a trained script, as again, these systems are pulling from a corpus of training data and additional documents to which they have access, and that means they’ll tend to handle common issues and patient types pretty well, but anything deviating from that is a toss-up, and, as I mentioned in the intro, there’s a chance they’ll just make stuff up or brown-nose the patient, saying things it seems like the patient wants to hear, rather than the things the patient needs to hear for their mental health.

On the upside, though, there’s a chance some people who wouldn’t feel comfortable working with a human therapist will be more comfortable working with a non-human chatbot, many people don’t have physical access to therapists or therapy centers, or don’t have insurance that covers what they need in this regard, and some people have other monetary or physical or mental health issues that makes therapy inaccessible or non-ideal for whatever reason, and these systems could help fill in the gaps for them, giving them something imperfect, but, well, 80% of what you need can be a lot better than 0% of what you need. In theory, at least.

That general logic is a big part of why the therapy AI bot boom has been so substantial, despite the many instances of human patients seemingly being driven to suicide or other sorts of self-harm after interacting with these bots, which in some cases were later found to either nudge their patients in that direction, or support their decisions to do so. And that’s alongside the other issues associated with any app that sends the user’s information to a third location for processing, like the collection of their data for marketing and other purposes.

The therapy chatbot industry is just one corner of a much larger conversation about what’s become known as ChatGPT Psychosis, which is shorthand for the delusions some users of these AI chatbots, those made by ChatGPT and those made by other companies, begin to have while interacting with these bots, or maybe already had, but then have amplified by their interactions with these systems.

The stories have been piling up, reported in the Times, in Rolling Stone, and in scientific journals, and the general narrative is that someone who seems to be doing fine, but who’s maybe a little depressed or unhappy, a little anxious, but nothing significant, at least to those around them, starts interacting with a chatbot, then gets really, really absorbed in that interaction, and then at some point those around this person realize that their friend or child or spouse or whomever is beginning to have delusions of grandeur, believing themselves to be a prophet or god, or maybe they’re starting to see the world as just an intertangled mess of elaborate, unbacked conspiracy theories, or they come to believe the entire world revolves around them in some fundamental way, or everyone is watching and talking about them—that genre of delusion.

Many such people end up feeling as if they’re living inside nihilistic and solipsistic nightmares, where nothing has meaning and they’re perhaps the only entity of any importance on the planet—everyone else is just playing a minor role in their fantastical existence.

Different chatbots have different skins, in the sense that their outputs are tailored in different ways, to have a different valence and average personality. Some chatbots, like ChatGPT’s GPT-4o, have had their sycophancy setting set so high that it rendered them almost completely useless before it was eventually fixed—early users reported feeling unsettled by their interactions with this bot when it was first released, because it was such a shameless yes-man, they couldn’t get any useful information from it, and all the language it used to deliver the information it did provide made them feel like they were being manipulated by a slavish underling.

For some people, though, that type of presentation, that many compliments and that much fawning attention, will feel good, or feel right.

Maybe they’re disempowered throughout their day in countless subtle and overt ways, and having someone—even if that someone isn’t real—speak to them like they’re important and valuable and smart and attractive and perhaps even the most important person in the world, maybe that feels good.

Others maybe feel like they have hidden potential that’s never been appreciated, and if the chatbot they’re referencing for all sorts of answers about things, and which seems to have most of those answers, and is thus a believable source of good, correct information, starts to talk to them as if they’re the messiah, well, maybe they start to believe they are important, are some kind of messiah: after all, it’s right about so many other things, so why not this thing? It’s something which many of us, to greater or lesser degrees, at least, possibly not always to that extreme, would be psychologically primed to believe, at least on some level, because it feels good to feel important, and so many social narratives, in some cultures at least, make this seem like something that does happen and might someday happen to us.

This effect might be even more pronounced in people who have underlying conditions, like depression or anxiety, and even more so those with conditions like schizophrenia that leave a person prone to various sorts of psychosis.

Folks with such conditions, diagnosed or not, are already frequently triggered by things like social media, which, because of the way these platforms scoop up data and target content at users, can make folks who look at TikTok and scan their Instagram feed feel like the center of the universe, like they’re being watched, like folks they don’t know are sending messages to them, or like there’s some kind of pattern they need to figure out and which they’ve caught a glimpse of, and which seems really, really important.

This is part of why many experts are saying that if AI chatbots are going to be used therapeutically, they should absolutely be used in a hybrid situation, where there are humans in the loop who are capable of checking to make sure the information being conveyed is accurate and not enflaming psychosis, and so they can ensure medication is being prescribed and used, if appropriate. There needs to be someone who can talk someone down and tell them when their brain is leading them awry, basically, which is not something chatbots are generally capable of doing right now—they’re more likely to reinforce a user’s incorrect theories and ideas and understandings, which of course can lead to a slew of other issues across all sorts of other industries and fields, as well, including general knowledge about the world and current events.

Speaking of the news, though, there are just as many articles, these days, reporting on folks who seem to have found love with AI chatbots as there are people who have committed violent acts against others, or various sorts of self-harm as a result of interacting with them.

Some of these pieces are written salaciously—look at these silly people doing silly things—but many do a pretty good job of at least attempting balance, as while the majority of folks featured in these articles seem to be missing something in terms of human interaction, which then presumably put them in the right state of mind to have romantic or companionable feelings toward an unthinking software system, the flip side of that coin is that many of them seem to be happier now than before they met these systems and brought them into their lives in this way.

We have, then, on one hand, AI chatbots telling their users to assassinate celebrities and, in at least one case, British Royalty, and on the other, we have sometimes the same chatbots made by the same companies telling people they are worthwhile and loved and appreciated and that’s exactly what some of their users need to hear at that moment.

It’s been argued, often convincingly, that these sorts of AI-human relationships are a crutch, and a massively unstable one. These systems are prone to change as the models behind them and the businesses that make and maintain those models change, and many of the stories about these people who have these relationships end with their AI partner or spouse suddenly losing interest in them, becoming cold, or in some other way no longer providing what they once provided.

This can be a bad moment for these people who again, in many cases seemed to be lacking something from the humans in their lives, and these AI systems kind of filled in the gaps for them. That’s what a crutch does, wobbly or not.

More ideal, according to the folks keeping tabs on these happenings and who are doing research in this space, at least, would be systems that help folks fill these gaps in more holistic and permanent ways, improving their social or physical or psychological situations so that they don’t rely on software entities and the potential delusions, positive or negative, that come with them. AI bots and companions would ideally help human beings connect with themselves and with other human beings, with the world outside the software, basically, rather than setting them up to use that crutch the rest of their lives.

Right now, though, we’re living through an era in which understandings about how these systems work are not widely disseminated, and collective understandings of their impact on our internal and external lives, our interpersonal relationships, and even our broader cultures is not fully understood; that history is being written day to day, right now.

It may be that this is a momentary thing, these systems filling the roles in our lives that other humans or groups of humans may have once filled, at least for some of us, but only until regulations and software updates and other sorts of things step in to ensure this no longer happens, for a variety of reasons.

Alternatively, it may be that this is just the first step toward a reality in which this sort of thing is more common: these tools further refined to be increasingly wonderful companions, becoming something akin to pets for many of us, something more like partners or spouses for some of us, and either way dramatically changing the nature of human society as a consequence.

Show Notes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_intelligence)

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11514308/

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/jul/12/i-felt-pure-unconditional-love-the-people-who-marry-their-ai-chatbots

https://www.wired.com/story/couples-retreat-with-3-ai-chatbots-and-humans-who-love-them-replika-nomi-chatgpt/

https://www.npr.org/2024/07/01/1247296788/the-benefits-and-drawbacks-of-chatbot-relationships

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/apr/15/she-helps-cheer-me-up-the-people-forming-relationships-with-ai-chatbots

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/ai-therapy-bots-fuel-delusions-and-give-dangerous-advice-stanford-study-finds/

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/technology/chatgpt-ai-chatbots-conspiracies.html

https://www.vice.com/en/article/chatgpt-is-giving-people-extreme-spiritual-delusions/

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10686326/

https://futurism.com/commitment-jail-chatgpt-psychosis

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/chatbots-posed-as-therapist-and-adult-lover-in-teen-suicide-case-lawsuit-says/

https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.18412

https://openai.com/index/sycophancy-in-gpt-4o/

This week we talk about crawling, scraping, and DDoS attacks.

We also discuss Cloudflare, the AI gold rush, and automated robots.

Recommended Book: Annie Bot by Sierra Greer

Transcript

Alongside the many, and at times quite significant political happenings, the many, and at times quite significant military conflicts, and the many, at times quite significant technological breakthroughs—medical and otherwise—flooding the news these days, there’s also a whole lot happening in the world of AI, in part because this facet of the tech sector is booming, and in part because while still unproven in many spaces, and still outright flubbing in others, this category of technology is already having a massive impact on pretty much everything, in some cases for the better, in some for the worse, and in some for better and worse, depending on your perspective.

Dis- and misinformation, for instance, is a bajillion times easier to create, distribute, and amplify, and the fake images and videos and audio being shared, alongside all the text that seems to be from legit people, but which may in fact be the product of AI run by malicious actors somewhere, is increasingly convincing and difficult to distinguish from real-deal versions of the same.

There’s also a lot more of it, and the ability to very rapidly create pretty convincing stuff, and to very rapidly flood all available communication channels with that stuff, is fundamental to AI’s impact in many spaces, not just the world of propaganda and misinformation. At times quantity has a quality all of its own, and that very much seems to be the case for AI-generated content as a whole.

Other AI- and AI-adjacent tools are being used by corporations to improve efficiency, in some cases helping automated systems like warehouse robots assist humans in sorting and packaging and otherwise getting stuff ready to be shipped, as is the case with Amazon, which is almost to the point that they’ll have more robots in their various facilities than human beings. Amazon robots are currently assisting with about 75% of all the company’s global deliveries, and a lot of the menial, repetitive tasks human workers would have previously done are now being accomplished by robotics systems they’ve introduced to their shipping chain.

Of course, not everyone is thrilled about this turn of events: while it’s arguably wonderful that robots are being subbed-in for human workers who would previously have had to engage in the sorts of repetitive, physical tasks that can lead to chronic physical issues, in many cases this seems to be a positive side-benefit of a larger effort to phase-out workers whenever possible, saving the company money over time by employing fewer people.

If you can employ 100 people using robots instead of 1000 people sans-robots, depending on the cost of operation for those robots, that might save you money because each person, augmented by the efforts of the robots, will be able to do a lot more work and thus provide more value for the company. Sometimes this means those remaining employees will be paid more, because they’ll be doing more highly skilled labor, working with those bots, but not always.

This is a component of this shift that for a long while CEOs were dancing around, not wanting to spook their existing workforce or lose their employees before their new robot foundation was in place, but it’s increasingly something they’re saying out loud, on investor calls and in the press, because making these sorts of moves are considered to be good for a company’s outlook: they’re being brave and looking toward a future where fewer human employees will be necessary, which implies their stock might be currently undervalued, because the potential savings are substantial, at least in theory.

And it is a lot of theory at this point: there’s good reason to believe that theory is true, at least to some degree, but we’re at the very beginning phases of this seeming transition, and many companies that jumped too quickly and fired too many people found themselves having to hire them back, in some cases at great expense, because their production faltered under the weight of inferior automated, often AI-driven alternatives.

Many of these tools simply aren’t as reliable as human employees yet. And while they will almost certainly continue to become more powerful and capable—a recent estimate suggested that the current wave of large-language-model-based AI systems, for instance, are doubling in power every 7 months or so, which is wild—speculations about what that will mean, and whether that trend can continue, vary substantially, depending on who you talk to.

Something we can say with relative certainty right now, though, is that most of these models, the LLM ones, at least, not the robot-driving ones, were built using content that was gathered and used in a manner that currently exists in a legal gray area: it was scraped and amalgamated by these systems so that they could be trained on a corpus of just a silly volume of human output, much of that output copyrighted or otherwise theoretically not-useable for this purpose.

What I’d like to talk about today is a new approach to dealing with the potentially illegal scraping of copyrighted information by and for these systems, and a proposed new pricing scheme that could allow the creators of the content being scraped in this way to make some money from it.

—

Web scraping refers to the large-scale crawling of websites and collection of data from those websites.

There are a number of methods for achieving this, including just manually visiting a bunch of websites and copying and pasting all the content from those sites into a file on your computer. But the large-scale version of that is something many companies, including entities like Google, do, and for various purposes: Google crawls the web to map it, basically, and then applies all sorts of algorithms and filters in order to build their search results. Other entities crawl the web to gather data, to figure out connections between different sorts of sites, and/or to price ads they sell on their own network of sites or the products they sell, and which they’d like to sell for a slightly lower price than their competition.

Web scraping can be done neutrally, then, your website scraped by Google so it can add your site to its search results, the data it collects telling its algorithms where you should be in those results based on keywords and who links to your site and other such things, but it can also be done maliciously: maybe someone wants to duplicate your website and use it to get unsuspecting victims to install malware on their devices. Or maybe someone wants to steal your output: your writings, your flight pricing data, and so on.

If you don’t want these automated web-scrapers to use your data, or to access some portion or all of your site, you can put a file called robots.txt in your site’s directory, and the honorable scrapers will respect that request: the googles of the world, for instance, have built their scrapers so that they look for a robots.txt file and read its contents before mapping out your website structure and soaking up your content to decide where to put you in their search results.

Not all scrapers respect this request: the robots.txt standard relies on voluntary compliance. There’s nothing forcing any scraper, or the folks running these scrapers, to look for or honor these files and what they contain.

That said, we’ve reached a moment at which many scrapers are not just looking for keywords and linkbacks, but also looking to grab basically everything on a website so that the folks running the scrapers can ingest those images and that writing and anything else that’s legible to their software into the AI systems they’re training.

As a result, many of these systems were trained on content that is copyrighted, that’s owned by the folks who wrote or designed or photographed it, and that’s created a legal quagmire that court systems around the world are still muddling through.

There have been calls to update the robots.txt standard to make it clear what sorts of content can be scraped for AI-training purposes and what cannot, but the non-compulsory, not-legally-backed nature of such requests seem to make robots.txt an insufficient vehicle for this sort of endeavor: the land-grab, gold-rush nature of the AI industry right now suggests that most companies would not honor these requests, because it’s generally understood that they’re all trying to produce the most powerful AI possible as fast as possible, hoping to be at or near the top before the inevitable shakeout moment at which point most of these companies will go bankrupt or otherwise cease to exist.

That’s important context for understanding a recent announcement by internet infrastructure company Cloudflare, that said they would be introducing something along the lines of an enforceable robots.txt file for their customers called pay per crawl.

Cloudflare is US-based company that provides all sorts of services, from domain registration to firewalls, but they’re probably best known for their web security services, including their ability to block DDoS, or distributed denial of service attacks, where a hacker or other malicious actor will lash a bunch of devices they’ve compromised, through malware or otherwise, together, into what’s called a botnet, and use those devices to send a bunch of traffic to a website or other web-based entity all at once.

This can result in so much traffic, think millions or billions of visits per second—a recent attack that Cloudflare successfully ameliorated sent 7.3 terabytes per second against one of their customers, for instance—it can result in so much traffic that the targeted website becomes inaccessible, sometimes for long periods of time.

So Cloudflare provides a service where they’re basically like a firewall between a website and the web, and when something like a DDoS attack happens, Cloudflare’s services go into action and the targeted website stays up, rather than being taken down.

As a result of this and similarly useful offerings, Cloudflare security services are used by more than 19% of all websites on the internet, which is an absolutely stunning figure considering how big the web is these days—there are an estimated 1.12 billion websites, around 200 million of which are estimated to be active as of Q1 2025.

All that said, Cloudflare recently announced a new service, called pay per crawl, that would use that same general principle of putting themselves between the customer and the web to actively block AI web scrapers that want to scrape the customer’s content, unless the customer gives permission for them to do so.

Customers can turn this service on or off, but they can also set a price for scraping their content—a paywall for automated web-scrapers and the AI companies running them, basically.

The nature of these payments is currently up in the air, and it could be that content creators and owners, from an individual blogger to the New York Times, only earn something like a penny per crawl, which could add up to a lot of money for the Times but only be a small pile of pennies for the blogger.

It could also be that AI companies don’t play ball with Cloudflare and instead they do what many tech analysts expect them to do: they come up with ways to get around Cloudflare’s wall, and then Cloudflare makes the wall taller, the tech companies build taller ladders, and that process just spirals ad infinitum.

This isn’t a new idea, and the monetization aspect of it is predicated on some early web conceptions of how micropayments might work.

It’s also not entirely clear whether the business model would make sense for anyone: the AI companies have long complained they would go out of business if they had to pay anything at all for the content they’re using to train their AI models, big companies like the New York Times face possible extinction if everything they pay a lot of money to produce is just grabbed by AI as soon as it goes live, those AI companies making money from that content they paid nothing to make, and individual makers-of-things face similar issues as the Times, but without the leverage to make deals with individual AI companies, like the Times has.

It also seems that AI chatbots are beginning to replace traditional search engines, so it’s possible that anyone who uses this sort of wall will be excluded from the search of the future. Those whose content is gobbled up and used without payment will be increasingly visible, their ideas and products and so on more likely to pop up in AI-based search results, while those who put up a wall may be less visible; so there’s a big potential trade-off there for anyone who decides to use this kind of paywall, especially if all the big AI companies don’t buy into it.

Like everything related to AI right now, then, this is a wild west space, and it’s not at all clear which concepts will win out and become the new default, and which will disappear almost as soon as they’re proposed.

It’s also not clear if and when the larger economic forces underpinning the AI gold rush will collapse, leaving just a few big players standing and the rest imploding, Dotcom Bubble style, which could, in turn, completely undo any defaults that are established in the lead-up to that moment, and could make some monetization approaches no longer feasible, while others, including possibly paywalls and micropayments, suddenly more thinkable and even desirable.

Show Notes

https://www.wired.com/story/pro-russia-disinformation-campaign-free-ai-tools/

https://www.wsj.com/tech/amazon-warehouse-robots-automation-942b814f

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-white-collar-job-loss-b9856259

https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cn-cloudflare

https://www.demandsage.com/website-statistics/

https://blog.cloudflare.com/defending-the-internet-how-cloudflare-blocked-a-monumental-7-3-tbps-ddos/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt

https://developers.cloudflare.com/ai-audit/features/pay-per-crawl/use-pay-per-crawl-as-site-owner/set-a-pay-per-crawl-price/

https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/01/cloudflare-launches-a-marketplace-that-lets-websites-charge-ai-bots-for-scraping/

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/01/technology/cloudflare-ai-data.html

https://creativecommons.org/2025/06/25/introducing-cc-signals-a-new-social-contract-for-the-age-of-ai/

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/pay-up-or-stop-scraping-cloudflare-program-charges-bots-for-each-crawl/

https://www.cloudflare.com/paypercrawl-signup/

https://www.cloudflare.com/press-releases/2025/cloudflare-just-changed-how-ai-crawlers-scrape-the-internet-at-large/

https://digitalwonderlab.com/blog/the-ai-paywall-era-a-turning-point-for-publishers-or-just-another-cat-and-mouse-game

This week we talk about the NOAA, FEMA, and the SSMIS.

We also discuss Arctic ice, satellite resolution, and automated weather observation stations.

Recommended Book: Superbloom by Nicholas Carr

Transcript

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, is a US scientific and regulatory agency that tackles an array of environmental, climatic, and weather-related issues, alongside its responsibilities managing oceanic ecosystems.

So it’s in charge of managing fishing protections and making sure endangered species within US waters are taken care of, but it also does scientific exploration—mapping the ocean, for instance—it monitors atmospheric conditions and keeps tabs on the various cycles that influence global and US water, air, and temperature happenings, and it tracks macro- and micro-scale weather events.

That latter responsibility means NOAA (which is the modern iteration of several other agencies, including the US Environmental Science Services Administration and the US Weather Bureau) also manages the US National Weather Service, which is the sub-agency that sends out hazardous weather statements when there are severe storms or tornadoes or other weather-related events of note in a given area, and which also provides weather forecast information that local experts on the ground use to make their own predictions.

Most of what the National Weather Service puts out is in the public domain, which means anyone can access and use it, free of charge. That’s a pretty big deal, because the data they collect and informational products they distribute, including all those hazardous weather statements, are at times life and death, but they’re also a big part of what makes standard local weather services possible in the US—they help the FAA and other agencies do their jobs, and they help everyday people understand how hot or cold it’s going to be, whether to pack and umbrella for the day, and so on.

To accomplish all this, the NOAA and its sub-agencies make use of a bunch of facilities and other tracking resources to collect, aggregate, and interpret all those data points, crunching them and spitting them back out as something intelligible and useful to their many end-users.

They’ve got weather observation stations across the US, many of them automated surface observing stations, which are exactly what they sound like: automated stations that collect data about sky conditions, wind direction and speed, visibility, present weather conditions, temperature, dew point, and so on—most of these are close to airports, as this information is also vital for figuring out if it’s safe to fly, and if so, what accommodations pilots should be making for the weather and visibility and such—but they also collect data from smaller weather stations scattered across the country, around 11,000 of them, many operated by volunteers under the auspices of an effort called the Cooperative Observer Program that was established in 1890, and that’s paired with another volunteer data-collection effort called the Citizen Weather Observer Program.

There are also weather buoys and weather ships lingering across the surface of the ocean and other bodies of water, tracking additional data like sea surface temperature and wave height at various points. And there are weather balloons which collect additional information about happenings further up in the atmosphere, alongside the many satellites in orbit that capture various sorts of data and beam that data down to those who can make use of it.

Again, all of this data is collected and crunched and then turned into intelligible outputs for your local weather forecasters, but also the people who run airlines and fly planes, the folks out on boats and ships, people who are managing government agencies, scientists who are doing long-term research on all sorts of things, and everyday people who just want to know if it’ll be sunny, how hot it will be, and so on.

There’s one more major client of the NOAA that’s worth noting here, too: the Department of Defense. And that relationship is a big part of what I want to talk about today, because it seems to be at the root of a major curtailing of weather-related data-sharing that was recently announced by the US government, much to the chagrin of the scientific community.

—

US President Trump has long voiced his skepticism about the NOAA.

There have been claims that this disdain is the result of the agency having called him out on some bald-faced lies he told about hurricane projections during his first administration, when he reportedly altered an NOAA hurricane impact projection map with a Sharpie to support a misstatement he had previously made about a hurricane impacting Alabama; the hurricane in question was not anticipated to hit Alabama, Trump said it would, and he later altered a map in order to make it look like he was right, when all the data, and all the experts, say otherwise.

Whether that’s true or not, the NOAA later released an unsigned statement seeming to support his false assertion, and it’s generally understood that the agency was forced to make that statement against the will of its staff and leadership by the then-president.

It’s also been posited that Trump doesn’t care for the NOAA because of their connection with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA.

FEMA became the target of several conspiracy theories on the US political right, which allege that liberal lawmakers, including former President Biden, used it as a sort of piggy bank for their personal projects and priorities; the agency provides funding and on-the-ground support for areas that have been impacted by hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes, floods, and other such weather-related disasters, but as immigration became more of a focal point of right-leaning and far-right politics in the US, accusations that the Biden administration was using FEMA funds to help immigrants enter and stay in the US grew; there’s no evidence this is the case, but that’s the nature of conspiracy theories—evidence isn’t necessary when something feels true to a big enough group of people.

In any event, FEMA is now on the chopping block, the second Trump administration has said it could be dissolved as soon as December of 2025, the biggest changes to the agency coming just after the end of this year’s hurricane season, which traditionally ends of November. Trump himself said FEMA would be giving out less money to states recovering from weather disasters, and that a panel he’s appointed will figure out exactly how to restructure or replace the agency.

To be clear, the president cannot kill off FEMA, only Congress can do that, and they have said they intend to reform the agency by making it easier for disaster survivors to access resources and by moving FEMA from its current position under the Department of Homeland Security into its own thing; a big contrast to Trump’s ambitions for the agency, which basically seems to be that FEMA shouldn’t do what it currently does, and the states should mostly or exclusively cover disaster costs and provide post-disaster resources, instead of the federal government helping out.

So Trump seemingly has a thing against these sorts of agencies, has semi-regularly called climate change a hoax, doesn’t seem to have any particular fondness for the idea of the US federal government helping out with local problems, or the local consequences of larger-scale problems like weather disasters, and has acted in a variety of ways to cut funding for science and public service related agencies and efforts across the board.

All of that has been pretty fundamental to his platform since his first administration. And while the scientific community has sounded the alarm about these stances, saying what he’s planning will put a lot of people and infrastructure at risk, and while this data and these resources are fundamental to reducing the damage, both human and otherwise, caused by such disasters, in the US and globally, to some degree, that doesn’t seem to bother this administration, which usually cites cost-cutting as their rationale, but also regularly points at the concept of immigration to justify many of the decisions they make, including some of these ones.

So that’s the context shaping the perception of an announcement made by the NOAA in the latter-half of June 2025 that the agency would no longer be importing, processing, or distributing data from the Special Sensor Microwave Imager Sounder, or SSMIS system, as of June 30—which was yesterday, if you’re listening to this episode on the day it’s released.

The agency cited recent service changes as their rationale for this cessation, and weather forecasters have been in a tizzy about this, because the SSMIS system is pretty fundamental to what they do, especially when it comes to hurricane forecasting.

The SSMIS is a satellite-based system that passively maps the whole world twice a day from space in very, very high resolution, and in addition to hurricane-tracking and other weather-related tasks, it also allows scientists to monitor sea ice in the Arctic and other such long-term projects.

The NOAA said that this cessation of service would not impact the quality of hurricane forecasting as we step into the beginning weeks of the traditional Atlantic hurricane season, but non-NOAA scientists and other experts, folks who aren’t on the US federal governments’ payroll, basically, have said this would blind them in this regard, and that while they can approximate some of the same forecasting powers using other data, it won’t be the same, and it won’t be nearly as good.

This system is the only one that allows scientists to see inside the clouds as hurricanes develop, and before such data was available, hurricane projections were a lot less accurate, and powerful storm systems would often sneak up on unsuspecting areas, because we lacked the heightened resolution and power necessary to make more up-to-the-minute and fine-grained projections.

Also, and this is perhaps less of an immediate concern, but might be an even bigger long-term issue than deadly hurricanes, is that there’s a more than 40-year-old study that’s been tracking changes to polar sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic that will no longer be feasible lacking this data, so everything that’s influenced by global water cycles and sea levels, which is basically everything weather- and climate-related, and that means, well, everything on earth could also be impacted by this new, US government-imposed reduced visibility, all of that research is upended, made less useful, and all of us in turn could suffer some pretty significant consequences because we lack that high-resolution understanding of what’s going on.

What’s worse is that this announcement was made just days before this source of data was scheduled to disappear, leaving them without time to cobble together less-good, but serviceable replacements for everything they’ll be losing as a consequence of these changes; and again, all of this is happening right at the beginning of hurricane season, so the stakes are very high.

Allegations of revenge as a motivation, or speculation that this is part of a larger effort by the Trump administration to systematically dismantle science and the public’s ability to get objective information about the world aside, there have also been rumblings that this might have been a Department of Defense decision, since these satellites are operated by the NOAA for the DoD on behalf of the US Space Force, which has ultimate authority over all satellites owned by the government.

In practice, that might mean that this is the consequence of the US military, or some facet of the US military, deciding that this information is too precious or dangerous to share broadly—as again, most of this information has been flagged public domain, so anyone can see and use it however they like—or it may be that this has been a miscommunication or the result of someone in the Navy making a decision without realizing the full implications of that decision.

As of the day I’m recording this, on the day this data is scheduled to disappear from the public domain, and some reports have indicated it has, indeed, disappeared as scheduled, journalists have been trying to get in touch with the relevant people at the Navy for comment, thus far unsuccessfully, but that outreach and their hopefully eventual contact with those in charge could result in a change in these plans, if it is indeed just a miscommunication or misunderstanding situation.

Either way, we’ll hopefully know more what happened here, as that could help us understand how safe or vulnerable other major sources of vital data might be under this administration, and/or under the current leadership of the DoD and similar military entities.

Show Notes

https://abcnews.go.com/US/hurricane-season-meteorologists-losing-vital-tool-forecasting/story?id=123305760

https://www.npr.org/2025/06/28/nx-s1-5446120/defense-department-cuts-hurricane-ice-weather-satellite

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/06/29/italy-and-spain-bake-in-heatwave-as-cities-issue-red-alerts-and-regions-mull-work-bans

https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2025/06/28/Defense-Department-ends-satellite-data-hurricane-experts/7881751141308/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/28/noaa-cuts-hurricane-forecasting-climate

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/weather-forecasters-lose-crucial-hurricane-detection-microwave-satellite/

https://www.kgw.com/article/news/nation-world/noaa-discontinues-data-website-trump-executive-order/507-f40d60d7-fb52-4cb4-a64b-f22bd1100562

https://hackaday.com/2025/06/12/end-of-an-era-noaas-polar-sats-wind-down-operations/

https://thehill.com/policy/equilibrium-sustainability/5357564-trump-cuts-noaa-nasa-farmers-climate-change-food-supply/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2025/05/14/national-weather-service-vacancies-hurricane-season/

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/us-hurricane-forecasting-cuts-1.7573024

https://apnews.com/article/hurricane-season-disaster-weather-doge-fema-noaa-cd215947480de9099a53fe20669bb923

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/05/florida-weatherman-john-morales-funding-cuts-forecasts

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/remote-sensing/articles/10.3389/frsen.2022.1021781/full

https://www.propublica.org/article/fema-grants-trump-emergencies

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/us/politics/as-fema-shrinks-a-grassroots-disaster-response-is-taking-shape.html

https://www.propublica.org/article/fema-grants-trump-emergencies

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/27/is-alligator-alcatraz-detention-centre-funded-by-florida-hurricane-money

https://www.npr.org/2025/06/26/nx-s1-5430469/faq-fema-elimination

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Atlantic_hurricane_warnings

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Dorian%E2%80%93Alabama_controversy

https://www.wusa9.com/video/weather/dod-stops-providing-noaa-with-satellite-data/65-a35e6409-20ad-4db1-83a1-0b281fcfb38b

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Weather_Service

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Oceanic_and_Atmospheric_Administration

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Hurricane_Center

This week we talk about OPEC, the Seven Sisters, and the price of oil.

We also discuss fracking, Israel and Iran’s ongoing conflict, and energy exports.

Recommended Book: Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock by Maud Woolf

Transcript

The global oil market changed substantially in the early 2000s as a pair of innovations—horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing—helped the plateauing US oil and gas market boom, unlocking a bunch of shale oil and gas deposits that were previously either entirely un-utilizable, or too expensive to exploit.

This same revolution changed markets elsewhere, too, including places like Western Canada, which also has large shale oil and gas deposits, but the US, and especially the southern US, and even more especially the Permian Basin in Texas, has seen simply staggering boosts to output since those twin-innovations were initially deployed on scale.

This has changed all sorts of dynamics, both locally, where these technologies and approaches have been used to tap ever-more fossil fuel sources, and globally, as previous power dynamics related to such resources have been rewired.

Case in point, in the second half of the 20th century, OPEC, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which is a predominantly Middle Eastern oil cartel that was founded by Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela in 1960, was a dominant force in geopolitics, as they collaboratively set global oil prices, and thus, were able to pull the strings connected to elections, war, and economic outcomes in nations around the world.

If oil prices suddenly spiked, that could cause an incumbent leader in a country a hemisphere away to lose their next election, and if anyone threatened one of their number, they could conceivably hold back resources from that country until they cooled down.

Before OPEC formed and established their position of primacy in global energy exports, the so-called Seven Sisters corporations, which consisted of a bunch of US and European companies that had basically stepped in and took control of global oil rights in the early 20th century, including oil rights across the Middle East, were the loci of power in this space, controlling about 85% of the world’s petroleum reserves as of the early 1970s.

That same decade, though, a slew of governments that hosted Seven Sisters facilities and reserves nationalized these assets, which in practice made all these reserves and the means of exploiting them the government’s property, and in most cases they were then reestablished under new, government-controlled companies, like Saudi Aramco in Saudi Arabia and the National Iranian Oil Company in Iran.

In 1973 and 1979, two events in the Middle East—the Yom Kippur War, during which pretty much all of Israel’s neighbors launched a surprise attack against Israel, and the Iranian Revolution, when the then-leader of Iran, the Shah, who was liberalizing the country while also being incredibly corrupt, was overthrown by the current government, the militantly Islamist Islamic Republic of Iran—those two events led to significant oil export interruptions that triggered oil shortages globally, because of how dominant this cartel had become.

This shortage triggered untold havoc in many nations, especially those that were growing rapidly in the post-WWII, mid-Cold War world, because growth typically requires a whole lot of energy for all the manufacturing, building, traveling around, and for basic, business and individual consumption: keeping the lights on, cooking, and so on.

This led to a period of stagflation, and in fact the coining of the term, stagflation, but it also led to a period of heightened efficiency, because nations had to learn how to achieve growth and stability without using so much energy, and it led to a period of all these coming-out-of-stagflation and economic depression nations trying to figure out how to avoid having this happen again.

So while OPEC and other oil-rich nations were enjoying a period of relative prosperity, due in part to those elevated energy prices—after the initial downsides of those conflicts and revolutions had calmed, anyway—other parts of the world were making new and more diversified deals, and were looking in their own backyards to try to find more reliable suppliers of energy products.

Parts of the US were already major oil producers, if not at the same scale as these Middle Eastern giants in the latter portion of the 20th century, and many non-OPEC producers in the US, alongside those in Norway and Mexico, enjoyed a brief influx of revenue because of those higher oil prices, but they, like those OPEC nations, suffered a downswing when prices stabilized; and during that price collapse, OPEC’s influence waned.

So in the 1980s, onward, the previous paradigm of higher oil prices led to a surge in production globally, everyone trying to take advantage of those high prices to invest in more development and production assets, and that led to a glut of supply that lowered prices, causing a lot of these newly tapped wells to go under, a lot of cheating by OPEC members, and all of the more established players to make far less per barrel of oil than was previously possible.

By 1986, oil prices had dropped by nearly half from their 1970s peak, and though prices spiked again in 1990 in response to Iraq’s invasion of fellow OPEC-member Kuwait, that spike only last about nine months, and it was a lot less dramatic than those earlier, 70s-era spikes; though it was still enough to trigger a recession in the US and several other countries, and helped pave the way for investment in those technologies and infrastructure that would eventually lead to the US’s shale-oil and gas revolution.

What I’d like to talk about today is the precariousness of the global oil and gas market right now, at a moment of significantly heightened tensions, and a renewed shooting conflict, in the Middle East.

—

As of the day I’m recording this, the Islamic Republic of Iran is still governing Iran, and that’s an important point to make as while Israel’s official justification for launching a recent series of attacks against Iran’s military and nuclear production infrastructure is that they don’t want Iran to make a nuclear weapon, it also seems a whole lot like they might be aiming to instigate regime change, as well.

Israel and Iran’s conflict with each other is long-simmering, and this is arguably just the most recent and extreme salvo in a conflict dating back to at least 2024, but maybe earlier than that, too, all the way back to the late-70s or early 80s, if you string all the previous conflicts together into one deconstructed mega-conflict. If you want to know more about that, listen to last week’s episode, where I got deeper into the specifics of their mutual dislike.

Today, though, I’d like to focus on an issue that is foundational to pretty much every other geopolitical and economic happening, pretty much always, and that’s energy. And more specifically, the availability, accessibility, and price of energy resources like oil and gas.

We’ve reached a point, globally, where about 40% of all electricity is generated by renewables, like solar panels, wind turbines, and hydropower-generating dams.

That’s a big deal, and while the majority of that supply is coming from China, and while it falls short of where we need to be to avoid the worst-case consequences of human-amplified climate change, that growth is really incredible, and it’s beginning to change the nature of some of our conflicts and concerns; many of the current economic issues between the US and China, these days are focused on rare earths, for instance, which are required for things like batteries and other renewables infrastructure.

That said, oil and gas still enable the modern economy, and that’s true almost everywhere, even today. And while the US changed the nature of the global oil and gas industries by heavily investing in both, and then rewired the global energy market by convincing many of its allies to switch to US-generated oil and gas, rather than relying on supplies from Russia, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a few years ago, a whole lot of these resources still come from at-times quite belligerent regimes, and many of these regimes are located in the Middle East, and belong to OPEC.

Iran is one such belligerent regime.

As of 2025, Iran is the 9th largest producer of oil in the world, and it holds 24% of the Middle East’s and about 12% of the world’s proven oil reserves—that’s the total volume of oil underground that could be pumped at some point. It’s got the world’s 3rd largest proven crude oil reserves and it exports about 2 million barrels of crude and refined oil every day. It also has the world’s second-largest proven natural gas reserves.

Iran isn’t as reliant on oil and gas exports as some of its neighbors, but it still pulled in about $53 billion in net oil exports each year as of 2023; which is a lot less than what it could be making, as international sanctions have made it difficult for Iran to fully exploit its reserves. But that’s still a huge chunk of its total income.

This is important to note because Israel’s recent series of attacks on Iran, in addition to taking out a lot of their military leaders, weapons manufacturing facilities, and nuclear research facilities, have also targeted Iran’s oil and gas production and export capacity, including large gas plants, fuel depots, and oil refineries, some located close to Tehran in the northern part of the country, and some down on its southwestern coast, where a huge portion of Iran’s gas is processed.

In light of these attacks, Iran’s leaders have said they may close the Strait of Hormuz, though which most of their exports pass—and the Strait of Hormuz is the only marine entryway into the Persian Gulf; nearly 20% of all globally consumed oil passes through this 90-mile-wide stretch of water before reaching international markets; it’s a pretty vital waterway that Iran partially controls because its passes by its southern coast.

Fuel prices already ticked up by about 9% following Israel’s initial strikes into Iran this past week, and there’s speculation that prices could surge still-higher, especially following US President Trump’s decision to strike several Iran nuclear facilities, coming to Israel’s aide, as Israel doesn’t possess the ‘bunker-buster’ bombs necessary to penetrate deep enough into the earth to damage or destroy many of these facilities.

As of Monday this week, oil markets are relatively undisrupted, and if any export flows were to be upset, it would probably just be Iran’s, and that would mostly hurt China, which is Iran’s prime oil customer, as most of the rest of the world won’t deal with them due to export sanctions.

That said, there’s a possibility that Iran will decide to respond to the US coming to Israel’s aid not by striking US assets directly, which could pull the US deeper into the conflict, but instead by disrupting global oil and gas prices, which could lead to knock-on effects that would be bad for the US economy, and the US’s relationships with other nations.

The straightest path to doing this would be to block the Strait of Hormuz, and they could do this by positioning ships and rocket launchers to strike anything passing through it, while also heavily mining the passage itself, and they’ve apparently got plenty of mines ready to do just that, should they choose that path.

This approach has been described by analysts as the strategic equivalent of a suicide bombing, as blocking the Strait would disrupt global oil and gas markets, hurting mostly Asia, as China, India, South Korea, Japan, and other Asian destinations consume something like 80% of the oil that passes through it, but that would still likely raise energy prices globally, which can have a lot of knock-on effects, as we saw during those energy crises I mentioned in the intro.

It would hurt Iran itself more than anyone, though, as almost all of their energy products pass through this passage before hitting global markets, and such a move could help outside entities, including the US, justify further involvement in the conflict, where they otherwise might choose to sit it out and let Israel settle its own scores.

Such energy market disruption could potentially benefit Russia, which has an energy resource-reliant economy that suffers when oil and gas prices are low, but flourishes when they’re high. The Russian government probably isn’t thrilled with Israel’s renewed attacks on one of its allies, but based on its lack of response to Syria’s collapse—the former Syrian government also being an ally of Russia—it’s possible they can’t or won’t do much to directly help Iran right now, but they probably wouldn’t complain if they were suddenly able to charge a lot more per barrel of oil, and if customers like China and India were suddenly a lot more reliant on the resources they’re producing.

Of course, such a move could also enrich US energy companies, though potentially at the expense of the American citizen, and thus at the expense of the Trump administration. Higher fuel prices tend to lead to heightened inflation, and more inflation tends to keep interest rates high, which in turn slows the economy. A lot of numbers could go in the opposite direction from what the Trump administration would like to see, in other words, and that could result in a truly bad outcome for Republicans in 2026, during congressional elections that are already expected to be difficult for the incumbent party.

Even beyond the likely staggering human costs of this renewed conflict in the Middle East, then, there are quite a few world-scale concerns at play here, many of which at least touch on, and some of which are nearly completely reliant on, what happens to Iran’s oil and gas production assets, and to what degree they decide to use these assets, and the channels through which they pass, in a theoretical asymmetric counterstrike against those who are menacing them.

Show Notes

https://archive.is/20250616111212/https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/an-overview-irans-energy-industry-infrastructure-2025-02-04/

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/15/which-iranian-oil-and-gas-fields-has-israel-hit-and-why-do-they-matter

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/17/mapping-irans-oil-and-gas-sites-and-those-attacked-by-israel

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/6/13/oil-markets-are-spooked-as-iran-israel-tensions-escalate

https://archive.is/20250620143813/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-20/eu-abandons-proposal-to-lower-price-cap-on-russian-oil-to-45

https://apnews.com/article/russia-economy-recession-ukraine-conflict-9d105fd1ac8c28908839b01f7d300ebd

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/22/business/us-iran-oil.html

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg9r4q99g4o

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/04/clean-energy-electricity-nature-and-climate-stories-this-week/

https://archive.is/20250622121310/https://www.ft.com/content/67430fac-2d47-4b3b-9928-920ec640638a

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Oil-Markets-Brace-for-Impact-After-US-Attacks-Iran-Facilities.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/22/business/energy-environment/iran-oil-gas-markets.html

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65504&utm_medium=PressOps

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/22/business/stocks-us-iran-bombing.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Oil

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fracking_in_Canada

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fracking_in_the_United_States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_in_the_United_States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shale_gas_in_the_United_States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yom_Kippur_War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970s_energy_crisis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990_oil_price_shock

https://www.strausscenter.org/energy-and-security-project/the-u-s-shale-revolution/

https://archive.is/20250416153337/https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-crude-oil-output-peak-by-2027-eia-projects-2025-04-15/

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/030415/how-does-price-oil-affect-stock-market.asp

This week we talk about tit-for-tat warfare, conflict off-ramps, and Israel’s renewed attacks on Iran’s nuclear program.

We also discuss the Iron Dome, the Iran-Iraq War, and regime change.

Recommended Book: How Much is Enough? by Robert and Edward Skidelsky

Transcript

In late-October of 2024, Israel launched a wave of airstrikes against targets in Iran and Syria. These strikes were code-named Operation Days of Repentance, and it marked the largest such attack on Iran by Israel since the 1980s, during the height of the Iran-Iraq War.

Operation Days of Repentance was ostensibly a response to Iran’s attack on Israel earlier than same month, that attack code-named Operation True Promise II, which involved the launch of around 200 ballistic missiles against Israeli targets. Operation True Promise II was itself a response to Israel’s assassination of the leader of Hamas, the leader of Hezbollah, and the Deputy of Operations for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

If you feel like there might be a tit-for-tat pattern here, you’re right. Iran and Israel have been at each other’s throats since 1979, following the Islamic Revolution when Iran cut off all diplomatic relations with Israel; some backchannel relations continued between the two countries, even through part of the Iran-Iraq War, when Israel often supported Iran in that conflict, but things got tense in the early 1980s when Iran, partnering with the Syrian government, started backing Hezbollah and their effort to boot Israel out of Southern Lebanon, while also partnering with Islamist militants in Iraq and Yemen, including the Houthis, and at times Hamas in Gaza, as well.

Most of these attacks have, until recently, been fairly restrained, all things considered. There’s long been bravado by politicians on both sides of the mostly cold war-ish conflict, but they’ve generally told the other side what they would be hitting, and signaled just how far they would be going, telling them the extent of the damage they would cause, and why, which provides the other side ample opportunity to step off the escalatory ladder; everyone has the chance to posture for their constituents and then step back, finding an off-ramp and claiming victory in that specific scuffle.

That back-and-forth in late-2024 largely stuck to that larger pattern, and both sides stuck with what typically works for them, in terms of doing damage: Israel flew more than 100 aircraft to just beyond or just inside Iran’s borders and struck a bunch of military targets, like air defense batteries and missile production facilities, while Iran launched a few hundred far less-accurate missiles at broad portions of Israel—a type of attack that could conceivably result in a lot of civilian casualties, not just damage to military targets, which would typically be a no-no if you’re trying to keep the tit-for-tat strikes regulated and avoid escalation, but because Israel has a fairly effective anti-missile system called the Iron Dome, Iran could be fairly confident that just hurling a large number of missiles in their general direction would be okay, as most of those missiles would be shot down by the Iron Dome, the rest by Israel’s allies in the region, and the few that made it through or struck unoccupied land in the general vicinity would make their point.

While this conflict has been fairly stable for decades, though, the tenor and tone seems to have changed substantially in 2025, and a recent wave of attacks by Israel is generally being seen as the culmination of several other efforts, and possibly an attempt by the Israeli government to change the nature of this conflict, perhaps permanently.

And that’s what I’d like to talk about today; Operation Rising Lion, and the implications of Israel’s seeming expansion and evolution of their approach to dealing with Iran.

—

In mid-June of 2025, Israel’s military launched early morning strikes against more than a dozen targets across Iran, most of the targets either fundamental to Iran’s nuclear program or its military.

The strikes were very targeted, and some were assassinations of top Iranian military leaders and nuclear scientists, like the Commander of the Revolutionary Guard, along with their families, including twenty children, who were presumably collateral damage. Some came from beyond Iran’s borders, some were conducted by assets smuggled into Iran earlier: car bombs and drones, things like that.

More attacks followed that initial wave, which resulted in the collapse of nuclear sites and airport structures, along with several residential buildings in the country’s capitol, Tehran.

This attack was ostensibly meant to hobble Iran’s nuclear program, which the Iranian government has long claimed is for purely peaceful, energy-generation purposes, but which independent watchdog organizations, and pretty much every other non-Iranian-allied government says is probably dual-purpose, allowing Iran to produce nuclear energy, but also nuclear weapons.

There was a deal on the books for a while that had Iran getting some benefits in exchange for allowing international regulators to monitor its nuclear program, but that deal, considered imperfect by many, but also relatively effective compared to having no deal at all, went away under the first Trump administration, and the nuclear program has apparently been chugging along since then with relative success; claims that Iran is just weeks from having enough fissile material to make a nuclear weapon have been common for years, now, but they apparently now have enough nuclear weapons-grade materials to make several bombs, and Israel in particular is quite keen to keep them from building such a weapon, as Iran’s leaders, over the years, have said they’d like to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth, and nuclear weapons would be a relatively quick and easy way to make that happen.

Of course, even without using such a weapon, simply having one or more is a sort of insurance policy against conventionally armed enemies. It ups the stakes in every type of conflict, and allows the nuclear-armed belligerent to persistently raise the specter of nuclear war if anyone threatens them, which is truly terrifying because of how many nuclear-related failsafes are in place around the world: one launch or detonation potentially becoming many, all at once, because of Dr. Strangelove-like automated systems that many militaries have readied, just in case.

So the possibility that Iran might be on the brink of actually, really, truly this time making a nuclear weapon is part of the impetus for this new strike by Israel.

But this is also probably a continuation of the larger effort to dismantle Iran’s influence across the region by the current Israeli government, which, following the sneak attack on Israel by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and the subsequent invasion of the Gaza Strip by Israeli forces, has been trying to undermine Iran’s proxies, which again, include quite a few militant organizations, the most powerful of which, in recent years, have been the trio of Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, right on Israel’s border.

Israel’s invasion of Gaza, which has led to an absolutely catastrophic humanitarian situation for Gazan civilians, but has also led to the near-total collapse of Hamas as a functioning militant organization in the Strip, could be construed as a successful mission, if you ignore all those civilians casualties and fatalities, and the near-leveling of a good portion of the Strip.

Israel was also able to take out a significant portion of Hezbollah’s leadership via conventional aerial attacks and ground-assaults, and a bizarrely effective asymmetric attack using bombs installed in the pagers used by the organization, and it’s been able to significantly decrease the Houthis’ ability to menace ships passing through the Red Sea, using their own military, but also through their relationship with the US, which has significant naval assets in the area.

Iran has long projected power in the region through its relationship with these proxies, providing them training and weapons and money in exchange for their flanking of Israel. That flanking was meant to keep Israel perpetually off-balance with the knowledge that if they ever do anything too serious, beyond the bounds of the controllable tit-for-tat, Cold War-style conflict in which they were engaged with Iran, they could suffer significant damage at home, from the north via Lebanon, from their southwestern flank via Gaza, or from a little ways to the south and via their coast from Yemen.

Those proxies now largely hobbled, though, Israel found itself suddenly freed-up to do something more significant, and this attack is being seen by analysts as the initial stages of what might be a more substantial, perhaps permanent solution to the Iran problem. Rather than being a show of force or a tit-for-tat play, these might be the beginning days of an assault that’s meant to enact not just a dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program, but full-on regime change in Iran.

And regime change means exactly what it sounds like: Iran’s government is Islamist, meaning that it wants to enforce a fairly brutal, repressive version of Islam globally, and it already does so against its people. There have periodically been successful protests against these measures by Iranian citizens, especially by severely repressed women and minority groups in the country, including folks of different religions and LGBTQ identifying folks, among others, almost always these protests, and any other attempts to attain more rights and equality for people who aren’t strictly Islamist men, generally result in violence, the black-bagging of protest leaders, extrajudicial killings and lifetime imprisonment and torture; a whole lot of really authoritarian, generally just villain-scale behavior by the Iranian government against anyone who steps out of line.

So the Iranian government is pretty monstrous by most modern, democratic standards, and the Israeli government’s seeming desire to crush it—to cry false on the regime’s projection of strength, and create the circumstances for revolution, if that is indeed what they’re doing—could be construed as a fairly noble goal.

It perhaps serves the purposes of Israel, as again, Iran has said, over and over, that they want to destroy Israel and would totally do so, given the chance. But it arguably also serves the purpose of democratic-leaning people, and perhaps even more so folks who are suffering under the current Iranian regime, and maybe even other, similar regimes in the region. Which again, in terms of spreading democracy and human rights, sounds pretty good to some ears.

That said, Israel is killing a lot of Iranian civilians alongside military targets, and its efforts in Gaza have led to accusations that it’s committing genocide in the region. Israeli leaders have themselves been accused of anti-democratic actions, basically doubling-down on the nation’s furthest-right, most militant, and most authoritarian and theocratic impulses, which makes any claims of moral superiority a little tricky for them to make, at this point.

There’s a chance, of course, that all this speculation and analysis ends up being completely off-base, and Israel is really, truly just trying to hobble Iran a bit, taking out some of their missile launchers and missile- and drone-manufacturing capacity, while also pushing back their acquisition of nuclear weapons by some meaningful amount of time; that amount of time currently unknown, as initial reports, at least, indicate that many of the attacks on Iran’s most vital nuclear research and development facilities were perhaps not as effective as Israel had hoped. There’s a chance that if enough overall damage is done, Iran’s government will enthusiastically return to the negotiating table and perhaps be convinced to set their nuclear program aside willingly, but at the moment both Iran and Israel seem committed to hurting each other, physically.

On that note, so far, as of the day I’m recording this, Iran has launched around 100 missiles, killed a few dozen Israelis, and injured more than 500 of the same. The Iranian government has said Israel’s strikes have killed at least 224 people and wounded more than 1,200; though a human rights group says the death toll in Iran could be quite a bit higher than official government numbers, with more than 400 people killed, around half of them civilians, so far.

It’s been nearly a week of this, and it looks likely that these strikes will continue for at least another few days, though many analysts are now saying they expect this to go one for at least a few weeks, if indeed Israel is trying to knock out some of Iran’s more hardened nuclear program-related targets; several of which are buried deep down in the ground, thus requiring bunker-buster-style missiles to reach and destroy, and Israel doesn’t have such weapons in their arsenal.

Neutralizing those targets would therefore mean either getting those kinds of weapons from the US or other allies, taking them out via some other means, which would probably take more time and entail more risk, or doing enough damage quickly than Iran’s government is forced to the negotiation table.

And if that ends up being the case, if Israel is really just gunning for the nuclear program and nothing else, this could be remembered as a significant strike, but one that mostly maintains the current status quo; same Iranian leadership, same perpetual conflict between these two nations, but Israel boasting even more of an upper-hand than before, with less to worry about in terms of serious damage from Iran or its proxies for the next several years, minimum.

It does seem like a good moment to undertake regime change in Iran, though, as doing so could help Israel polish up its reputation, at least a little, following the reputational drubbing it has taken because of its actions in Gaza. I doubt people who have really turned on Israel would be convinced, as doing away with an abusive, extremist regime, while doing abusive, extremist regime stuff yourself the homefront, probably won’t be an argument that convinces many Palestinian liberation-oriented people; there’s a chance some of those people will even take up the cause of Iranian civilians, which is true to a point, as many Iranian civilians are suffering and will continue to suffer under Israel’s attacks—though of course that leaves out the part about them also suffering, for much longer, under their current government.

That said, taking Iran out of the geopolitical equation would serve a lot of international interests, including those of the US—which has long hated Iran—and Ukraine, the latter of which because Russia has allied itself with the Iranian government, and buys a lot of drones, among other weapons, from Iran. That regime falling could make life more difficult for Russia, at least in the short term, and it would mean another ally lost in the region, following the fall of the Assad regime in Syria in late-2024.

There’s a chance that these same geopolitical variables could pull other players into this conflict, though: Russia could help Iran, for instance, directly or indirectly, by sending supplies, taking out Israeli missiles and drones, maybe, while the US could help Israel (more directly, that is, as it’s apparently already helping them by shooting down some of Iran’s counterstrike projectiles) by providing bunker-buster weapons, or striking vital military targets from a distance.

Such an escalation, on either side, would probably be pretty bad for everyone except possibly Iran, though Israel has said it wants the US to join in on its side, as that would likely result in a much quicker victory and far fewer casualties on its side.

The US government is pretty keen to keep out of foreign conflicts right now, though, at least directly, and Russia is pretty bogged down by its invasion of Ukraine; there’s a chance other regional powers, even smaller ones, could act as proxies for these larger, outside forces—the Saudis taking the opportunity to score some damage on their long-time rival, Iran, for instance, by helping out Israel—but any such acts would expand the scope of the conflict, and it’s seldom politically expedient to do anything that might require your people make any kind of sacrifice, so most everyone will probably stay out of this as long as they can, unless there are serious benefits to doing so.

Show Notes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_2025_Israeli_strikes_on_Iran

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/06/13/israel-iran-regime-attack-goal-column-00405153

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/real-threat-iran-tehran-most-dangerous-option-responding-israel

https://www.twz.com/news-features/could-iran-carry-out-its-threat-to-shut-the-strait-of-hormuz

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/defense-news/article-857713

https://kyivindependent.com/israel-asks-us-to-join-strikes-on-irans-nuclear-sites-officials-told-axios/

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog-june-15-2025/

https://www.twz.com/air/israel-escalates-to-attacking-iranian-energy-targets-after-ballistic-missiles-hit-tel-aviv

https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/israel-iran-strikes-news-06-14-25

https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-confirms-irgc-air-force-chief-top-echelon-killed-in-israeli-strike/

https://time.com/7294186/israel-warns-tehran-will-burn-deadly-strikes-traded-nuclear-program/

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/06/14/world/israel-iran-news

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/opinion/israel-iran-strikes.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/14/world/middleeast/drones-smuggled-israel-iran-ukraine-russia.html

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/06/15/world/iran-israel-nuclear

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/15/world/middleeast/iran-military-leaders-killed.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/14/world/europe/israel-iron-dome-defense.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/14/world/middleeast/israel-iran-missile-attack.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/14/world/middleeast/iran-israel-energy-facility-strikes-tehran.html

https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/israel-iran-strikes-news-06-15-25

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/was-israel-s-strike-on-iran-a-good-idea--four-questions-to-ask

https://apnews.com/article/israel-iran-missile-attacks-nuclear-news-06-16-2025-c98074e62ce5afd4c3f6d33edaffa069

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/16/world/middleeast/iran-israel-war-off-ramp.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2024_Iranian_strikes_on_Israel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2024_Israeli_strikes_on_Iran

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_of_Resistance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lebanon_electronic_device_attacks