May 29, 2025

DOES THE INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINE NEED TO BE SAVED: Can Hydrogen Save the Internal Combustion Engine? These Engineers Say Yes.

I feel like my thoughts on hydrogen cars from Popular Mechanics are still valid. “The car advertises itself as petroleum-free, which is true. But—and here’s my problem with hydrogen cars—it’s not really fossil fuel free. Most hydrogen is made by ‘steam reformation’ of natural gas, which is still a fossil fuel. You can also make it out of water, via electrolysis, but unless you’ve got a non-fossil source of electricity the hydrogen is really just functioning as an energy-storage medium, rather than a source of energy. Of course, build lots of nice, clean nuclear plants, or orbiting solar power plants, or whatever, and that problem goes away.”

Posted at 5:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds 118

MY LATEST SUBSTACK COLUMN: Scary AI and Scarier Not-Scary AI.

As always, if you like these essays, please take out a (preferably paid) subscription. I will thank you, and my family will thank you.

UPDATE: This from the comments at Substack made my day: “I want to comment just on the writing style of this essay: exceptional. They say writing ability is like a muscle you can develop through exercise. Your writing muscles are in top shape.”

Well, I’ve always said you can only be so smart but you can always be a better writer.

Posted at 4:45 pm by Glenn Reynolds 71

JOHN ROBERTS SHOWS NO SIGNS OF THINKING:

Posted at 4:01 pm by Glenn Reynolds 143

BIG BANG: First Look: Rossi R95 Triple Black Pistol. “Rossi R95 Triple Black pistols are available in four different centerfire calibers including .454 Casull, .357 Mag, .44 Mag. and .45-70 Gov’t.”

Posted at 4:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds 25

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

UPDATE:

Posted at 2:45 pm by Ed Driscoll 75

RUY TEIXEIRA: Hispanic Moderates’ Big Swing Right.

The release of the new data and report from Catalist has underscored the extent of Hispanic defection from the Democrats over the last two presidential cycles. We’ve seen massive drops in Democratic support from pretty much every subgroup of Hispanics, albeit with some variation: working-class Hispanics more than the college-educated, women (interestingly) more than men, younger Hispanics more than older ones, and urban residents more than those in the suburbs. But all the defections have been substantial—at least 22 margin points and usually much more between 2016 and 2024.

The Catalist data are confined to standard demographic subgroups so can’t tell us about variation among Hispanics by factors such as ideology. But the Blue Rose Research data, released just prior to the Catalist data, can and the results are astonishing. According to their data, Democratic support dropped by a gobsmacking 46 points among Hispanic moderates, from +62 to +16, between 2016 and 2024. As David Shor has pointed out, Hispanic moderates’ political behavior is now quite close to that of white moderates.

What’s going on here? Here’s Patrick Ruffini’s take:

In 2020 and 2024…realignment came for nonwhite voters. A basic tenet of the Democratic Party—that of being a group-interest-based coalition—was abandoned as the party’s ideologically moderate and conservative nonwhite adherents began to peel off in a mass re-sorting of the electorate…[T]hese voters were now voting exactly how you would expect them to, given their ideologies: conservatives for the party on the right, moderates split closer to either party.

This explanation for political realignment should concern Democrats deeply, because it can’t be fixed by better messaging or more concerted outreach. The voters moving away from the Democrats are ideologically moderate to conservative. Their loyalty to the Democratic Party was formed in a time of deep racial and inter-ethnic rivalry, when throwing in with one locally dominant political party could help a once-marginalized group secure political power. The system worked well when local politics was relatively insulated from ideological divides at the national level. But this wouldn’t last forever—and national polarization now rules everything around us.

This seems exactly correct to me and makes it easier to see why Hispanic moderates increasingly resemble white moderates politically. They are voting their ideology and political views not their group identity. This is further illustrated by examining Hispanic moderates’ more specific political views.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll 109

AXIOS ON THE AI JOBS DANGER: Sleepwalking into a white-collar bloodbath.

Dario Amodei — CEO of Anthropic, one of the world’s most powerful creators of artificial intelligence — has a blunt, scary warning for the U.S. government and all of us:

  • AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs — and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years, Amodei told us in an interview from his San Francisco office.
  • Amodei said AI companies and government need to stop “sugar-coating” what’s coming: the possible mass elimination of jobs across technology, finance, law, consulting and other white-collar professions, especially entry-level gigs.

Why it matters: Amodei, 42, who’s building the very technology he predicts could reorder society overnight, said he’s speaking out in hopes of jarring government and fellow AI companies into preparing — and protecting — the nation.

Few are paying attention. Lawmakers don’t get it or don’t believe it. CEOs are afraid to talk about it. Many workers won’t realize the risks posed by the possible job apocalypse — until after it hits.

  • “Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen,” Amodei told us. “It sounds crazy, and people just don’t believe it.”

The big picture: President Trump has been quiet on the job risks from AI. But Steve Bannon — a top official in Trump’s first term, whose “War Room” is one of the most powerful MAGA podcasts — says AI job-killing, which gets virtually no attention now, will be a major issue in the 2028 presidential campaign.

  • “I don’t think anyone is taking into consideration how administrative, managerial and tech jobs for people under 30 — entry-level jobs that are so important in your 20s — are going to be eviscerated,” Bannon told us.

In his 2023 book, The Conservative Futurist, James Pethokoukis predicted:

What are the best current guesses for AI’s impact? Goldman Sachs, a bank, finds a third of tasks that make up nearly a thousand U.S. occupations are exposed to the current state of AI automation. That translates to some two-thirds of all occupations. But that doesn’t mean two-thirds of all jobs are going away. Some occupations are more exposed than others. GS economists see a high level of exposure in administrative and legal jobs, low exposure in “physically intensive” jobs such as construction and maintenance. Overall, the bank’s assumptions would mean 7 percent of current U.S. employment being substituted by AI, 63 percent being complemented, and 30 percent being unaffected. But not even a megabank knows for sure.

Of course, AI will only become more capable. Maybe the reassuring story that history tells us about automation (machines destroy jobs but, eventually, create more new ones) will be a poor guide going forward. But that’s not my baseline case. In his 2022 paper “The Labor Market Impacts of Technological Change: From Unbridled Enthusiasm to Qualified Optimism to Vast Uncertainty,” MIT economist David Autor offers a cautiously optimistic prediction on continued human employment (although he includes a caveat that tech progress faster than what current experts predict could make his forecasts too rosy). Even if AI ends up replacing far more of what humans do than augmenting what they do best—making those tasks more valuable—or creating new things to do, the economy’s increased productivity could be such that average wages would rise. Workers would get less of the economic pie, but the pie would be bigger. Without the emergence of human-like artificial general intelligence, Autor sees an upper limit to the automation process. He thinks humans will continue to have a “comparative advantage” in a number of areas: creativity, judgment, hypothesis formation, contextual thinking, causal analysis, communication, emotional intelligence—“the importance of which we likely do not fully appreciate and the difficulty of which we surely vastly underestimate.” Autor is also confident that the most skilled workers “will likely continue to be complemented by advances in computing and AI—such as workers who invent, design, research, lead, entertain, and educate.”

The next obvious question is what humans will do for work if AGI is reached, which some experts are predicting could happen by 2040, if not earlier. Again, history should be the baseline here. We always overstate the impact of technology on jobs. Who would guess that just one of the 270 jobs in the 1950 U.S. census has been eliminated by automation?52 And who would guess further that job is elevator operator? Beyond looking at history, it’s hard to say what comes next for workers. And that’s OK. “The limits of both our collective knowledge and our individual imaginations constrain well-intentioned efforts to plan for the workforce of the future,” Adam Thierer, a policy analyst, observes. It’s always been easier to recognize which current jobs can be automated than to envision the jobs and industries that don’t exist yet but will be created by new technologies.

We’ve been here before of course; in 1995, lefty futurist Jeremy Rifkin wrote The End of Work, where “Rifkin predicted that automation, mechanization, and computerization would cause massive unemployment within America in the near future. Reality check: Unemployment is lower [in 2004] than it was in 1995. A columnist for the Financial Post remarked in 2003: ‘Who can forget the jeremiads of that great intellectual flim-flam man, Jeremy Rifkin, whose book, The End of Work, said it all. And what ensued? The greatest bout of job creation in post-war history!’”

Of course, one reason why Web publications such as Axios fear a “white collar bloodbath” is how recent AI trends are effecting their industry: Business Insider axing 21% of workforce as AI sends web search traffic plunging.

Business Insider is laying off about 21% of its workforce, an internal memo showed on Thursday, as the financial news outlet grapples with shrinking search traffic and the growing use of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT.

The New York-based company joins several digital media companies in restructuring operations as consumers increasingly depend on artificial intelligence for news synopsis, which is eating into web traffic.

In the memo, CEO Barbara Peng told staff the company now generates twice as much revenue for each website visit as it did two years ago, but 70% of its business still has some degree of traffic sensitivity.

“We must be structured to endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control, so we’re reducing our overall company to a size where we can absorb that volatility,” Peng said in the memo seen by Reuters.

The New York-based company is accelerating adoption of AI, with a majority of employees already utilizing Enterprise ChatGPT and several AI-driven products to enhance operations and reader experience, Peng said.

In December of 2002, Virginia Postrel noted the disconnect between a remarkably mild (considering what had just happened in September of 2001) recession and how it was being reported by the legacy media:

In today’s NYT, Dan Akst puts the current economic gloominess in perspective, reminding us that even in the current slump the economy looks more like an earlier era’s dream than the nightmare too often portrayed in media account. By historical standards, things are looking awfully good: “low interest rates, affordable energy, full employment without inflation and broad access to home ownership.” We’ve even learned to compete with the Japanese. Why the disconnect? One reason “may be the sharp advertising downturn that started in early 2001. The resulting media recession, including layoffs and other cutbacks, has produced a grimmer-than-usual attitude in the perennially gloomy fourth estate. The industry’s concentration in New York and Washington, both of which were struck by terrorists last year, has further darkened the industry’s outlook.” Dan is no outsider taking cheap shots at reporters. He’s a long-time journalist acknowledging a psychological truth: We all grant more salience to facts we experience directly. And journalists know lots and lots of people who’ve lost jobs in this recession.

The legacy media’s fear of what AI will do to their profession is driving a lot of their more feverish nightmare scenarios for the world at large.

Posted at 1:44 pm by Ed Driscoll 229

ROGER SIMON: How Culpable Is the UN in the Gaza War?

This is the same UN whose “humanitarian chief” as recently as a week ago accused Israel of imminently murdering 14,000 infants. From JNS:

“The United Nations and the BBC on Wednesday corrected a dramatic claim that 14,000 infants in the Gaza Strip faced death within 48 hours, clarifying that the figure actually refers to children at risk of severe malnutrition over the course of a full year.

“U.N. humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher made the claim on BBC Radio 4‘s “Today” program, saying: ‘There are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them.’ The comment was quickly picked up by national media outlets, cited in U.K. parliamentary debates and referenced in international diplomatic discussions.”

This is evil propaganda that not even Hamas itself could duplicate.

By now the role of UNRWA in aiding Hamas in so many ways, including helping hide their munitions, missiles and launchers, command and control centers and so forth under hospitals and schools—all against international law— has been detailed ad infinitum.

With friends like the UN, who needs Al Jazeera?

And it doesn’t stop with UNRWA. Corruption is everywhere in the UN, a prominent example being the Oil-for-Food Programme that turned the Iraq War into a money machine for sleazy international bureaucrats. It’s almost as if the organization were set up for profiteering outside of legal jurisdiction. And who can forget how the UN’s World Health Organization tilted toward protecting China during COVID-19, therefore playing a large role in the global shutdown whose horrifying results are being questioned everywhere?

As a kid, when I would drive by the UN or visit with my father who then occasionally worked for WHO, I would look on its buildings with awe. Now I see it as evil on the East River. I know I am not alone in this.

What is to be done? Can it be resurrected?

In the short run, I doubt it. In many ways it is worse even than its short-lived predecessor, the League of Nations.

Maybe some day humanity will be able to countenance a genuine international organization without the endless corruption, manipulation and bias. But those days seem to be far off.

For now, we should save our money. And as for those magnificent buildings on the East River, such priceless real estate must have better uses.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll 97

THE PRESS: EVERYTHING IS AWFUL!

The voters:

Posted at 12:43 pm by Glenn Reynolds 37

LESLEY STAHL HAS A SAD: It’s Hopeless, ‘I Don’t See a Path Out.’

America has no reason for hope – and there’s no way the nation can escape hopelessness – “60 Minutes” Correspondent Lesley Stahl says in a fearmongering PBS special purporting to examine the boundaries of presidential authority.

Stahl is a panelist in PBS’s misleadingly titled “How Much Executive Power Is Too Much? Breaking the Deadlock: A Power Play” – a transparently manipulative effort to vilify President Donald Trump by portraying the threat-to-democracy deeds of a hypothetical “President Powerton.”

After leading viewers to a foregone conclusion that Americans should fear and reject the drunk-with-power “President Powerton,” Moderator Aaron Tang asks panelists the following question:

“One last question: folks, is there any reason for hope?”

Not only is there no reason for hope, but there’s hope of having hope, because “all” of the nation’s institutions are irredeemable, Stahl answered:

“I am not hopeful. I look at all our institutions, all of which have lost the respect and trust of the American people. I worry about the future of democracy, obviously.

“And, I don’t see a path out. So, I’m kind of down.”

Not all panelists’ responses are shown, but the ones that “60 Minutes” chose to air express either hope for the nation or, at least, cautious optimism.

“America is crumbling because of this president,” Stahl declared earlier in the program.

In 2003, the year before Dan hit the fan at CBS, Stahl was asked about bias at her network by Fox News’ Cal Thomas:

[Stahl:] I’m going to attack your premise and say that I think the voices that are being heard in broadcast media today, are far more — the ones who are being heard, are far more likely to be on the right and avowedly so, and therefore, more — almost stridently so, than what you’re talking about.”

Thomas pounced: “Can you name a conservative journalist at CBS News?”

Stahl was flummoxed and denied that anyone at CBS is biased in any way: “Well I don’t know of anybody’s political bias at CBS News. I really think we try very hard to get any opinion that we have out of our stories. And most of our stories are balanced, and there are standards that say they need to be balanced. So if you have one side, you try to get the other side. And I’m not saying we don’t have opinions, but I’m saying we try to cleanse our stories of them.”

Such thinking is what drove the DNC-MSM into their box canyon; fast-forward to last December, where Megyn Kelly has some suggestions for Stahl’s industry on how to escape: Lesley Stahl, Van Jones ‘Extremely Worried’ About Death of Corporate Media Influence.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 109