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AliExpress caught fingerprinting visitors after sending inaudible sounds to browsers
Is the technique outdated? Yes. Is it still creepy? Also yes.
Iowa Football Opponent Preview: Illinois
The Hawkeyes get set to invade Champaign for the first time in four years.
Japan eyes tax breaks for non-core business sales in governance reform push, sources say
Japan's government is considering tax breaks on gains from sales of non-core businesses, a move that could accelerate long-delayed corporate restructuring and spur industry consolidation, two people with knowledge of the matter said.
Making the case for independent science
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's 16-year rule ended in the spring, when voters replaced him with Péter Magyar, who has pledged to undo Orbán-led initiatives that, in the eyes of critics, isolated ...
Autonomy and Innovation
Incentives favor offense when it comes to agentic cybersecurity; it’s the same dynamic that will limit incumbents and fuel startups in the long run.
Exxon Eyes Shell's $8 Billion U.S. Chemicals Business
ExxonMobil is among several bidders pursuing all or part of Shell’s U.S. chemicals business in a potential deal valued at up to $8 billion.
Big Country Politics: Taylor County Democratic Party Chair eyes 2026 ‘blue wave’
ABILENE, Texas (KTAB/KRBC) – With several high-profile races drawing attention ahead of the 2026 election, Taylor County Democratic Party Chair Sammy Garcia said local issues could play an importan…
SK Hynix Unpacks Advanced Packaging Technologies, Including Intel EMIB, For Its Next-Gen HBM Memory As It Eyes 3D Structures For The Future
SK Hynix leverages advanced packaging technologies such as Intel's EMIB for its next-gen HBM solutions, which will enter the 3D stage.
Maker of Clear Eyes Recalls Nearly 40,000 Bottles Over Contamination Risk
Federal safety regulators said the maker of Clear Eyes Maximum Itchy Eye Relief voluntarily recalled the drops because of a “lack of assurance of sterility.”
Analysis: Huge relief for Maresca's City
Manchester City showed improvement from the side who were bashed 3-0 by Arsenal in last Sunday's Community Shield - but for most of this game it looked as if Enzo Maresca was going to start with consecutive defeats. Replacing a legend is always difficult - as David Moyes experienced when Sir Alex Ferguson left neighbours Manchester United in 2013 - and the late comeback will come as a major relief in their first Premier League game without Pep Guardiola in a decade. City did not exactly promote from within when hiring Maresca, who quit as Chelsea manager at the start of 2026, but the Italian was Guardiola's City assistant in 2022-23 and would perhaps be seen as something of a continuity candidate.
What happened to the cast of ‘Dynasty’? See the stars 45 years after the premiere
Backstabbing, scheming, secret children, brainwashing, amnesia, and shoulder pads… so, so many shoulder pads. Yes, this is ‘Dynasty.’
Player Availability Report: #ATLvSKC
Player Availability Report is SportingKC.com’s look at the latest status updates around the team ahead of upcoming matches and is presented by Saint Luke’s. All details listed are from the league’s official Player Status Report that is submitted the day prior to the match. Sporting Kansas City hits the road
This shark can live 400 years. Its eyes barely seem to age
Greenland sharks may live for 400 years without suffering the kind of retinal decline normally associated with aging. Researchers found healthy eye tissue and active proteins specially adapted for seeing blue light in the dim Arctic depths. DNA repair mechanisms may help keep their eyes functioning across centuries. The discovery could eventually offer new clues for protecting human vision as we age.
Buc-ee's CEO eyes 'conservative, business-friendly states' for expansion
Buc-ee's co-founder and CEO Arch Aplin III recently said the company seeks expansion opportunities in "conservative, business-friendly states."
Buc-ee's CEO eyes 'conservative, business-friendly states' for expansion
Buc-ee's co-founder and CEO Arch Aplin III recently said the company seeks expansion opportunities in "conservative, business-friendly states."
Impinj Set To Revolutionize Logistics With Tracking Chips. CEO Eyes 'Gigantic Opportunity.'
Impinj, a maker of chips and systems for tracking assets, is just getting started in its growth trajectory, its CEO says. Impinj stock rose.
ICYMI: Sen. Banks Joins Kudlow on Fox Business Network
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Yesterday, Senator Jim Banks (R-Ind.) joined Kudlow on Fox Business Network to discuss the conflict in Iran, Economic D-Day, and the DSA’s takeover of the Democratic Party. Click the image above for the full discussion. Key Excerpts on Iran: Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.): “At the end of the day, what President Trump and the U.S. Military are doing to push back, […]
Cowboys Headlines: Downs still learning, All eyes on Barham's debut
The Cowboys held their final practice in Oxnard; buzz continues to grow with Barham set to debut while Downs reflects on his first training camp.
Jaguars Set to Take on Panthers in Second Preseason Game
Roster spots hang in the balance as Jacksonville returns home for its second preseason game. Roster spots are on the line, and all eyes will be focused on whether backup QB Nick Mullens can rebound after last week's poor outing.
HBO's 'Lanterns' are lords of the ring
Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose with a power ring.
The player Ohio State can’t afford to lose
The Buckeyes have plenty of talent along the offensive line, but no one is more important to the unit’s stability than the veteran center responsible for protecting, communicating and holding everything together.
Radial Acquires Mindful Health Solutions, Eyes Pending Boom in ‘Brain Medicine’
New York City-based startup Radial acquired the much larger and older outpatient mental health operator Mindful Health Solutions. The
GTA 6 leaker claims to have "full access" to the game, as Rockstar struggles to contain even more gameplay videos
More seemingly real GTA 6 gameplay videos emerge as the leaker involved claims to have "full access" to the game, and shows no inclination of stopping.
Is Mega Starmie any good for Pokémon GO Raids?
We got a slew of new Mega Evolutions in Pokémon Legends: Z-A and its DLC, but none of them has been as hilarious as Mega Starmie, which just got longer legs and became glossier. And yes, it runs like a human being, leaving players in stitches just by looking at it. Mega Patrick Starmie anyone?! […]
Scientists Spotted an ‘Alien’ Object on the Ocean Floor. The Reality Is Even Weirder.
The deepest, most remote parts of the ocean still remain alien to our eyes.
Relive the Original Xbox By Building Your Own 1:1 Scale 3,509-Piece Mattel Brick Shop Version
In celebration of the Xbox's 25th anniversary, Mattel has announced a 3,509-piece, 1:1-scale buildable original Xbox through its premium Mattel Brick Shop brand. And yes, it also includes a buildable 1:1-scale Duke controller and features lights, sounds, and scenes from three different classic Xbox games. It's available for preorder at a couple of different retailers for $329.99.
Columbia House — yes, it still exists — is going out of business
New York (CNN) — Columbia House, a pioneer of subscription music before streaming, is shutting down after seven decades in business.
Yes, the Pixelsnap magnets on Pixel 11 are stronger this year
Pixelsnap is one of the best things added to Pixel phones in a number of years, but it wasn’t quite...
Patriots news: Is Christian Gonzalez playing in Eagles joint practice?
All eyes have been on New England Patriots cornerback Christian Gonzalez as he’s been sidelined for the past week with an injury. The team is set to start joint practice with the Philadelphia Eagles, and head coach Mike Vrabel was asked if Gonzalez would be participating . “Vrabel says no Christian Gonzalez again today for the Patriots’ joint […] The post Patriots news: Is Christian Gonzalez playing in Eagles joint practice? appeared first on ClutchPoints.
Columbia House — yes, it still exists — is going out of business
Columbia House, a pioneer of subscription music before streaming, is shutting down after seven decades in business.
CMS announces QualTech event focusing on innovative technology to improve health outcomes
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services yesterday announced the launch of QualTech, a new event created to identify innovative technology that improves health outcomes. CMS is seeking participants from U.S-based teams, academic institutions, nonprofit organizations, private sector companies, industry associations and other stakeholders to propose technology solutions in advance of the event.
HHS awards more than $96 million in behavioral health grants
The Department of Health and Human Services yesterday announced that it will award $96.7 million in grants through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration for various behavioral health services.
A very normal day in L.A., plus the AP Top 25
The Pulse Newsletter 📣 | This is The Athletic’s daily sports newsletter. Sign up here to receive The Pulse directly in your inbox. Good morning! Watch your shoelaces today. Coming up: 🫠 Inside the Lakers’ drama 🙃 The Clippers, too 🏈 AP Top 25 takes In 1979, Jerry Buss bought the Lakers. For 46 years, even after Buss died in 2013, the team’s ownership remained relatively stable. To describe the last 14 months as “chaos” feels light, at this point. Let’s just do a quick timeline recap, punctuated by yesterday’s wild updates: June 2025: The Buss family...
Rosie O’Donnell sends message to Trump while hosting ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live’: ‘Hi, I know you’re watching’
Rosie O’Donnell made her return to TV on Monday, as she guest-hosted ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live.’ And, yes, Trump was a topic.
A therapy that “rewrites” childhood memories can ease fear of failure
Childhood criticism can leave people carrying a fear of failure long into adulthood, but new research suggests those emotional patterns may be surprisingly flexible. Young adults who revisited painful memories through imagery-based therapy showed lasting reductions in fear, guilt, sadness, and stress.
Raccoon crashes through ceiling of Allegheny County business, leaving owner with canceled orders
“I thought I was dreaming when I saw glowy eyes.” A raccoon broke into a Carrick business, leaving behind a mess that forced the owner to temporarily close.
ICYMI: Sen. Banks Joins All Indiana Politics
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Yesterday, Senator Jim Banks (R-Ind.) joined All Indiana Politics to discuss AI oversight, Food-is-Medicine initiatives, the ongoing conflict in Iran, and the Protect College Sports Act. Click the image above for the full discussion. Key Excerpts on AI: Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.): “We need to better understand the security threats that are occurring in some of these labs, and that’s the […]
Opinion | Yes, Higher Ed Shapes Students’ Politics. Here’s How.
Different disciplines have different ideological effects.
3 2028 QBs that could eventually commit to Michigan Football
Michigan Football has its eyes set on multiple quarterbacks in the 2028 recruiting class, including a Georgia commit who’s also the No. 2 player in the country:
Can 5 minutes of movement have health benefits? A new study says yes
Five-minute walks every hour appear to be a realistic and effective way to mitigate the effects of prolonged sitting, writes columnist Carrie Dennett.
A French Start-Up, Inbolt, Makes Robots See, and Work, Better
Inbolt, a French start-up that sells robot vision systems, helped a Stellantis plant in Detroit become a top performer in the company.
Naturally Sparkling: The Science Behind Pet-Nat Wine
This week’s Northern Express — sister publication of The Ticker — is the Ingredients issue, featuring stories about our farmers, growers, chefs, bakers, and winemakers. In the lattermost category, a few local wineries are trying their hands at a 500-year-old winemaking process, pétillant-naturel, or pét-nat. What makes it different from traditional wine styles are three main components: …
Politics Unplugged (Full Episode) August 16, 2026
From GOP teen to Dem candidate, Jacob Martinez eyes District 9; consultants Grodsky & Dell'Artino break down the Governor's race and Mark Kelly's likely 2028 presidential bid.
Foundation Work Underway at 1600 Edgewater in Miami’s Arts & Entertainment District
Florida YIMBY says "Yes In My Backyard" to positive new development in Florida.
We study autism and vaccines. Trump’s executive order rests on flawed science.
The new childhood vaccine schedule and 6G, in readers' eyes.
Pork and politics: Canadians bring trade pitch to Iowa state fair
DES MOINES — Pork is a popular topic at the Iowa State Fair as hungry patrons mow down on barbecue and curious children gaze with wide eyes at the state's biggest pig.
Shields eyes Price after dominant middleweight return
Claressa Shields makes a powerful return to middleweight, stopping Kaye Scott in the sixth round to reclaim the WBA and WBC titles in Atlanta.
Yessss Drew Gilbert
Drew Gilbert had never hit lead-off before. The vast majority of his plate appearances this season have come out of the 8th and 9th spots in the batting order. There’s plenty of reasons why Gilbert wouldn’t be seriously considered to bat first when constructing a Major League line-up. Mainly, he doesn’t hit for average, he […]
Kingdom Hearts IV – extended D23 2026 ‘Coco’ trailer
Square Enix has released an extended version of the new Kingdom Hearts IV trailer that debuted alongside the game’s release window and Coco world reveal yesterday.
Reagan’s PATCO Showdown ignited Colorado labor backlash
Forty-five years ago this week: “It’s the old Nixon reaction as far as I’m concerned. He thinks he’s the Great God Almighty and can do no wrong … in the eyes of the public,” said Zelda Bransted, spokesman of the Colorado AFL-CIO. “I sincerely hope it backfires.” Bransted made the comment in response to President […]
'Yesteryear' and the tradwife trend hold a message
It turns out keeping chickens and growing vegetables don’t just drive social-media clicks: They’re also habits associated with better long-term health.
Land Rover’s building a limited-edition, road-legal V8 Defender Dakar
And yes, you want one. For what reason, we are unsure, but you want one
One UI 9.5 leaks continue: Samsung eyes a glass UI with shiny edges and 'depth'
Think Liquid Glass.
Gemini app gets 3.7 Flash & setting to turn off corner media watermarks
When Gemini 3.7 Flash launched yesterday morning, Google said it was just powering the Spark agent in the Gemini app. The updated model...
Is This Air Safe to Breathe? How Wildfire Smoke Impacts Your Health
Hazy skies and irritated eyes are both hallmark indicators of wildfire smoke in the air. But even if skies are clear, can nearby wildfires still impact health? According to a recent advisory from the New Mexico Department of Health (NMDOH), smoke...
AI needs science’s search history
“Actually, that’s where the gold is,” said Alasdair Russell, my graduate school friend who leads a pre-clinical genome editing group at Cambridge. He was talking about the winding road of science that is omitted from published papers. “When you’re discussing how to do the experiment, and why this way is better than another way, and what does the data really mean? I know what it shows, but what does it mean?” At RAAIS 2026, he described how his group has begun logging the twisting path of discovery as it happens, recording the verbal and written exchanges that normally disappear. Ideas become nodes in a living graph: they branch when a meeting produces two plausible experiments, merge when separate lines of evidence converge, and go dark when someone quietly stops pursuing them. In his implementation, one agent scores novelty, while another tries to learn “how scientists think and how they navigate through a complex world of data,” so that high-potential nodes can trigger deeper investigation. As frontier AI labs deploy agents toward scientific discovery, giving AI authentic scientific taste remains a trillion-dollar dilemma. The bottleneck is that the record we have kept for centuries of science might be insufficient to get us there. The experiments that never make the paper Peter Medawar, 1960 Nobel laureate and “father of transplantation,” asked in 1963 whether the scientific paper was a fraud, and answered yes: the form of the paper misrepresents the thinking that produced it. Sixty years on, the diagnosis is unchanged. A paper presents a clean progression from hypothesis to result to conclusion. Lost along the way are the unconventional theories, the abandoned or unaffordable methods, and the underwhelming and inconclusive data. It reads like a browser history with every dead end deleted: the ten open tabs, the four rephrased queries, the wrong turn down a subforum. All scrubbed, leaving one clean path from question to answer as the canonical path. What has changed since then is that the discarded material is now worth something. No high-impact journal wants these artifacts, but raw trial and error is the most likely source of the training data required to develop scientific intuition, or what researchers call taste. Earlier attempts to capture the discards were motivated by scientific integrity. The Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine launched in 2002 to publish rigorous studies that disputed established models or exposed ineffective treatments. Its archive preserved negative conclusions after they had become papers, rather than the live alternatives and arguments that produced them. BioMed Central closed it in 2017, saying the mission had been served now that other journals publish null results. A less generous reading is that in fifteen years it published around 200 papers because almost nobody wants to read a negative result, let alone write one up when it will not count toward academic tenure. AI models are different. Even an uninteresting negative result can be useful, provided it is labeled. Earlier this year, Anthropic put a version of this to the test. The company pulled 129 decision points from real Claude Code sessions between January and March 2026, showed models the work up to a human detour, and asked what should happen next. Claude Mythos Preview beat the human choice 64% of the time, while Opus 4.5 managed 51%. The comparison was tilted toward the models because Anthropic deliberately chose moments where the human decision had room for improvement. On 127 further scenarios where the human action was already strong, the models improved on it only about 20% of the time. The study was possible because Anthropic’s researchers work inside a tool that logs by default. The reasoning, detours and outcome are produced in the same working environment. Biology has no equivalent. Its reasoning happens in hallways, at benches, in Slack threads and on whiteboards, while the outcome arrives weeks later somewhere else. The record has to emerge from the work itself. Ask scientists to reconstruct it afterwards and we’ll create another polished account. Subscribe A log is not a label Before any of this becomes training data, a negative result has to say what failed. The first paper published in the Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine examined 234 negative studies across five leading medical journals. Only 30% discussed statistical power, and half clearly defined a primary outcome. Tell a model an experiment failed, without telling it whether the assay was underpowered, a reagent had degraded, or the hypothesis was simply wrong, and it will learn noise with confidence. Decision histories have a second missing label too. When a lab considers five experiments and runs one, only the chosen branch returns an outcome. The other four are experimental counterfactuals. Researchers call this the selective labels problem: the data reveal results only for the actions someone chose to take. Such a record can teach a model to imitate a lab’s taste, but it cannot establish that the taste was good. It also smuggles local constraints into general lessons. A lab that never ran cryo-EM because it did not own a microscope teaches a model that cryo-EM is rarely the right call. Alasdair’s nodes preserve the candidate set, which is the necessary first step. To be useful, each decision record needs six fields: The evidence available at that moment, and nothing that arrived later. The candidates considered, including the ones dismissed in a sentence. For each candidate: the expected result, the confidence attached to it, and the cost in time and money. The route chosen, and the reason. What happened next. How the evidence changed the scientist’s view. These must be timestamped before the outcome, because hindsight turns uncertainty into inevitability. Disagreement also has to survive. Averaging three scientists into one clean rationale reproduces exactly the information loss we are trying to fix. But there is an obvious failure mode here. Once decisions are logged and scored, people log for the record post-facto. Anyone who has watched an electronic lab notebook fill up with retrospective tidying knows how quickly a research tool becomes a compliance exercise. A record that costs a scientist ten minutes of honest reflection per decision is worth far more than one that costs an hour of performance. A publication initiative called Registered Reports offers a useful starting point. Here, researchers submit their rationale, methods and analysis plan for peer review before the data exist, and the journal commits in principle to publish if they follow the approved plan. Nature has now expanded the format across every field it covers. This approach to paper writing timestamps intent before the outcome, but it freezes one plan. A useful search history must also preserve how the plan changed, which alternatives were rejected, when, and on what evidence. Subscribe Run the runner-up Autonomous labs show what happens when decisions and outcomes are connected in a loop. Liverpool’s mobile robotic chemist ran 688 experiments over eight days in a ten-variable formulation space. A batched Bayesian search used each result to choose the next experiments and found photocatalyst mixtures six times more active than the starting formulations. Every completed experiment changed what the system did next. The robot optimized within a goal and search space that humans had already chosen. It did not decide which scientific question mattered. So what this work demonstrates is narrower, but still useful: a search history pays off when the options return standardized outcomes quickly. Open-ended biology is harder because branches can take weeks and the discarded alternatives may never be run. Some exploration therefore has to be bought. Where two branches are plausible and the stakes justify the cost, a lab should sometimes run the runner-up. Otherwise the record captures what today’s scientists usually chose and stays silent on what they systematically overlooked. A funder could ring-fence a small fraction of a grant for the branch not taken, provided that the decision record and the outcome are both deposited. That costs money, but so does having every lab rediscover the same abandoned path. Test whether taste transfers When it comes time to evaluate if our new AI system exhibits taste, the comparison should run across laboratories and fields. At selected decision points in a live research campaign, we should freeze the six fields: the evidence, the candidates, expected results, confidence, costs and the choice made. Experts then rank the options before the outcomes are known, and those outcomes are checked independently later. We could give models one of two diets - papers alone, or papers plus decision histories - and ask them to rank the next experiment on unfamiliar projects. Then, we score information gained per dollar and week, calibration, and how quickly weak branches are abandoned. If histories improve choices only inside the lab that produced them, they amount to useful organizational memory. If they improve choices on unfamiliar problems elsewhere, Alasdair’s group will have captured something science has never managed to write down: a transferable record of taste. Until that happens, a scientific search history is a promising record, not yet a training set.
Apple's 2026 Back to School Offer is Now Live Across Europe
Apple's annual Back to School promotion is now live in the United Kingdom and 18 other European countries: Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Turkey. The European launch follows the company's back-to-school promotion rollout in the United States and several other regions and territories last month.
Yesterdays: Trapping wolves for science in Glacier
Tests for the new Spruce Park damsite were underway. Plans were for a 350-foot tall earthen dam, with a 2,600 acre-foot reservoir. The dam was never built and today the site is in the Great Bear Wilderness.
Bears' Ben Johnson eyes more than just Super Bowl: 'I want to have the highest-scoring offense ever'
Have physicists finally discovered glueballs? New evidence points to yes.
“It’s the strongest evidence yet that particles dominated by a glueball component can exist in nature.”...
Honor Launches Its Long-Awaited Robot Phone And Yes It Can Wiggle At You
The big news with Honor's latest is the automated pop-up camera gimbal.
Lane Kiffin Feeling ‘Magnitude’ of LSU Job Entering Crucial Season
As the new college football season gets going soon, all eyes will be on the LSU Tigers and head coach Lane Kiffin.After a controversial exit from Ole Miss last year, Kiffin’s new role with the Tigers has been discussed more than ever. There is more pressure on Kiffin entering this season than he’s ever faced […] The post Lane Kiffin Feeling ‘Magnitude’ of LSU Job Entering Crucial Season appeared first on HEAVY.
Apple Extends 2026 Back to School Promotion Until September 24
Apple today extended its 2026 Back to School Promotion until September 24, which means it will last almost a month longer than planned. The extension is applicable in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and multiple countries in Asia. The Back to School promotion offers a free item or gift card when students or educators purchase an eligible Mac or iPad model, plus an educational discount.
Snyder's Soapbox: Yes, the Dodgers are a villain, and that's good for MLB
Any form of entertainment is more fun when there's a bad guy
The U.S. Healthcare System is Already Mostly Socialized
Now that Abdul El-Sayed is the Democratic nominee for Michigan’s open Senate seat, the outcome of this crucial race will depend mainly on two things: Whether Republicans succeed in demonizing El-Sayed because he’s brown and a Muslim, and whether they succeed in demonizing him as a left-wing radical. I will defer for the now the question of whether bigotry will be effective this year, although I will address it another day. What I want to address instead is El-Sayed’s signature issue — healthcare. Yes, El-Sayed advocates Medicare for All, a position the usual suspects denounce as “socialism.” I will get to the politics of his stance soon. Today, however, I want to talk about the substance. We should be clear that El-Sayed doesn’t even call himself a socialist. On the contrary, he explicitly disavows the label, saying “I’m a capitalist who just knows about capitalism”. In fact, as I explained in a previous post, the policies that El-Sayed advocates qualify him as a social democrat, not a socialist. Still, El-Sayed advocates a system under which the government would pay almost all medical expenses. Isn’t that socialism? Well, if that is the criterion then much of U.S. healthcare is already socialist. In fact, the government’s role is so large that U.S. healthcare is better described as partially privatized socialism than as anything resembling a free market. Let’s start with the raw numbers on health insurance, which pays the bulk of Americans’ medical expenses. Americans receive health insurance either from private companies or from public programs, overwhelmingly Medicare and Medicaid. Here’s what the breakdown of coverage and spending between private and public looked like in 2024: While a majority of Americans with health insurance get it from private companies, well over 100 million of us are covered by government programs instead. And these government programs pay more total dollars for medical bills than the private insurers do. Why do government programs that cover a minority of the population account for a majority of health insurers’ outlays? Mainly because Medicare covers seniors, and we’re expensive. Also, while Medicaid covers many younger Americans, disabled and elderly beneficiaries account for most of its spending. Even by the raw numbers, then, U.S. health insurance looks as much public as private. But that understates the government’s role: Private health insurance in the U.S. is both highly regulated and heavily subsidized. This is obviously true for the insurance coverage purchased by tens of millions of Americans through the exchanges established by the Affordable Care Act. But employment-based health insurance, which covers 161 million Americans, is far more of a government creation than most people realize. For employment-based insurance exists largely because of huge implicit government subsidies that come with major strings attached. Here’s how that works. If your employer pays you $10,000, that’s taxable income. But if your employer pays $10,000 toward a company health insurance plan that meets certain criteria, it isn’t taxable. That’s a huge effective subsidy, running at more than $300 billion a year. Take that subsidy into account, along with the more than $100 billion per year spent subsidizing policies purchased under the ACA, as well as the outlays on Medicare and Medicaid, and net effect is that the government pays for more than two-thirds of Americans’ health insurance. Granted, there are strings attached. Roughly speaking, employment-based health plans can’t discriminate based on medical history — that is, they can’t deny coverage to employees with pre-existing conditions — and they also can’t offer the plans only to highly compensated employees — a health plan that is only for the C-suite is considered taxable income. So given the restrictions of the federal tax code, employer-based health insurance is a lot like Obamacare, which also prohibits discrimination based on medical history and provides subsidies to make insurance affordable to lower-paid workers. The fact is that virtually all of private healthcare insurance is already well under some form of government control through regulation and tax subsidies. How should we think about this system? First of all, is Medicare socialist? Don’t tell anyone, but the way Medicare operates — it covers every senior’s medical expenses, whatever they turn out to be, while being funded by taxes that depend on one’s income — could be summarized by the old Marxist slogan “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” And back in 1961, when Ronald Reagan was the face of a last-ditch effort by the American Medical Association to block the creation of Medicare, he denounced Medicare as “socialized medicine” and warned that it would destroy our freedom. In reality, American freedom survived until Jan. 20, 2025, while Medicare is immensely popular, with an 82 percent favorable rating in the most recent KFF survey. Medicaid, government health insurance for lower-income Americans, comes in at 73 percent. This is in sharp contrast to public views about private insurers, who are widely disliked if not hated and accused of denying essential care. Furthermore, if Medicare is socialism, then the whole U.S. health insurance system, with the government paying most of the bills and placing conditions on private insurers, is almost equally socialist. If you insist on calling any program the government pays for and regulates socialist, then U.S. healthcare would best be described as a partially privatized form of socialism. And one must ask, what is the point of the part that is privatized? Do private insurers add anything positive? Or are they simply parasites, skimming off money that could have been paying for care? The case for viewing insurers as parasites is strong. Many Medicare benefits are now delivered via Medicare Advantage, that is, plans paid for by the government but run through insurance companies. MedPAC, an independent advisory commission, estimates that last year Medicare Advantage plans were overpaid by $84 billion, thanks to practices such as “upcoding,” in which patients’ health problems are overstated to get larger sums from Medicare. Assessing the waste from employer-based insurance is harder, but most evidence suggests that private insurers have substantially higher administrative costs than Medicare does. Furthermore, the complexity of private insurance, with multiple payers all trying to deny care when they can, is a huge burden both on providers — doctors, nurses, and hospitals — and on patients. What do private insurers offer to compensate for these costs? One must go through intellectual contortions to avoid the conclusion that they are, in fact, parasites. Which brings me back to El-Sayed. In supporting Medicare for All, he’s basically calling for an end to the partial, parasitic privatization of a healthcare system that is already hugely dependent on public funding. When one looks at it that way, it’s not at all a radical proposal. Admittedly, the political lift requires overcoming the opposition to higher taxes to pay for Medicare for All. Political realism rather than economics was the reason I and many other progressives supported Obamacare, with all its complexities, rather than demanding an immediate move to Medicare for All. But the political calculus may very well have shifted since the 2000s, as Americans are fed up with a system of unaffordable premiums, rampant claim denials, and byzantine claim administration. Moreover, funding healthcare insurance through taxation would allow for a much more progressive distribution of the cost. That is, compared to the present system, middle-income households would pay less as high-income households would pay more. And the U.S. would stop wasting large sums on pointless administrative costs. So let’s be clear: El-Sayed’s healthcare platform is perfectly reasonable on the merits of cost, fairness and health efficacy. And with private insurers never more hated, while millions of Americans are losing their health insurance, 2026 may be its time. MUSICAL CODA
Someone Made a Terrific Deal in the Peacock/YouTube Premium Partnership…But Who?
(Welcome to the “Most Important Story of the Week”, my bi-weekly strategy column analyzing the most important (but often not buzziest) news story of the last two weeks. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. Please subscribe.) I hope everyone around the world suffering from record heat waves is doing okay. The temperature is already up in Southern California, but obviously not nearly as bad as parts of Europe. With a super El Nińo coming this year, I worry it will get even worse. Yes, we know what’s causing this heat—it’s the carbon, duh—but we really aren’t making enough progress. I’m not “environmental strategy guy”, but if I were, I’d have some ideas of what I’d try. Honestly, for years I’ve been intrigued by the work of the folks at MEER—whose plan, super simply, is to put up mirrors to reflect heat (while continuing the important work of decarbonization)—but I’m frustrated this idea hasn’t made more progress. (Other geo-engineering groups seem to get better press.) With heat like this—cancelling events, hurting economies and, most importantly, killing people—it seems like the time to push solutions! The “mirrors on the ground” solution has barely been tried.1 While entertainment companies may not “feel the heat”, lots of outdoors/experiential industries—concerts, theme parks and so on—will. Even movie theaters could benefit, since mirrors could help lower AC costs, which I imagine is not an insignificant expense, especially in the hotter areas of the country. So I do think the entertainment industry should prioritize this issue. Anyways, let’s get back into the entertainment strategy. I was about to write, “Hey, this week we don’t have any mergers and entertainment news to dive into,” but that’s not really true, since we had more updates on Paramount-Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery. But the big story of the week involves a streamer and a Big Tech platform bundling their respective streamers. So I’ll write about the updates on Paramount buying Warner Bros., Versant making some moves, and a whole lot more. But we start with a surprising deal: Peacock licensing their content to YouTube Premium. Let’s dive in! Subscribe Most Important Story of the Week - Peacock’s Pricey Premium Partnership The story of the week is Comcast’s2 NBC-Universal’s Peacock making a deal with Google’s YouTube’s YouTube Premium subscription product to embed their content. And I’ll say this up front: Someone made a terrific deal. The question is who. And I’ll be honest: I don’t know. Let me explain why, including why this deal exists, the pros and cons for each side, the biggest unknown, and what that says about the streaming wars. Customers Love Bundles (But YouTube Has Its Own Issues) We’re just getting started with this issue, but the rest is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so if you’d like to find out… Why customers love bundles… But why I’m worried about YouTube’s integration... How Peacock is trading scale for control… And the reason they likely made this deal... The odd budget math for this deal... Whether or not I think the Paramount-Skydance/WBD deal is more likely after the latest settlement... Versant making moves and why that’s good for Hollywood… Another distributor going out of business… ...and a whole lot more! ...please subscribe! We can only keep doing this great work with your support.
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Viewpoint: Europe needs a new scientific contract
The White House's new science strategy should be required reading in the Berlaymont and every European capital.Not because Europe should copy it. Parts of it should concern Europeans deeply. But because it asks the question Europe has so far avoided while steadily losing ground in the global race for technological leadership.Europe already possesses many of the world's finest universities, scientists and research-intensive companies. It produces world-leading research in fields ranging from quantum technologies and biotechnology to climate science. Yet time and again Europe generates the scientific breakthroughs while others build the companies, industries and strategic advantages around them, particularly in digital technologies. Increasingly, we find ourselves regulating technologies whose underlying capabilities were developed elsewhere.This is not primarily a scientific failure. It is an institutional one.The settlement that shaped modern science policy emerged after the Second World War. In Science, the Endless Frontier, Vannevar Bush argued that governments should invest in fundamental research while protecting scientists from political direction. Public investment was justified precisely because no government, university or company could predict where the next transformative discovery would emerge.That scientific contract served liberal democracies extraordinarily well. It underpinned decades of advances in medicine, computing, energy and communications, but the world for which it was designed no longer exists.Artificial intelligence is transforming not only technology but the production of knowledge itself. Advanced chips, computing power, data and scientific instruments have become strategic assets. Scientific knowledge now diffuses globally almost instantly. Competitive advantage increasingly lies not in making discoveries first, but in possessing the infrastructure, capital, engineering capability and institutions required to translate those ideas into products, industries and strategic advantage.The old boundaries between science, industrial policy, national security and geopolitics have largely disappeared. Dual-use technologies now underpin both economic power and military deterrence.The US has recognised this shift. In July, the White House published Science: A New Golden Age, a comprehensive attempt to rethink the relationship between science and national power. The report builds on Bush's legacy, but departs from his framework in important ways. Science is no longer treated simply as the source of future discoveries. It is presented as the foundation of economic resilience, technological leadership and national security. AI, advanced infrastructure and the capacity to build become as important as discovery itself.Yet the report also reveals a striking paradox. The same administration calling for “a new golden age” of US science has simultaneously proposed deep cuts to the federal research enterprise while expanding political influence over the allocation of public research funding. Europe should therefore distinguish between the report's diagnosis and its prescription. The diagnosis, that science has become a strategic asset, is compelling. But the prescription is self-defeating. Long-term technological leadership depends on strong universities, academic freedom and the institutional autonomy that makes scientific discovery possible. This distinction matters. Bush's achievement was never simply to make science serve national strength. It was to establish a division of labour in which governments invested in research without attempting to direct discovery itself. Scientific breakthroughs emerge precisely because researchers retain the freedom to pursue questions whose value cannot yet be demonstrated and whose conclusions cannot be anticipated.Neither China, nor the USAs science becomes more strategically important, the temptation to politicise it inevitably grows. But scientific freedom is not an obstacle to technological leadership, it is an essential precondition.China represents the opposite model. For decades it has integrated science, manufacturing, infrastructure and industrial policy into a single national strategy. Its ability to mobilise resources around critical technologies is formidable. But it does so within an authoritarian system where scientific priorities are increasingly inseparable from political power.Europe should imitate neither model. It should learn from the strategic ambition of the US without importing its growing politicisation of science. And it should learn from China's capacity to build without adopting its concentration of power.Instead, Europe needs a scientific contract of its own. Bush's scientific contract protected the freedom to discover because the defining challenge of the 20th century was producing new knowledge. Europe's next scientific contract must preserve that freedom while ensuring that scientific discoveries can be converted into technological, industrial and strategic capability. Because in a transactional world, Europe's freedom to shape its own future depends on its capacity to build it.Related articlesThe US ‘golden age’ science strategy: what Europeans need to knowEuropean researchers sound the alarm that Trump rule changes will hit cooperationNIH turmoil risks reciprocal EU-US access to health research fundingThis does not mean subordinating free science to competitiveness or industrial policy. On the contrary. Scientific autonomy remains the first principle of Europe's next scientific contract. Governments should not direct scientific discovery. Their responsibility is to ensure that Europe's scientific, industrial, financial and regulatory institutions work together rather than in isolation.Meeting that responsibility requires far more than research funding. European researchers need access to world-class computing infrastructure, advanced laboratories, shared datasets and scientific facilities. Innovative companies need patient capital, testing environments and a genuine single market in which they can scale without facing 27 different regulatory regimes. Public procurement must evolve from purchasing existing technologies to creating markets for new ones. Regulators must become partners in experimentation rather than guardians of yesterday's rules.A connecting architectureEurope does not need to invent the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) model from scratch. Britain's Aria, Germany's Sprind and Wellcome Leap already show that Europe can build institutions capable of taking high-risk, mission-oriented bets while preserving democratic accountability. The challenge now is not to create more isolated initiatives, but to connect them to Europe's broader scientific, industrial and financial system so that breakthrough discoveries can scale.Above all, Europe must stop treating research, innovation, industrial policy, finance and security as separate policy domains. The challenge is no longer to create excellent institutions in each of these fields, but to make them work as one European innovation system. Europe's strength will increasingly depend not on excellence within institutions, but on excellence across them.Europe's ambition should be neither to imitate the US nor to emulate China. It should demonstrate that scientific freedom, democratic legitimacy and technological capability are not competing objectives, but mutually reinforcing strengths. In an age of geopolitical rivalry, Europe's greatest advantage may ultimately be its ability to attract the world's best talent by combining scientific freedom, democratic openness and technological ambition.Bush's scientific contract helped define the 20th century because it protected the freedom to discover. Europe's challenge is not to abandon that achievement but to extend it. The defining task of Europe's next scientific contract is to preserve the freedom to discover while building Europe's capacity to translate scientific discovery into technological power.Kaare Nielsen is founder of Pomus, a Danish think tank on science and innovation.