As to be expected, the request to collaborate didn’t end well.

Each weekday morning before dawn, hundreds of people stand outside the main immigration courthouse in Manhattan in a line that often curves around the building. They arrive as early as 10 p.m. the night before, with some people wrapping themselves in cardboard to brace themselves against the cold. They covet a spot inside the federal office building, most for mandatory check-ins with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Gabriel Acosta, from Venezuela, said he arrived at 4 a.m. “Because I have to,” he said. “They could deport me,” another man added. By around 7:15 a.m., police and guards cut off the line. “You gotta come back before 5 in the morning, OK?” a guard told a group of people huddled outside in the chilly morning air. “And they only take 500 people.”

When the history of American hardship is written in some distant decade, two recent events may capture the whipsaw forces of the age. Child poverty fell to a record low. And the program that did the most to reduce it vanished. The story of that temporary program — technically, a tax-credit expansion but more plainly a series of monthly checks to most families with children — was extraordinary in every way. A guaranteed income in a country long resistant to one, the expanded child tax credit emerged from obscurity to win support from most of the Democratic Party, aided millions of low- and middle-income families during the pandemic and helped cut child poverty nearly in half. Then it died, as President Biden’s efforts to preserve it drew unified Republican opposition and the defection of a crucial Senate Democrat. Critics called the monthly payments of up to $300 per child an expensive welfare scheme that would deter parents from working by providing cash aid regardless of whether they had jobs. The checks have ended, but the battle has not. Supporters say new evidence shows the payments lowered hardship and nurtured children without reducing parental employment. Some Democrats hope to revive payments to small groups of parents as part of a year-end tax deal, and despite Republicans taking control of the House in January, restoring the full program remains a long-term Democratic goal.

EU officials attack Joe Biden over sky-high gas prices, weapons sales and trade as Vladimir Putin’s war threatens to destroy Western unity.

Ohio State University hit pause earlier this week on the construction of part of its new inpatient hospital tower after substantial cracks were discovered in a concrete, but the tower did not sink because of it as had been stated in a local Twitter post. The structural engineer of record and an additional third-party engineer examined the cracks, which were found Monday morning and prompted the university to halt steel work on the $1.79 billion tower at its Wexner Medical Center. Pictures of a cracked concrete column claiming to be from inside the hospital circulated on a Twitter post earlier this week, along with reports that the new hospital tower sank nine inches last weekend and the university was trying to enlist a team of German engineers to address the problem. Johnson said the pictures appeared to be from the worksite, but added that there was "no truth" to the reports in the Tweet by a local blogger that the tower was sinking or that the university was bringing in German engineers. The additional third-party engineer is from Chicago, he said.

Half of Twitter's top 100 advertisers appear to no longer be advertising on the website. A new report states that these 50 advertisers have spent almost $2 billion on Twitter ads since 2020.

Paul Schrade, 1924–2022

From the author of "Why Even Democrats Should Vote for Speaker Ryan" (2016)

Texas-based fintech GloriFi, which describes itself as “an unapologetically pro-America, pro-freedom, pro-capitalism technology company”, is shutting down just months after launching its digital banking app.

To break open his find, Hole tried a rock saw, an angle grinder, a drill, even dousing the thing in acid. However, not even a sledgehammer could make a crack. That's because what he was trying so hard to open was no gold nugget.

The Securities and Exchange Commission was seeking information from collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX earlier this year, the Prospect has confirmed, bringing a new perspective to an effort by a bipartisan group of congressmembers to slow down that investigation. The March letter from eight House members—four Democrats and four Republicans—questioned the SEC’s authority to make informal inquiries to crypto and blockchain companies, and intimated that the requests violated federal law. Rep. Tom Emmer (R-MN), whom the Republican caucus just elected as majority whip, the number three position in the House GOP leadership, led the letter. In a contemporaneous Twitter thread, Emmer wrote: “My office has received numerous tips from crypto and blockchain firms that SEC Chair @GaryGensler’s information reporting ‘requests’ to the crypto community are overburdensome, don’t feel particularly … voluntary … and are stifling innovation.” Some of the “Blockchain Eight,” as the Prospect termed them in March, have benefited from crypto largesse. Five of the eight members received campaign donations from FTX employees, ranging from $2,900 to $11,600. Rep. Ted Budd (R-NC), one of the signatories, received half a million dollars in support from a Super PAC created by FTX co-CEO Ryan Salame. More consequentially, Emmer was the head of the National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign arm for House Republicans, this year. The NRCC’s associated super PAC, the Congressional Leadership Fund, received $2.75 million from FTX in the 2022 cycle; $2 million from Salame in late September, and $750,000 from the company’s political action committee. That money helped House Republicans win the majority in 2022. Though FTX has been portrayed as a Democratic firm, thanks to the high profile of former co-CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, the company sprinkled around campaign donations fairly evenly, with a shade over 50 percent going directly to congressional Republicans and a shade under 50 percent to Democrats this cycle.

The world’s biggest single-building pig farm has opened in Hubei province, but critics say it will increase the risk of larger animal disease outbreaks

XFL celebrates new owners Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and Dany Garcia ahead of 2023 season. (So much to be thankful for today.)

Its underlying philosophy marries 18th-century utilitarianism with the more modern argument that people in rich nations should donate disposable income to help the global poor. But there’s also a big emphasis on math, borrowing from economics and decision theory to prioritize causes and measure potential improvements in quality of life. Early on, this cost-benefit approach produced a lot of donations for mosquito nets to prevent malaria in susceptible countries. From the beginning, however, the do-gooder group in Oxford was tied to a similar subculture in the Bay Area. The leading intellectuals of that world, like AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky, wrote for an online forum called Less Wrong, which, like effective altruism, also attracted a community of young people more interested in specific modes of argumentation than politics. Yudkowsky and Nick Bostrom, who was also at Oxford, shared a similar theoretical concern about AI development: Specifically, that once artificial intelligence became as smart as humans, things could quickly spin out of control. Their ideas might have remained a mostly intellectual exercise, worked out in white papers and online forums, if not for a handful of Silicon Valley tycoons who elevated them to a bigger stage.

Effective altruism isn’t just about donations. It aims to bring rationality to what people choose to care about.

Decades after the segregation battles of his youth, Jerry Jones has modernized the NFL’s revenue model but hasn’t hired a Black head coach.

The worst recession in US history shaped how well people would age — before they were even born. Researchers have found1 that the cells of people who were conceived during the Great Depression, which lasted from 1929 to 1939 and, at its height, saw about 25% of the US workforce unemployed, show signs of accelerated ageing.

Not content with reactivating accounts that spewed anti-trans content, Musk’s Twitter has now banned a group that organizes to protect people at LGBTQ events from far-right violence. No surprises here: Elon Musk is now devoting the powers of his rapidly dwindling workforce to reactivating the Twitter accounts of violence-promoting reactionaries suspended before he took over. On Friday, for example, he proudly announced the restoration of two accounts suspended for posting anti-transgender content. But now it seems he’s not done. As an anti-trans moral panic pushed by Musk-favored Twitter accounts like Libs of TikTok escalates, and in the wake of the massacre at Club Q, a queer club in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Musk’s regime has also banned an account run by people mobilizing against anti-LGBTQ violence. On Tuesday, Twitter suspended the account of the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, or EFJBGC—as first reported by journalist Steven Monacelli. The John Brown Gun Club assists marginalized communities in defending themselves from white supremacist and fascist violence. “John Brown Gun Club isn’t so much an organization as it is a declaration of intent and commitment to abolitionist principles,” its website states. More concretely, as its Mastodon profile describes its mission, though its members may carry firearms, it is “not a militia.” The reason given for its account suspension, an Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club contributor told The New Republic, was that it had violated Twitter rules against “hateful conduct,” with two tweets cited: a reply to the official account of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (“Mugging at gun point,” reads the reply to an unspecified CBP post) and another post with what seems like a retort to the perpetual conservative nonjoke about pronouns, “Every queer a riflethem.”

Elon Musk has his hands full these days, what with his chaotic takeover of Twitter, so I'm not sure how much involvement he will have had with Tesla's latest, and perhaps, weirdest product. No, it's not an unsteady robot or a dystopian off-road vehicle. We expect that from Tesla. It's a set of glassware. Alcohol might seem like a strange sideline for a car company, but Tesla surprised us earlier in the year by releasing its own limited-edition tequila. In a bottle shaped like a lightning bolt, obviously. Now it's released the perfect accessory for anyone who snapped up one of those $420 bottles – Tesla sipping glasses. And they're possibly the most impractical, worst designed glasses we've ever seen.

A policy proposal heading for Board of Supervisors approval next week would explicitly authorize San Francisco police to kill suspects using robots. The new policy, which defines how the SFPD is allowed to use its military-style weapons, was put together by the police department. Over the past several weeks, it has been scrutinized by supervisors Aaron Peskin, Rafael Mandelman and Connie Chan, who together comprise the Board of Supervisors Rules Committee. Peskin, chair of the committee, initially attempted to limit the SFPD’s authority over the department’s robots by inserting the sentence, “Robots shall not be used as a Use of Force against any person.” The following week, the police struck out his suggestion with a thick red line. Why is this happening now? Cities across California are currently drafting new policies on the use of military weapons by local police forces, thanks to a state law called AB 481, which passed last year. Figuring out the force options of robots is one small part of the law’s remit. The law mandates that every police force in California must annually report its stock of all military-style weapons, their cost, how they can be used, and how they were deployed in the prior year. The law gives local authorities — in San Francisco’s case, the Board of Supervisors — the ability to annually reject or accept the rules governing how the weapons are used. In its initial submission, the SFPD omitted all of its 608 semi-automatic assault rifles, 64 machine guns, and 15 submachine guns from the new use-of-force policy. According to Peskin, these were added in when he pushed back on their omission. But in the department’s latest version, which is set to come before the supervisors next week, 375 of the semi-automatic assault rifles are missing again. The rationale given for the removal of these assault rifles from the policy: The Chief of Police defines them as “standard-issue service weapons.” Others disagree with that assessment. “We don’t see regular officers walking around with assault rifles,” said Allyssa Victory, staff attorney with the criminal justice program at the ACLU of Northern California (and recent Oakland mayoral hopeful). “Just writing a policy doesn’t make it so.” “The law defines ‘military weapons,’ not the chief of police,” wrote civil rights lawyer Moyer over email. “San Francisco is not the only department to attempt to redefine ‘military weapons’ so as to justify hiding their use, costs, and upkeep from the public.”