AUSTIN, Texas—Even as a cold night started to settle outside Tesla‘s headquarters here on Saturday, a group of cryptocurrency entrepreneurs had no plans to leave until Elon Musk, the man they named their currency after, accepted a 12,000-pound sculpture of a Mr. Musk-headed goat riding a rocket. It is the latest stunt in the cryptocurrency space, where jokes and memes about digital currencies regularly flood social media. But a 6-ton sculpture as a marketing gimmick isn’t so common. The creators of Elon GOAT say the name of their cryptocurrency was inspired by their respect for Mr. Musk. They and his other fans think he is the “greatest of all time,” or a “GOAT.” They took the admiration literally, spending $600,000 to create a sculpture of Mr. Musk’s head, wearing a gold-plated dogecoin necklace on a goat’s body. The rocket can move, pointing to the sky as if it is taking off. Gas lines run through it so that flames can shoot out of the back. They trucked it to Tesla Inc.’s headquarters, in hopes Mr. Musk would accept the gift. The creators are calling called the event “GOATSgiving.” But about two hours after the co-founders of Elon GOAT parked the sculpture right outside the Tesla building, there was no sign of Mr. Musk.

Cuban exiles continue the family business

A group of Florida-bound migrants, including almost 50 children, who reached the Florida Keys in a rickety sailboat from Haiti on Monday, resulting in a frantic federal, state and local rescue effort, have been returned to the Caribbean nation

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.