timelets

In the heavily censored realm of the Chinese internet, where no group is allowed to be very organized, one set of intellectuals has made themselves heard. They are loosely affiliated writers who refer to themselves as the Industrial Party. Their views are simple to summarize: that nation-states ruthlessly compete with each other; that science and technology are the decisive forces in this Darwinian competition; and that therefore the state must be organized around the pursuit of science and technology. They patriotically view the Communist Party as the world’s most capable political organization for this pursuit.

The Industrial Party tends not to cite a broad range of thinkers, only forceful leaders like Mao or Stalin who repelled invaders and established an industrial base. It is a worship of strength through technology.

--- Daniel Wang. “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.”

“a collection of essays called The Hall of Uselessness by the Belgian sinologist Simon Leys. In one of these essays, “The Chinese Attitude Towards the Past,” Leys considers the construction techniques of Chinese builders.

Builders everywhere have attempted to overcome the erosion of time. Ancient Egypt and medieval Europe built great pyramids and cathedrals out of stone. The approach in China, as Leys points out, is for builders to yield to the onrush of time by using eminently perishable, and indeed fragile, materials. By building temples out of wood with paneling sometimes made of paper, Chinese architecture has built-in obsolescence, demanding frequent renewal. “Eternity should not inhabit the building,” Leys writes. “It should inhabit the builder.” Rather than using the strongest materials, Chinese builders have embraced transience to ensure the eternity of spiritual designs.

--- Daniel Wang. “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.”

“I came to realize the inadequacy of twentieth-century labels like capitalist, socialist, or, worst of all, neoliberal. They are no longer up to the task of helping us understand the world, if they ever were. Capitalist America intrudes upon the free market with a dense program of regulation and taxation while providing substantial (albeit imperfect) redistributive policies.

Socialist China detains union organizers, levies light taxes, and provides a threadbare social safety net. The greatest trick that the Communist Party ever pulled off is masquerading as leftist. While Xi Jinping and the rest of the Politburo mouth Marxist pieties, the state is enacting a right-wing agenda that Western conservatives would salivate over: administering limited welfare, erecting enormous barriers to immigration, and enforcing traditional gender roles—where men have to be macho and women have to bear their children.”

-- Daniel Wang. “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.”

A joint toxicological investigation concluded that Navalny, who died while serving a sentence on what his supporters and Western governments said were trumped-up charges, was most likely poisoned with epibatidine—a highly potent toxin derived from South American poison dart frogs. The substance doesn’t occur naturally in Russia.

“Navalny died in prison, meaning the Russian state had the means, motive and opportunity to administer this poison,” the governments of the U.K., France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands said in a joint statement.

Navalny, the most prominent domestic critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, appeared in good health and high spirits in video footage recorded days before his death at the notoriously harsh penal colony known as “Polar Wolf.” Officials said the symptoms he reportedly experienced—paralysis, acute pain and respiratory failure—are consistent with epibatidine poisoning.

https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/navalny-killed-by-poison-frog-toxin-european-governments-say-7ca4b388

Three times a year, the forecasting platform Metaculus hosts a tournament that is known to have especially difficult questions. It generally attracts the more serious forecasters, Ben Shindel, a materials scientist who ranked third among participants in a recent competition, told me. Last year, at its Summer Cup, a London-based start-up called Mantic entered an AI prediction engine.

A few months later, the guesses from Mantic’s prediction engine and the other tournament participants were scored against the real-life outcomes and one another. The AI placed eighth out of more than 500 entrants, a new record for a bot.

Mantic’s prediction engine combines a bunch of LLMs and assigns each one different tasks. One might serve as an expert on a database of election results. Another might be asked to scan weather data, economic outcomes, or box-office receipts, depending on the question that it’s attacking. The models work together as a team to generate a final prediction.

On Metaculus, a group of forecasters has taken to estimating when AIs will have the chops to out-predict an elite team of humans. Last January, they said there was about a 75 percent chance this would happen by 2030. Now they think it’s more like 95 percent.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/02/ai-prediction-human-forecasters/685955/

Federal prosecutors in Washington sought and failed on Tuesday to secure an indictment against six Democratic lawmakers who posted a video this fall that enraged President Trump by reminding active-duty members of the military and intelligence community that they were obligated to refuse illegal orders.

It was remarkable that the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington — led by Jeanine Pirro, a longtime ally of Mr. Trump’s — authorized prosecutors to go into a grand jury and ask for an indictment of the six members of Congress, all of whom had served in the military or the nation’s spy agencies.

But it was even more remarkable that a group of ordinary citizens sitting on the grand jury in Federal District Court in Washington forcefully rejected Mr. Trump’s bid to label their expression of dissent as a criminal act warranting prosecution.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/10/us/politics/trump-democrats-illegal-orders-pirro.html

South Texas is a heightened example of what contractors are facing across the country in areas where U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity has intensified. Home builders in Minnesota relayed similar experiences of raids picking up whole work crews, even those with legal documentation, said Grace Keliher, executive vice president of the Builders Association of Minnesota. Nationally, a third of commercial contractors reported being affected by immigration-enforcement actions in the past six months, according to a January report by trade group Associated General Contractors of America.

Two guards at a nearby immigration detention center said they frequently see detainees come in still wearing dusty work clothes from construction jobsites. A significant portion of the men they now guard have valid work permits, they said, which they haven’t seen in previous administrations, but those detainees still wait weeks to see a judge before being released.

Because of that, people are afraid to work whether they have legal authorization or not, a reality that has hit the industry and broader regional economy hard. Paul Rodriguez, CEO of Valley Land Title, estimated that residential construction activity fell 30% in recent months in Hidalgo County.

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/texas-immigration-raids-economy-87e23e2e