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In Britain, where gas accounts for roughly 40 percent of electricity generation but has a disproportionate effect on its cost

if the price of beer had risen as much that of natural gas over the last year, a pint in a pub would cost £25, or about $30.

“How can you adapt to a rise like this?” said Tewdos Gebreysus, a 35-year-old Uber driver in London, who said he was now paying four times as much on his energy bills as he was at the beginning of the year.

Johnson has left it for his successor to devise a response to the skyrocketing energy costs.

She and her opponent, Rishi Sunak, reject more sweeping measures, like using state subsidies to freeze the energy price cap for two years.

at a campaign gathering with Mr. Sunak on Thursday, she said the solution to the crisis was not to throw more money carelessly at consumers. Mr. Sunak, who has proposed cutting value-added tax on energy bills, warned that without drastic action, “there’s a high risk that millions of people will fall into destitution.

Britain is far less dependent on Russian gas than Germany or other European countries. But the structure of its energy market makes it extremely sensitive to fluctuations in the market price of natural gas.

The Bank of England has predicted that inflation will peak at 13 percent in October as the new energy prices turn up in household bills. Other estimates are higher; analysts at Citibank have said the rate could reach as high as 18 percent early next year.

Britain’s opposition Labour Party recently proposed to freeze energy tariffs where they are now, paying part of the £29 billion cost by increasing the so-called windfall taxes that the Conservative government imposed this year on oil and gas giants operating in the North Sea

The leadership contest has been dominated by Ms. Truss’s promise to cut taxes, which is popular with the rank-and-file Conservative Party members who will vote for the next prime minister. But economists say it would do little to protect the most vulnerable people from the ravages of soaring energy bills.

With another hefty price increase looming in October, the public outcry over energy costs is likely to haunt the next prime minister. Unless the government develops an effective response, some analysts said, the issue could cripple the government and tilt the next election to the Labour Party.

“We have a sort of worst-of-both-worlds system,” said Jonathan Portes, a professor of a professor of economics and public policy at Kings College London. “Household prices are related to the spot market, and we sort of save up price increases and dump them on households all at once.”

Beyond the mechanics of the system, critics said Britain had lagged Germany and other European countries in urging people to reduce energy consumption and increase the efficiency of their homes and offices.

“This is the poverty of our politics,” said Tom Burke, the chairman of E3G, an environmental think tank, and a former government adviser. “You’ve got to do some financial work to address the costs in the short term, and then you’ve got to really drive forward on demand reduction in the long run.”

A person familiar with Zatko’s tenure said the company investigated Zatko’s security claims during his time there and concluded they were sensationalistic and without merit. Four people familiar with Twitter’s efforts to fight spam said the company deploys extensive manual and automated tools to both measure the extent of spam across the service and reduce it.

the whistleblower document alleges the company prioritized user growth over reducing spam, though unwanted content made the user experience worse. Executives stood to win individual bonuses of as much as $10 million tied to increases in daily users, the complaint asserts, and nothing explicitly for cutting spam.

Chief executive Parag Agrawal was “lying” when he tweeted in May that the company was “strongly incentivized to detect and remove as much spam as we possibly can,” the complaint alleges.

Zatko described his decision to go public as an extension of his previous work exposing flaws in specific pieces of software and broader systemic failings in cybersecurity. He was hired at Twitter by former CEO Jack Dorsey in late 2020 after a major hack of the company’s systems.

“I felt ethically bound. This is not a light step to take,” said Zatko, who was fired by Agrawal in January. He declined to discuss what happened at Twitter, except to stand by the formal complaint. Under SEC whistleblower rules, he is entitled to legal protection against retaliation, as well as potential monetary rewards.

“Security and privacy have long been top companywide priorities at Twitter,” said Twitter spokeswoman Rebecca Hahn. She said that Zatko’s allegations appeared to be “riddled with inaccuracies” and that Zatko “now appears to be opportunistically seeking to inflict harm on Twitter, its customers, and its shareholders.” Hahn said that Twitter fired Zatko after 15 months “for poor performance and leadership.” Attorneys for Zatko confirmed he was fired but denied it was for performance or leadership.

In 1998, Zatko had testified to Congress that the internet was so fragile that he and others could take it down with a half-hour of concentrated effort. He later served as the head of cyber grants at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon innovation unit that had backed the internet’s invention.

Overall, Zatko wrote in a February analysis for the company attached as an exhibit to the SEC complaint, “Twitter is grossly negligent in several areas of information security. If these problems are not corrected, regulators, media and users of the platform will be shocked when they inevitably learn about Twitter’s severe lack of security basics.”

Zatko’s complaint says strong security should have been much more important to Twitter, which holds vast amounts of sensitive personal data about users. Twitter has the email addresses and phone numbers of many public figures, as well as dissidents who communicate over the service at great personal risk.

This month, an ex-Twitter employee was convicted of using his position at the company to spy on Saudi dissidents and government critics, passing their information to a close aide of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in exchange for cash and gifts.

Zatko’s complaint says he believed the Indian government had forced Twitter to put one of its agents on the payroll, with access to user data at a time of intense protests in the country. The complaint said supporting information for that claim has gone to the National Security Division of the Justice Department and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Another person familiar with the matter agreed that the employee was probably an agent.

“Take a tech platform that collects massive amounts of user data, combine it with what appears to be an incredibly weak security infrastructure and infuse it with foreign state actors with an agenda, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster,” Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee,

Many government leaders and other trusted voices use Twitter to spread important messages quickly, so a hijacked account could drive panic or violence. In 2013, a captured Associated Press handle falsely tweeted about explosions at the White House, sending the Dow Jones industrial average briefly plunging more than 140 points.

The complaint — filed last month with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice, as well as the FTC — says thousands of employees still had wide-ranging and poorly tracked internal access to core company software, a situation that for years had led to embarrassing hacks, including the commandeering of accounts held by such high-profile users as Elon Musk and former presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

After a teenager managed to hijack the verified accounts of Obama, then-candidate Joe Biden, Musk and others in 2020, Twitter’s chief executive at the time, Jack Dorsey, asked Zatko to join him, saying that he could help the world by fixing Twitter’s security and improving the public conversation, Zatko asserts in the complaint.

But at Twitter Zatko encountered problems more widespread than he realized and leadership that didn’t act on his concerns, according to the complaint.

Twitter’s difficulties with weak security stretches back more than a decade before Zatko’s arrival at the company in November 2020. In a pair of 2009 incidents, hackers gained administrative control of the social network, allowing them to reset passwords and access user data. In the first, beginning around January of that year, hackers sent tweets from the accounts of high-profile users, including Fox News and Obama.

Several months later, a hacker was able to guess an employee’s administrative password after gaining access to similar passwords in their personal email account. That hacker was able to reset at least one user’s password and obtain private information about any Twitter user.

Twitter continued to suffer high-profile hacks and security violations, including in 2017, when a contract worker briefly took over Trump’s account, and in the 2020 hack, in which a Florida teen tricked Twitter employees and won access to verified accounts. Twitter then said it put additional safeguards in place.

This year, the Justice Department accused Twitter of asking users for their phone numbers in the name of increased security, then using the numbers for marketing. Twitter agreed to pay a $150 million fine for allegedly breaking the 2011 order, which barred the company from making misrepresentations about the security of personal data.

After Zatko joined the company, he found it had made little progress since the 2011 settlement, the complaint says. The complaint alleges that he was able to reduce the backlog of safety cases, including harassment and threats, from 1 million to 200,000, add staff and push to measure results.

But Zatko saw major gaps in what the company was doing to satisfy its obligations to the FTC, according to the complaint. In Zatko’s interpretation, according to the complaint, the 2011 order required Twitter to implement a Software Development Life Cycle program, a standard process for making sure new code is free of dangerous bugs. The complaint alleges that other employees had been telling the board and the FTC that they were making progress in rolling out that program to Twitter’s systems. But Zatko alleges that he discovered that it had been sent to only a tenth of the company’s projects, and even then treated as optional.

“If all of that is true, I don’t think there’s any doubt that there are order violations,” Vladeck, who is now a Georgetown Law professor, said in an interview. “It is possible that the kinds of problems that Twitter faced eleven years ago are still running through the company.”

“Agrawal’s Tweets and Twitter’s previous blog posts misleadingly imply that Twitter employs proactive, sophisticated systems to measure and block spam bots,” the complaint says. “The reality: mostly outdated, unmonitored, simple scripts plus overworked, inefficient, understaffed, and reactive human teams.”

One current and one former employee recalled that incident, when failures at two Twitter data centers drove concerns that the service could have collapsed for an extended period. “I wondered if the company would exist in a few days,” one of them said.

The current and former employees also agreed with the complaint’s assertion that past reports to various privacy regulators were “misleading at best.”

The complaint also alleges that Zatko warned the board early in his tenure that overlapping outages in the company’s data centers could leave it unable to correctly restart its servers. That could have left the service down for months, or even have caused all of its data to be lost. That came close to happening in 2021, when an “impending catastrophic” crisis threatened the platform’s survival before engineers were able to save the day, the complaint says, without providing further details.

As the head of security, Zatko says he also was in charge of a division that investigated users’ complaints about accounts, which meant that he oversaw the removal of some bots, according to the complaint. Spam bots — computer programs that tweet automatically — have long vexed Twitter. Unlike its social media counterparts, Twitter allows users to program bots to be used on its service: For example, the Twitter account @big_ben_clock is programmed to tweet “Bong Bong Bong” every hour in time with Big Ben in London. Twitter also allows people to create accounts without using their real identities, making it harder for the company to distinguish between authentic, duplicate and automated accounts.

In the complaint, Zatko alleges he could not get a straight answer when he sought what he viewed as an important data point: the prevalence of spam and bots across all of Twitter, not just among monetizable users.

Zatko cites a “sensitive source” who said Twitter was afraid to determine that number because it “would harm the image and valuation of the company.” He says the company’s tools for detecting spam are far less robust than implied in various statements.

For example, they said the company implied that it had destroyed all data on users who asked, but the material had spread so widely inside Twitter’s networks, it was impossible to know for sure

The four people familiar with Twitter’s spam and bot efforts said the engineering and integrity teams run software that samples thousands of tweets per day, and 100 accounts are sampled manually.

Some employees charged with executing the fight agreed that they had been short of staff. One said top executives showed “apathy” toward the issue.

Zatko’s complaint likewise depicts leadership dysfunction, starting with the CEO. Dorsey was largely absent during the pandemic, which made it hard for Zatko to get rulings on who should be in charge of what in areas of overlap and easier for rival executives to avoid collaborating, three current and former employees said.

For example, Zatko would encounter disinformation as part of his mandate to handle complaints, according to the complaint. To that end, he commissioned an outside report that found one of the disinformation teams had unfilled positions, yawning language deficiencies, and a lack of technical tools or the engineers to craft them. The authors said Twitter had no effective means of dealing with consistent spreaders of falsehoods.

Dorsey made little effort to integrate Zatko at the company, according to the three employees as well as two others familiar with the process who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive dynamics. In 12 months, Zatko could manage only six one-on-one calls, all less than 30 minutes, with his direct boss Dorsey, who also served as CEO of payments company Square, now known as Block, according to the complaint. Zatko allegedly did almost all of the talking, and Dorsey said perhaps 50 words in the entire year to him. “A couple dozen text messages” rounded out their electronic communication, the complaint alleges.

Faced with such inertia, Zatko asserts that he was unable to solve some of the most serious issues, according to the complaint.

Some 30 percent of company laptops blocked automatic software updates carrying security fixes, and thousands of laptops had complete copies of Twitter’s source code, making them a rich target for hackers, it alleges.

A successful hacker takeover of one of those machines would have been able to sabotage the product with relative ease, because the engineers pushed out changes without being forced to test them first in a simulated environment, current and former employees said.

“It’s near-incredible that for something of that scale there would not be a development test environment separate from production and there would not be a more controlled source-code management process,” said Tony Sager, former chief operating officer at the cyberdefense wing of the National Security Agency, the Information Assurance divisio

Sager is currently senior vice president at the nonprofit Center for Internet Security, where he leads a consensus effort to establish best security practices.

The complaint says that about half of Twitter’s roughly 7,000 full-time employees had wide access to the company’s internal software and that access was not closely monitored, giving them the ability to tap into sensitive data and alter how the service worked. Three current and former employees agreed that these were issues.

“A best practice is that you should only be authorized to see and access what you need to do your job, and nothing else,” said former U.S. chief information security officer Gregory Touhill. “If half the company has access to and can make configuration changes to the production environment, that exposes the company and its customers to significant risk.”

Another graphic implied a downward trend in the number of people with overly broad access, based on the small subset of people who had access to the highest administrative powers, known internally as “God mode.” That number was in the hundreds. But the number of people with broad access to core systems, which Zatko had called out as a big problem after joining, had actually grown slightly and remained in the thousands.

When Dorsey left in November 2021, a difficult situation worsened under Agrawal, who had been responsible for security decisions as chief technology officer before Zatko’s hiring, the complaint says.

An unnamed executive had prepared a presentation for the new CEO’s first full board meeting, according to the complaint. Zatko’s complaint calls the presentation deeply misleading.

The presentation showed that 92 percent of employee computers had security software installed — without mentioning that those installations determined that a third of the machines were insecure, according to the complaint.

The complaint says Dorsey never encouraged anyone to mislead the board about the shortcomings, but that others deliberately left out bad news.

The presentation included only a subset of serious intrusions or other security incidents, from a total Zatko estimated as one per week, and it said that the uncontrolled internal access to core systems was responsible for just 7 percent of incidents, when Zatko calculated the real proportion as 60 percent.

Zatko stopped the material from being presented at the Dec. 9, 2021 meeting, the complaint said. But over his continued objections, Agrawal let it go to the board’s smaller Risk Committee a week later.

Agrawal didn’t respond to requests for comment. In an email to employees after publication of this article, obtained by The Post, he said that privacy and security continues to be a top priority for the company, and he added that the narrative is “riddled with inconsistences” and “presented without important context.”

On Jan. 4, Zatko reported internally that the Risk Committee meeting might have been fraudulent, which triggered an Audit Committee investigation.

Agarwal fired him two weeks later. But Zatko complied with the company’s request to spell out his concerns in writing, even without access to his work email and documents, according to the complaint.

Since Zatko’s departure, Twitter has plunged further into chaos with Musk’s takeover, which the two parties agreed to in May. The stock price has fallen, many employees have quit, and Agrawal has dismissed executives and frozen big projects.

Zatko said he hoped that by bringing new scrutiny and accountability, he could improve the company from the outside.

“I still believe that this is a tremendous platform, and there is huge value and huge risk, and I hope that looking back at this, the world will be a better place, in part because of this.”

these boosters will probably further reduce the chances of more severe disease complications, which include long Covid, and says “the higher your level of immunity, the less viral replication you’re going to have, the less viral damage, the less likelihood of long Covid.”

these new boosters can be expected to do even more going forward — including providing better protection against future variants, by better training both antibodies and memory cells, which are different parts of the immune system. As Bhattacharya told me, being exposed to different versions of the virus (as will happen with these updated boosters) further deepens and broadens the kind of antibodies that get generated, including ones that can work against future variants

I’ve never understood the second-guessing by public health authorities and doctors about how the public may or may not react. Why not just provide accurate, detailed information and make it easy to get vaccinated? That’s the best response to “vaccine fatigue,” even if committed anti-vaxxers might remain hard to reach.

There’s much research on vaccine messaging, but most of it comes down to establishing trust, being honest and transparent, and making vaccination easier. Our terrible health care system is a major impediment:

it’s vaccination, not vaccines, that saves lives — and many more would be vaccinated if given information and easy access. Not having tools against diseases that cause so much suffering is one tragedy, but having them remain unused should be an unacceptable one.

Also on Friday, N.A.R.’s chief legal officer, Katie Johnson, sent an internal message to staff that clarified the group’s own interpretation of the rules for agent commissions. In that message, which was obtained by The New York Times, she said that while N.A.R.’s policy does require listing agents to offer compensation to a buyer’s broker, that offer can be $0.

An attorney for plaintiffs in the antitrust case told Inman, the real estate news site, which first reported the shift, that the change amounted to “a stunning admission of guilt.

N.A.R. has said it has no intention of joining Anywhere and Re/Max in a settlement, and instead will head to federal court on Oct. 16 in Kansas City

The departures from N.A.R. come just a few days after Redfin, the Seattle-based online real estate broker, announced it would require many of its own agents to sever their ties with the organization.

“The trial and the sexual harassment are inextricably linked because they expose flaws within N.A.R. Anyone in real estate knows, a house is only as strong as its foundation. The house of N.A.R., after years of neglect, had too many cracks and now those cracks have been exposed,” he said in an interview. “The only way to save it is to rebuild it from the ground up.”

“N.A.R. is bloated, and its staff is arrogant. And at the same time, its membership is trying to figure out if they can function without N.A.R., and we’re defending whether or not our business model works for the average consumer.”

“The economic momentum has clearly petered out,” Ms. Chen said. “I don’t know what I want to save money for, but I just feel that having some money would make me feel more secure.”

When China did away with its “zero-Covid” restrictions in December, there was anticipation that the economy would rebound from pent-up demand. But confidence began to wane from a deepening real estate crisis and a steady stream of disappointing economic indicators. Consumer spending started to slow.From January to May, retail sales grew 9.3 percent from a year earlier. But growth slowed substantially starting in June and has not rebounded to previous levels.

Even when pockets of spending picked up from pandemic lows, they remained far from pre-Covid levels.

Whichever way you cut it, global warming is already happening too fast to generously support life, which our prior climate did quite well. As a feebly supportive climate devolves into an unsupportive one, it won’t matter who forecasted the timing right, only that we missed our chance at the good version of Earth.

The scientist James Hansen, famous for his early warnings about climate change, suggested in a paper released last week with a suite of high-level colleagues that warming is accelerating more rapidly than is presently understood: In their view, that the Earth could exceed 1.5 degrees of warming this decade is practically assured, and 2 degrees by 2050 is likely unless the world eliminates fossil-fuel use far faster than planned.

One expert who worked on the UN report called this “insanity,” a “climate disaster of our own making.” The climate math is not adding up.

Previous studies have warned of the ice sheet’s collapse if emissions were not drawn down; hers now suggests that we’ve passed the point of no return, that even significant emissions cuts would be too late for this particular ice sheet. (The East Antarctic ice sheet, she said, is far more stable—and good thing, because it contains enough frozen water for 10 times the amount of sea-level rise as its western counterpart.

by one estimate, the West Antarctic ice sheet contains enough water to raise sea level globally by just over five meters, or 17 feet. At the very least, Naughten told me, she thinks it would be wise to plan for two to three meters of sea-level rise, or six to ten feet, in the next couple of centuries

I shudder to think what would happen if everyone living within two meters of sea level would be displaced,” she added. That “everyone” is projected to include some 410 million by 2100.

the loss of much of West Antarctica’s ice sheet is now virtually inevitable. Even if future emissions are drastically curtailed, enough warming is probably locked in to wash the bulk of the sheet away. At best, she says, we are on the brink of its total loss becoming assured

France, Ireland, Kenya, Spain, and 12 other countries have called for a global accord to phase out fossil-fuel production. There is little doubt that this is necessary; adding more fossil fuels to the pipeline is quite obviously counterproductive to slowing, then stopping, climate change.

Yet in the U.S. alone, a country responsible for at least 20 percent of historical emissions, the current buildout of liquified-natural-gas infrastructure, intended to export the country’s plentiful gas, is the largest fossil-fuel expansion proposed in the world—and it’s happening under a president who recently passed the most impactful climate legislation the country has ever seen

China, which is responsible for about 12 percent of historical emissions according to Alex Wang, who studies Chinese environmental governance at UCLA, has one of the largest clean-power programs in the world. But the country is at the same time dramatically expanding its coal production.

the difference between the world we have and the one we could have is buried in two contrasting modeling reports by two of the world’s most important energy-information organizations.

Whereas the International Energy Agency projected that we’d hit peak fossil-fuel use in 2030, the U.S. Energy Information Administration came to a very different conclusion: It saw demand for fossil fuels rising through at least 2050

If a policy is set to expire, the U.S. EIA treats it as expiring. It doesn’t take into account policies that countries have talked about but have had yet to implement. The international agency’s analysis, in contrast, assumes countries will follow through with more climate-friendly policies and renew the ones they already have on the books. “Look how different things could be,” Bowman said. The difference is night and day, despair and hope.

Policy, and only policy, appears to make that difference. It represents the choices that our leaders make about when to finally change course.

“climate is a spectrum; it isn’t an on/off switch.” Whenever we do make a different set of decisions, ones that make the math properly compute, we will be saving what we have left, preventing some layer of livability from being irrecoverably sloughed off and swept away.

In the late 1990s, the sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas interviewed 162 low-income single mothers in Camden, N.J., and Philadelphia to understand why they had children without being married. “Money is seldom the primary reason” why mothers say they are no longer with their children’s fathers. Instead, mothers point to “far more serious” offenses: “It is the drug and alcohol abuse, the criminal behavior and consequent incarceration, the repeated infidelity, and the patterns of intimate violence that are the villains looming largest in poor mothers’ accounts of relational failure.”

But it doesn’t take behavior this harmful to discourage marriage; often, simple compatibility or constancy can be elusive.

Ms. Camino, for her part, has dabbled in dating since her partner left, but hasn’t yet met anyone who shares her values, someone who’s funny and — she hesitates to use the word “feminist” — but a man who won’t just roll his eyes and say something about being on her period whenever she voices an opinion.

“There are women that are just out here trying, and the men aren’t ready,” she told me. “They don’t care, most of them.” Who, exactly, is Ms. Camino supposed to marry?

For as long as people have been promoting marriage, they have also been observing that a good man is hard to find

what was once dismissed as the complaint of “picky” women is now supported by a raft of data

The same pundits plugging marriage also bemoan the crisis among men and boys, what has come to be known as “male drift” — men turning away from college, dropping out of the work force, or failing to look after their health.

even this nod ignores the qualitative aspect of the dating experience — the part that’s hard to cover in surveys, or address with policy.

a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who recently surveyed more than 5,000 Americans about dating and relationships, found that nearly half of college-educated women said they were single because they had trouble finding someone who meets their expectations, versus one-third of men.

For a variety of reasons — mixed messages from the broader culture about toughness and vulnerability, the activity-oriented nature of male friendships — it seems that by the time men begin dating, they are relatively “limited in their ability and willingness to be fully emotionally present and available,” he said.

Navigating interpersonal relationships in a time of evolving gender norms and expectations “requires a level of emotional sensitivity that I think some men probably just lack, or they don’t have the experience,

He had recently read about a high school creative writing assignment in which boys and girls were asked to imagine a day from the perspective of the opposite sex. While girls wrote detailed essays showing they had already spent significant time thinking about the subject, many boys simply refused to do the exercise, or did so resentfully

Mr. Cox likened that to heterosexual relationships today: “The girls do extra and the boys do little or nothing.”

educated women freeze their eggs because they’re unable to find a suitable male partner: Ms. Inhorn points to a large gap in the number of college-educated women versus college-educated men during their reproductive years — on the order of several million.

Ms. Inhorn’s book goes beyond these quantitative mismatches to document the qualitative experience of women who are actively searching for partners — the frustration, hurt and disappointment.

“Almost without exception,” she writes, “women in this study were ‘trying hard’ to find a loving partner,” mostly through dating sites and apps. Women in their late 30s reported “online ageism,” others described removing their Ph.D from their profiles so as not to intimidate potential dates; still others found that men were often commitment-averse.

Ms. Inhorn compiled a sort of taxonomy of cads, such as the “Alpha males” who “want to be challenged by work, not by their partners” or the “Polyamorous men” who claim “that their multiple attachments to women are all ‘committed.’” Her breakdown — table 1.1 in the book — reads like a rigorous academic version of all the complaints you’ve ever heard from your single female friends.

to truly address the decline in heterosexual marriage, we must attend to the details — to acknowledge the qualitative aspects of relationship formation

in particular, we should listen to the experiences of women who are attempting to find partners. We should care about the interior lives, not just the educational attainment or the employment status, of the men who could be those partners.

It requires taking the stories of single women seriously, and not treating them as punchlines — something for which there is little historical precedent, but which a handful of scholars are slowly beginning to do.

Lesson #5: Proportionality should be a guideline in war.

McNamara talks about the proportions of cities destroyed in Japan by the US before the dropping of the nuclear bomb, comparing the destroyed Japanese cities to similarly-sized cities in the US: Tokyo, roughly the size of New York City, was 51% destroyed; Toyama, the size of Chattanooga, was 99% destroyed; Nagoya, the size of Los Angeles, was 40% destroyed; Osaka, the size of Chicago, was 35% destroyed; Kobe, the size of Baltimore, was 55% destroyed; etc. He says LeMay once said that, had the United States lost the war, they would have been tried for war crimes, and agrees with this assessment.

Lesson #7: Belief and seeing are both often wrong. McNamara affirms Morris' framing of lesson 7 in relation to the Gulf of Tonkin incident: "We see what we want to believe."

Lesson #8: Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning. McNamara says that, even though the United States is the strongest nation in the world, it should never use that power unilaterally: "if we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we better reexamine our reasoning."

we are not omniscient. If we cannot persuade other nations with similar interests and similar values of the merits of the proposed use of that power, we should not proceed unilaterally except in the unlikely requirement to defend directly the continental U.S., Alaska and Hawaii.

We, the richest nation in the world, have failed in our responsibility to our own poor and to the disadvantaged across the world to help them advance their welfare in the most fundamental terms of nutrition, literacy, health and employment.

War is a blunt instrument by which to settle disputes between or within nations, and economic sanctions are rarely effective. Therefore, we should build a system of jurisprudence based on the International Court—that the U.S. has refused to support—which would hold individuals responsible for crimes against humanity.

If we are to deal effectively with terrorists across the globe, we must develop a sense of empathy—I don't mean "sympathy," but rather "understanding"—to counter their attacks on us and the Western World.

We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values.

Our misjudgments of friend and foe, alike, reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders.

We failed then—and have since—to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces, and doctrine. We failed, as well, to adapt our military tactics to the task of winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.

We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people's or country's best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.

We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action … should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.

5. Proportionality should be a guideline in war

8. Be prepared to re-examine your reasoning

1. The human race will not eliminate war in this century, but we can reduce the brutality of war—the level of killing—by adhering to the principles of a "Just War," in particular to the principle of "proportionality."

5. We, the richest nation in the world, have failed in our responsibility to our own poor and to the disadvantaged across the world to help them advance their welfare in the most fundamental terms of nutrition, literacy, health and employment.

8. War is a blunt instrument by which to settle disputes between or within nations, and economic sanctions are rarely effective. Therefore, we should build a system of jurisprudence based on the International Court—that the U.S. has refused to support—which would hold individuals responsible for crimes against humanity.

9. If we are to deal effectively with terrorists across the globe, we must develop a sense of empathy—I don't mean "sympathy," but rather "understanding"—to counter their attacks on us and the Western World.

3. We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values.

5. We failed then — and have since — to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces, and doctrine.

. We failed, as well, to adapt our military tactics to the task of winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture

9. We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people's or country's best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.

10. We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action … should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.

11. We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions … At times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.

a pro-life libertarian will recognize the humanity and dignity of both mother and child.

The entire philosophy of libertarianism depends on a healthy recognition of human dignity. A healthy libertarianism can still be individualistic, but it’s also deeply concerned with both personal virtue and the rights of others.

The difference between libertarianism and libertinism can be summed up as the difference between rights and desires. A libertarian is concerned with her own liberty but also knows that this liberty ends where yours begins

A libertine, by contrast, is dominated by his desires. The object of his life is to do what he wants, and the object of politics is to give him what he wants.

A libertarian is concerned with all forms of state coercion. A libertine rejects any attempt to coerce him personally, but he’s happy to coerce others if it gives him what he wants.

Donald Trump is the consummate libertine. He rejects restraints on his appetites and accountability for his actions. The guiding principle of his worldview is summed up with a simple declaration: I do what I want. Any movement built in his image will be libertine as well.

Trump’s movement dismisses the value of personal character. It mocks personal restraint. And it’s happy to inflict its will on others if it achieves what it wants

Libertinism says my desires are more important than your rights, and this means that libertines are terrible ambassadors for any cause that requires self-sacrifice.

I don’t think the pro-life movement has fully reckoned with the political and cultural fallout from the libertine right-wing response to the Covid pandemic

Here was a movement that was loudly telling women that they had to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, with all the physical transformations, risks and financial uncertainties that come with pregnancy and childbirth, at the same time that millions of its members were also loudly refusing the minor inconveniences of masking and the low risks of vaccination — even if the best science available at the time told us that both masking and vaccination could help protect others from getting the disease.

Even worse, many of the same people demanded that the state limit the liberty of others so that they could live how they wanted

This do-what-you-want ethos cost a staggering number of American lives. A 2022 study found that there were an estimated 318,981 vaccine-preventable deaths from January 2021 to April 2022.

Now there’s evidence from Ohio and Florida that excess mortality rates were significantly higher for Republicans than Democrats after vaccines were widely available.

It’s not just that libertinism robs Republicans of moral authority; it’s that libertinism robs Republicans of moral principle.

In each state, all the pro-life movement needed was consistent Republican support, and it would have sailed to victory. All the Democrats in the state could have voted to protect abortion rights, and they would have lost if Republicans held firm. But they did not.

“Do as I say and not as I do” is among the worst moral arguments imaginable.

A holistic pro-life society requires true self-sacrifice. It asks women to value the life growing inside of them even in the face of fear and poverty. It asks the community to rally beside these women to keep them and their children safe and to provide them with opportunities to flourish. It requires both individuals and communities to sublimate their own desires to protect the lives and opportunities of others.

An ethos that centers individuals’ desires will bleed over into matters of life and death. It did during Covid, and it’s doing so now, as even Republicans reject the pro-life cause.

The challenge is much more profound. Pro-life America has to reconnect with personal virtue. It has to model self-sacrifice. It has to show, not just tell, America what it would look like to value life from conception to natural death.

At present, however, the Republican Party is dominated by its id. It indulges its desires. And so long as its id is in control, the pro-life movement will fail. There is no selfish path to a culture of life.

Experts compare the moment to the early days of social media, a technology offering tantalizing new tools for politics — and unforeseen threats.

For years, those fears had largely been speculative because the technology to produce such fakes was too complicated, expensive and unsophisticated.

His spokesman later stressed that the post was in jest and clearly labeled A.I.-generated. His campaign said in a statement that its use of A.I. is to entertain and make political points, not deceive.

Researchers have long worried about the impact of A.I. on elections. The technology can deceive and confuse voters, casting doubt over what is real, adding to the disinformation that can be spread by social networks.

Much of the content has been clearly fake. But a few creations have toed the line of disinformation. The Massa campaign produced one “deepfake” video in which Mr. Milei explains how a market for human organs would work, something he has said philosophically fits in with his libertarian views.

So far, the A.I.-generated content shared by the campaigns in Argentina has either been labeled A.I. generated or is so clearly fabricated that it is unlikely it would deceive even the most credulous voters. Instead, the technology has supercharged the ability to create viral content that previously would have taken teams of graphic designers days or weeks to complete.

To do so, campaign engineers and artists fed photos of Argentina’s various political players into an open-source software called Stable Diffusion to train their own A.I. system so that it could create fake images of those real people. They can now quickly produce an image or video of more than a dozen top political players in Argentina doing almost anything they ask.

For Halloween, the Massa campaign told its A.I. to create a series of cartoonish images of Mr. Milei and his allies as zombies. The campaign also used A.I. to create a dramatic movie trailer, featuring Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital, burning, Mr. Milei as an evil villain in a straitjacket and Mr. Massa as the hero who will save the country.

World Health Organization data published in September showed there were twice as many cholera cases in 2022 than in 2021. Outbreaks were recorded in countries where cholera had been under control for years, including Yemen and Lebanon.

2. Mosquitoes on the march

Rising temperatures and frequent floods also unlock new places where disease-carrying insects thrive. The mosquitoes that carry the viruses that cause dengue fever and mala

Nor is the disease confined to developing countries. There are fears that it is spreading in southern Europe, partly owing to the warm weather. More than 8 billion people could be at risk of malaria and dengue fever by 2080, scientists have warned.

3. Human-animal contact

Many existing diseases will get more dangerous, but new illnesses could also emerge as people are increasingly forced into areas where there is wildlife. Diseases can jump from animals to humans. These diseases, such as Ebola, avian flu and Sars, are called “zoonoses” and they make up the majority of new illnesses.

Scientists have found that the climate crisis is helping to circulate diseases between species that previously did not encounter each other. As the planet heats up, many animal species are forced to move into new areas to find suitable conditions.

It has been estimated that zoonoses are responsible for as many as 2.5bn cases of human illness and 2.7m human deaths worldwide each year, and that animals have played a major part in nearly every major disease outbreak since 1970.

4. Severe weather events

Although governments are getting better at preparing for severe weather events, nine out of 10 deaths linked to weather disasters since 1970 happened in small island nations and developing countries in Africa, Asia and South America.

5. The air that we breathe

Outside air pollution has been linked to numerous cancers and diseases and is estimated to be responsible for more than 4m premature deaths globally each year.

Changing weather patterns are expected to make this already bad situation worse as more dust, rain and wildfire smoke are added to the mix. Children are especially likely to get sick from air pollution because their brains, lungs and other organs are still developing.

6. The psychological cost

Environmental deterioration has a knock-on effect on the economic and social systems that keep society productive and happy, setting in motion a downward spiral of psychological hardship.

If crops are destroyed during extreme weather events, children may get less nutritious food, the consumption of which is linked to psychological conditions such as anxiety and depression.

When people can’t get the help they need, they may self-medicate with alcohol or drugs, which in turn makes them more likely to engage in risky behaviour (such as unprotected sex) that could result in infections such as HIV, or illnesses that can result from spending time in crowded places, such as tuberculosis.

In 2021, scientists studying evidence of a potential link between heat exposure and mental health found a 2.2% increase in mental health-related mortality per 1C rise in temperature.

7. Salty water and perilous pregnancies

Drinking water is becoming saltier. One reason for this is that sea levels are rising, so there is more sea water flowing into rivers and other sources of fresh water during floods and tropical storms.

Taking in too much salt can lead to high blood pressure (hypertension). Over time, this condition damages the body’s veins, arteries and major organs (including the brain, heart, kidneys and eyes) since they’re working so much harder overall.

Hypertension is doubly dangerous for pregnant women and their babies

8. Food insecurity

More frequent and severe droughts and floods make it harder to grow the grains, fruit and vegetables that people need to eat to stay healthy. Small island states in the Caribbean, Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Ocean bear the brunt of the effects of the crisis, in part because most people live close to sea level.

As a result, people who live in one of the 39 small island nations are the most likely to die from one of the four main NCDs: cancer, diabetes, heart disease and lung disease.

9. The stress of extreme heat

The scorching temperatures this year broke records in Europe, China and North America. Heat is one of the most dangerous effects of the climate crisis and the top cause of weather-related deaths in the U

When it gets too hot, the body’s temperature rises faster than it can cool itself down, less blood flows to other organs, and the kidneys have to work harder. This puts strain on the heart and can lead to organ failure. Heatstroke is the most serious heat-related illness.

In particular, people whose jobs require long hours of physical labour in the sun face an increased risk of kidney disease as temperatures rise, research suggests. Repeated instances of heat stress can lead to permanent damage and chronic kidney disease.

In June, the Guardian revealed how young migrant workers were returning to Nepal with chronic kidney disease after working in extreme heat conditions in the Gulf and Malaysia. “One factor highlighted again and again is heat. Prolonged exposure to h

10. Millions on the move

It’s hard to predict exactly how many people will be on the move because of the climate crisis, but extreme weather events are likely to make conditions worse for the more than 100 million displaced people around the world.

If nothing changes, the number of people who need humanitarian aid to recover from floods, storms and droughts could double by 2050,

That means more than 200 million people will need aid annually. The displacement of millions of people also means cramped and often unsanitary living. For example, more than 900,000 Rohingya refugees live in makeshift shelters in Bangladesh, often built on unstable ground that’s prone to landslides.

As long as life continues as it has — with people choosing smaller family sizes, as is now common in most of the world — then in the 22nd or 23rd century, our decline could be just as steep as our rise.

there is no consensus on exactly how quickly populations will fall after that. Over the past 100 years, the global population quadrupled, from two billion to eight billion.

What would happen as a consequence? Over the past 200 years, humanity’s population growth has gone hand in hand with profound advances in living standards and health: longer lives, healthier children, better education, shorter workweeks and many more improvements

In this short period, humanity has been large and growing. Economists who study growth and progress don’t think this is a coincidence. Innovations and discoveries are made by people. In a world with fewer people in it, the loss of so much human potential may threaten humanity’s continued path toward better lives.

It would be tempting to welcome depopulation as a boon to the environment. But the pace of depopulation will be too slow for our most pressing problems. It will not replace the need for urgent action on climate, land use, biodiversity, pollution and other environmental challenges

If the population hits around 10 billion people in the 2080s and then begins to decline, it might still exceed today’s eight billion after 2100

Population decline would come quickly, measured in generations, and yet arrive far too slowly to be more than a sideshow in the effort to save the planet. Work to decarbonize our economies and reform our land use and food systems must accelerate in this decade and the next, not start in the next century.

This isn’t a call to immediately remake our societies and economies in the service of birthrates. It’s a call to start conversations now, so that our response to low birthrates is a decision that is made with the best ideas from all of u

If we wait, the less inclusive, less compassionate, less calm elements within our society and many societies worldwide may someday call depopulation a crisis and exploit it to suit their agendas — of inequality, nationalism, exclusion or control

Births won’t automatically rebound just because it would be convenient for advancing living standards or sharing the burden of care work

We know that fertility rates can stay below replacement because they have. They’ve been below that level in Brazil and Chile for about 20 years; in Thailand for about 30 years; and in Canada, Germany and Japan for about 50.

In fact, in none of the countries where lifelong fertility rates have fallen well below two have they ever returned above it. Depopulation could continue, generation after generation, as long as people look around and decide that small families work best for them, some having no children, some having three or four and many having one or two.

Nor can humanity count on any one region or subgroup to buoy us all over the long run. Birthrates are falling in sub-Saharan Africa, the region with the current highest average rates, as education and economic opportunities continue to improve

The main reason that birthrates are low is simple: People today want smaller families than people did in the past. That’s true in different cultures and economies around the world. It’s what both women and men report in surveys.

Humanity is building a better, freer world with more opportunities for everyone, especially for women

That progress also means that, for many of us, the desire to build a family can clash with other important goals, including having a career, pursuing projects and maintaining relationships

In a world of sustained low birthrates and declining populations, there may be threats of backsliding on reproductive freedom — by limiting abortion rights, for example

Nobody yet knows what to do about global depopulation. But it wasn’t long ago that nobody knew what to do about climate change. These shared challenges have much in common,

As with climate change, our individual decisions on family size add up to an outcome that we all share.

Six decades from now is when the U.N. projects the size of the world population will peak. There won’t be any quick fixes: Even if it’s too early today to know exactly how to build an abundant future that offers good lives to a stable, large and flourishing future population, we should already be working toward that goal.

The federal government encouraged this practice from the start. The Timber Culture Act passed in 1873, permitted homesteaders to claim an additional 160 acres of free land by planting trees on at least a quarter of it. Decades later, desperate to curb the Dust Bowl, President Franklin Roosevelt channeled roughly $14 million — mostly via emergency relief and the Works Progress Administration — to the Prairie States Forestry Project, resulting in nearly 19,000 miles of windbreaks throughout the Great Plains, many of them composed of Eastern redcedar.

Still today, the Department of Agriculture subsidizes the planting of redcedar for everything from windbreaks to wildlife habitat. State programs provide similar cost-share programs, and it’s from all of these plantings (and more) the spread — or the “encroachment,” as ecologists call it — generally begins.

In 2018, the rangeland ecologist Dirac Twidwell and his colleagues at the University of Nebraska began the Eastern Redcedar Science Literacy Project to catalog the fallout

Eastern redcedar can transform a thriving tallgrass prairie into a closed canopy woodland in just 40 years. In the process, critical biodiversity is evicted from the landscape. The majority of grassland bird species are no longer present where Eastern redcedar cover exceeds just 10 percent of land cover. Beyond 30 percent, most small mammals vanish, too. And as too many ranchers and other land managers can now attest, both forage production and plant diversity take a nosedive in the Green Glacier’s wake.

Allergies. Wildfires. Tick-borne disease. All of these problems climb while stream flow and groundwater recharge rates often decline. True, a juniper woodland sequesters more carbon. But the grassland it muscled out was a more reliable carbon sink, storing more than 90 percent of its capture underground, safe from wildfires that would send that carbon into the atmosphere. From virtually every angle — environmental or economic, livestock or literature, air quality or landscape aesthetics — the Green Glacier is a problem.

“The Great Plains biome is dying,” Dr. Twidwell said. “Losing grasslands at this scale is akin to losing tropical rainforests or coral reefs.”

for decades now, discussion about the Green Glacier has been largely relegated to the dusty confines of trade journals and agricultural conventions. Perhaps this is because the vast majority of our remaining grasslands are privately owned. Perhaps, as our forests burn and our levees break, there is little sympathy left for the livestock industry, responsible for roughly 15 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions — never mind the many effects of tree encroachment that bleed far beyond the ranch.

If America wants to preserve what’s left of Cather’s spiritual homeland, something greater than what Dr. Twidwell calls “postage-stamp prairies,” then “the clock is ticking,”

The good news is that prescribed fire, where done repeatedly, has proved to effectively halt the Green Glacier’s spread. In fact, the Loess Canyons Rangeland Alliance, a group of neighboring landowners in southwestern Nebraska, is one of the first documented groups to halt the encroachment on a regional scale.

For him, Tesla is about trying to save humanity from global warming while SpaceX is about making humanity a multiplanetary species in case things don’t work out on Earth.

He said he worried that activating Starlink then would have further stoked the conflict. “I think if the Ukrainian attacks had succeeded in sinking the Russian fleet, it would have been like a mini Pearl Harbor and led to a major escalation,” he is quoted as saying in Walter Isaacson’s new biography, “Elon Musk.” 

“I tend to view the future as a series of probabilities—there’s certain probability that something will go wrong, some probability that it’ll go right; it’s kind of a spectrum of things. And to the degree that there is free will versus determinism, then we want to try to exercise that free will to ensure a great future.”

“Nuclear war probability is rising rapidly,” he tweeted last fall after months of fighting between the two countries. 

with the purchase of Twitter-turned-X, Musk couched the decision as keeping the social-media platform as a bastion for free speech in what he sees as a larger battle against cultural forces trying to squash diverse thought—or, as he calls it, the “woke mind virus.”

“Accept worst case outcome & assign it a probability, which is usually very low. Now think of good things in life & assign them probabilities—many are certain!” he tweeted a couple of years ago. “Bringing anxiety/fear to the conscious mind saps it of limbic emotional strength.”

“We’re like a pro sports team that has been winning the championship for so long and so many years in a row that we have forgotten what losing even looks like,” Musk said. “And that’s when the champion team loses.” 

“My brother believes an economic winter is coming every single day,” Kimbal Musk once told lawyers about his older sibling’s mindset during a legal procedure. 

“To be frank, civilization is feeling a little fragile these days,” Musk said last year during an update on SpaceX’s large rocket development. “I’m an optimist, but I think we got to protect the downside here and try to build that city on Mars as soon as possible and secure the future of life.”

Among his stated worries, of which he has tweeted: “a big rock will hit Earth eventually & we currently have no defense” and “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.”

he framed his creation of an artificial-intelligence startup called xAI in his typically grandiose terms, cautioning that the technology has the potential to spiral out of control and essentially turn on its master, something akin to “The Terminator” movie. 

“I think it’s actually important for us to worry about a `Terminator’ future in order to avoid a `Terminator’ future,”

This past week, Musk returned to calling for peace, saying U.S. policies risk pushing Russia into an alliance with China just as the Israel-Hamas war has the potential to expand. He cautioned that many people overestimate U.S. military might in such a scenario

“Cheery fatalism is very effective.”

At home, that means more wind and solar farms, more electric cars and more diverse supply chains to build it all. This will be inflationary in the short term, as it means manufacturing new products and investing in new technologies

The first to go is the era of easy money. This isn’t a short-term response to President Biden’s much-needed post-pandemic fiscal stimulus. (In fact, that stimulus is exactly what kept the U.S. economy resilient while peers flagged, according to a recent New York Fed report.

This is a return to an economy that is more rational and hardheaded. Not all companies, or stocks, are created equal. Many have too much debt on their books.

Years of easy money propped up everything. A higher cost of capital will be painful temporarily, but it will give markets what they’ve needed for years — a reason for investors to sort out risky investments

Cheap energy is over, too. One outcome of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the realization (especially in Europe) that getting crucial commodities from autocrats is never a good idea

The United States, Europe and China are, in different ways, all speeding up the transition to a green economy.

All of that is going away or gone. A decade and a half of go-go speculation is finished. The era of cheap is kaput.

But it will be strongly deflationary if we can make the shift.

Finally, the era of cheap labor has ended

Wages are rising, and we’ve seen more labor activity, including strikes, this year than in the past four decades. More will follow. This is an appropriate response to decades of wage stagnation amid record corporate profits

Unions, but also non-union workers in many areas of the economy including construction and manufacturing, have been buoyed by the largest infrastructure investment since the 1950s — which has given them negotiating power that they haven’t had in years

Meanwhile, companies in the service sector are reconsidering their usual hire-and-fire-fast approach, having been trained by the pandemic to hang onto employees as long as possible.

Yes, artificial intelligence could throw a spammer in all this. CEOs are looking to use it to bring down labor costs. But workers today are becoming more proactive about demanding more control of both trade and technology;

The end of cheap is a huge shift. It means Main Street rather than Wall Street will drive the economy. It will make for a more balanced and resilient economy.

The bond market won’t like it, and there will be calls to return to the old ways, particularly if inflation continues to bite.

cheap isn’t really cheap. It’s just putting your troubles on layaway.

The national unemployment rate, as calculated by the National Bureau of Statistics, accounts only for urban unemployment, which stands at just above 5 percent and is believed to be underestimated. The average monthly income of migrant workers was $630 in 2022, or less than half the income of those working for the government. And that data is flawed because it includes only months when a worker has a job.

Mr. Xi said in his speech that the mass return of migrant workers in 2008 and 2020 had not caused any social problems because they “have land and houses back in their home villages so they can return to cultivate the land, have food to eat, and work on something.”

But the prospect of moving back to the villages is often bleak and even scary, especially for younger migrant workers who have spent their adult lives in the cities. They can see what awaits them. Their parents and grandparents may need to work until they physically cannot anymore and hesitate to seek medical care. They usually do not have unemployment benefits, and they cannot rely on their families, as some urban youths do, because their parents’ and grandparents’ pensions are “only enough to buy salt,

The other reality facing migrant workers is that returning to their villages to earn money farming is not an option, as Mr. Xi said it was. There is not enough land waiting for them

“For Chinese, especially in the countryside, there’s no such thing called retirement,” he said. His grandfather is 90 and cleans pig manure for a farm every day in the central province of Henan.

The morning we spoke he had just gotten off a shift that started at 7:30 p.m. and ended at 7 a.m. He had worked for two weeks without a day off because of the demand for Apple’s newest iPhone.

He feels he cannot go home to his village and do nothing while his parents and grandfather are still working. “It’s just not appropriate,”

“My ideal country is one where the people live in peace and prosperity, where there is food safety, freedom of speech, justice, a media that can expose injustices, a five-day, eight-hour workweek for workers,” said Mr. Zhang, the unemployed welder. “If these can be achieved, I will support whoever is in power, regardless of their party or how long they govern.”

Mr. Ge left his village at age 17 and started working on construction sites and in factories. He had benefits during the six years he worked at Foxconn, a contract manufacturer for Apple. But when he was out of work this year, he could not get any unemployment benefits, which is not uncommon as local governments are deeply in debt. Now 34, he still works 10-hour shifts at another Apple contract manufacturer and lives in a dormitory.

“Only people who couldn’t find jobs would do farming,” said Guan, a migrant worker in the northwestern province of Gansu, “because income from farming is too low.”

“To be honest, deep down I feel lost,” he said. “All I can say is that for the time being, I’ll save as much money as possible. As for what the future holds, it’s really hard to say. I might not even live to see that age.”

If OnlyFans’s creator earnings were taken as a whole, the company would rank around No. 90 on Forbes’s list of the biggest private companies in America by revenue, ahead of Twitter (now called X), Neiman Marcus Group, New Balance, Hard Rock International and Hallmark Cards.

Many creators now operate like independent media companies, with support staffs, growth strategies and promotional budgets, and work to apply the cold quantification and data analytics of online marketing to the creation of a fantasy life.

The subscription site has often been laughed off as a tabloid punchline, a bawdy corner of the internet where young, underpaid women (teachers, nurses, cops) sell nude photos, get found out and lose their jobs.

pressures to perform for a global audience; an internet that never forgets. “There is simply no room for naivety,” one said in a guide posted to Reddit’s r/CreatorsAdvice.

America’s social media giants for years have held up online virality as the ultimate goal, doling out measurements of followers, reactions and hearts with an unspoken promise: that internet love can translate into sponsorships and endorsement deals

But OnlyFans represents the creator economy at its most blatantly transactional — a place where viewers pay upfront for creators’ labor, and intimacy is just another unit of content to monetize.

The fast ascent of OnlyFans further spotlights how the internet has helped foster a new style of modern gig work that creators see as safe, remote and self-directed,

Creators’ nonchalance about the digital sex trade has fueled a broader debate about whether the site’s promotion of feminist autonomy is a facade: just a new class of techno-capitalism, selling the same patriarchal dream.

But OnlyFans increasingly has become the model for how a new generation of online creators gets paid. Influencers popular on mainstream sites use it to capitalize on the audiences they’ve spent years building. And OnlyFans creators have turned going viral on the big social networks into a marketing strategy, using Facebook, Twitter and TikTok as sales funnels for getting new viewers to subscribe.

many creators, she added, still find it uniquely alluring — a rational choice in an often-irrational environment for gender, work and power. “Why would I spend my day doing dirty, degrading, minimum-wage labor when I can do something that brings more money in and that I have a lot more control over?”

it is targeting major “growth regions” in Latin America, Europe and Australia. (The Mexican diver Diego Balleza said he is using his $15-a-month account to save up for next year’s Paris Olympics.)

“Does an accountant always enjoy their work? No. All work has pleasure and pain, and a lot of it is boring and annoying. Does that mean they’re being exploited?”

Adams’s operation is registered in state business records as a limited liability company and offers quarterly employee performance reviews and catered lunch. It also runs with factory-like efficiency, thanks largely to a system designed in-house to track millions of data points on customers and content and ensure every video is rigorously planned and optimized.

Since sending her first photo in 2021, Adams’s OnlyFans accounts have earned $16.5 million in sales, more than 1.4 million fans and more than 11 million “likes.” She now makes about $30,000 a day — more than most American small businesses — from subscriptions, video sales, messages and tips, half of which is pure profit

Adams’s team sees its business as one of harmless, destigmatized gratification, in which both sides get what they want. The buyers are swiped over in dating apps, widowed, divorced or bored, eager to pay for the illusion of intimacy with an otherwise unattainable match. And the sellers see themselves as not all that different from the influencers they watched growing up on YouTube, charging for parts of their lives they’d otherwise share for free.

“This is normal for my generation, you know?

“I can go on TikTok right now and see ten girls wearing the bare minimum of clothing just to get people to join their page. Why not go the extra step to make money off it?”

the job can be financially precarious and mentally taxing, demanding not just the technical labor of recording, editing, managing and marketing but also the physical and emotional labor of adopting a persona to keep clients feeling special and eager to spend.

enix International Limited, is based, the company said its sales grew from $238 million in 2019 to more than $5.5 billion last year.

Its international army of creators has also grown from 348,000 in 2019 to more than 3 million today — a tenfold increase.

The company paid its owner, the Ukrainian American venture capitalist Leonid Radvinsky, $338 million in dividends last year.)

portion of its creator base and 70 percent of its annual revenue

When Tim Stokely, a London-based operator of live-cam sex sites, founded OnlyFans with his brother in 2016, he framed it as a simple way to monetize the creators who were becoming the world’s new celebrities — the same online influencers, just with a payment button. In 2019, Stokely told Wired magazine that his site was like “a bolt-on to your existing social media,” in the same way “Uber is a bolt-on to your car.”

Before OnlyFans, pornography on the internet had been largely a top-down enterprise, with agents, producers, studios and other middlemen hoarding the profits of performers’ work. OnlyFans democratized that business model, letting the workers run the show: recording their own content, deciding their prices, selling it however they’d like and reaping the full reward.

The platform bans real-world prostitution, as well as extreme or illegal content, and requires everyone who shows up on camera to verify they’re 18 or older by sending in a video selfie showing them holding a government-issued ID.

OnlyFans operates as a neutral marketplace, with no ads, trending topics or recommendation algorithms, placing few limitations on what creators can sell but also making it necessary for them to market themselves or fade away.

After sending other creators’ agents their money over PayPal, Adams’s ad workers send suggestions over the messaging app Telegram on how Bryce should be marketed, depending on the clientele. OnlyFans models whose fans tend to prefer the “girlfriend experience,” for instance, are told to talk up her authenticity: “Bryce is a real, fit girl who wants to get to know you

Like most platforms, OnlyFans suffers from a problem of incredible pay inequality, with the bulk of the profits concentrated in the bank accounts of the lucky few.

the top 1 percent of accounts made 33 percent of the money, and that most accounts took home less than $145 a month

Watching their partner have sex with someone else sometimes sparked what they called “classic little jealousy issues,” which Adams said they resolved with “more communication, more growing up.” The money was just too good. And over time, they adopted a self-affirming ideology that framed everything as just business. Things that were tough to do but got easier with practice, like shooting a sex scene, they called, in gym terms, “reps.” Things one may not want to do at first, but require some mental work to approach, became “self-limiting beliefs.”

They started hiring workers through friends and family, and what was once just Adams became a team effort, in which everyone was expected to workshop caption and video ideas. The group evaluated content under what Brian, who is 31, called a “triangulation method” that factored their comfort level with a piece of content alongside its engagement potential and “brand match.” Bryce the person gave way to Bryce the brand, a commercialized persona drafted by committee and refined for maximum marketability.

One of the operation’s most subtly critical components is a piece of software known as “the Tool,” which they developed and maintain in-house. The Tool scrapes and compiles every “like” and view on all of Adams’s social network accounts, every OnlyFans “fan action” and transaction, and every text, sext and chat message — more than 20 million lines of text so far.

It houses reams of customer data and a library of preset messages that Adams and her chatters can send to fans, helping to automate their reactions and flirtations — “an 80 percent template for a personalized response,” she said.

And it’s linked to a searchable database, in which hundreds of sex scenes are described in detail — by price, total sales, participants and general theme — and given a unique “stock keeping unit,” or SKU, much like the scannable codes on a grocery store shelf. If a fan says they like a certain sexual scenario, a team member can instantly surface any relevant scenes for an easy upsell. “Classic inventory chain,” Adams said.

The systemized database is especially handy for the young women of Adams’s chat team, known as the “girlfriends,” who work at a bench of laptops in the gym’s upper loft. The Tool helped “supercharge her messaging, which ended up, like, 3X-ing her output,” Brian said, meaning it tripled.

Keeping men talking is especially important because the chat window is where Adams’s team sends out their mass-message sales promotions, and the girlfriends never really know what to expect. One girlfriend said she’s had as many as four different sexting sessions going at once.

Adams employs a small team that helps her pay other OnlyFans creators to give away codes fans can use for free short-term trials. The team tracks redemption rates and promotional effectiveness in a voluminous spreadsheet, looking for guys who double up on discount codes, known as “stackers,” as well as bad bets and outright fraud.

Many OnlyFans creators don’t offer anything explicit, and the site has pushed to spotlight its stable of chefs, comedians and mountain bikers on a streaming channel, OFTV. But erotic content on the platform is inescapable; even some outwardly conventional creators shed their clothes behind the paywall

Creators with a more hardcore fan base, meanwhile, are told to cut to the chase: “300+ sex tapes & counting”; “Bryce doesn’t say no, she’s the most wild, authentic girl you will ever find.”

The $18 an hour she makes on the ad team, however, is increasingly dwarfed by the money Leigh makes from her personal OnlyFans account, where she sells sex scenes with her boyfriend for $10 a month. Leigh made $92,000 in gross sales in July, thanks largely to revenue from new fans who found her through Adams or the bikini videos Leigh posts to her 170,000-follower TikTok account

“This is a real job. You dedicate your time to it every single day. You’re always learning, you’re always doing new things,” she said. “I’d never thought I’d be good at business, but learning all these business tactics really empowers you. I have my own LLC; I don’t know any other 20-year-old right now that has their own LLC.”

The team is meeting all traffic goals, per their internal dashboard, which showed that through the day on a recent Thursday they’d gained 2,221,835 video plays, 19,707 landing-page clicks, 6,372 new OnlyFans subscribers and 9,024 new social-network followers. And to keep in shape, Adams and her boyfriend are abiding by a rigorous daily diet and workout plan

They eat the same Chick-fil-A salad at every lunch, track every calorie and pay a gym assistant to record data on every rep and weight of their exercise.

But the OnlyFans business is competitive, and it does not always feel to the couple like they’ve done enough. Their new personal challenge, they said, is to go viral on the other platforms as often as possible, largely through jokey TikTok clips and bikini videos that don’t give away too much.

the host told creators this sales-funnel technique was key to helping build the “cult of you”: “Someone’s fascination will become infatuation, which will make you a lot of money.”

Adams’s company has worked to reverse engineer the often-inscrutable art of virality, and Brian now estimates Adams makes about $5,000 in revenue for every million short-form video views she gets on TikTok.

Her team has begun ranking each platform by the amount of money they expect they can get from each viewer there, a metric they call “fan lifetime value.” (Subscribers who click through to her from Facebook tend to spend the most, the data show. Facebook declined to comment.)

The younger workers said they see the couple as mentors, and the two are constantly reminding them that the job of a creator is not a “lottery ticket” and requires a persistent grind. Whenever one complains about their lack of engagement, Brian said he responds, “When’s the last time you posted 60 different videos, 60 days in a row, on your Instagram Reels?”

But some have taken to it quite naturally. Rayna Rose, 19, was working last year at a hair salon, sweeping floors for $12 an hour, when an old high school classmate who worked with Adams asked whether she wanted to try OnlyFans and make $500 a video.

Rose started making videos and working as a chatter for $18 an hour but recently renegotiated her contract with Adams to focus more on her personal OnlyFans account, where she has nearly 30,000 fans, many of whom pay $10 a month.

One recent evening this summer, Adams was in the farm’s gym when her boyfriend told her he was headed to their guest room to record a collab with Rose, who was wearing a blue bikini top and braided pigtails.

“Go have fun,” Adams told them as they walked away. “Make good content.” The 15-minute video has so far sold more than 1,400 copies and accounted for more than $30,000 in sales.

Rose said she has lost friends due to her “lifestyle,” with one messaging her recently, “Can you imagine how successful you would be if you studied regularly and spent your time wisely?”

The message stung but, in Rose’s eyes, they didn’t understand her at all. She feels, for the first time, like she has a sense of purpose: She wants to be a full-time influencer. She expects to clear $200,000 in earnings this year and is now planning to move out of her parents’ house.

“I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. And now I know,” she said. “I want to be big. I want to be, like, mainstream.”

OpenAI was was trying to balance safety and development — a balance that became harder to maintain under the pressures of commercialization.

It was founded as a nonprofit by people who professed sincere concern about taking things safe and slow. But it was also full of AI nerds who wanted to, you know, make cool AIs.

OpenAI set up a for-profit arm — but with a corporate structure that left the nonprofit board able to cry “stop” if things started moving too fast (or, if you prefer, gave “a handful of people with no financial stake in the company the power to upend the project on a whim”).

On Friday, those people, in a fit of whimsy, kicked Brockman off the board and fired Altman. Reportedly, the move was driven by Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist, who, along with other members of the board, has allegedly clashed repeatedly with Altman over the speed of generative AI development and the sufficiency of safety precautions.

Chief among the signatories was Sutskever, who tweeted Monday morning, “I deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we’ve built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company.”

Humanity can’t help itself; we have kept monkeying with technology, no matter the dangers, since some enterprising hominid struck the first stone ax.

a software company has little in the way of tangible assets; its people are its capital. And this capital looks willing to follow Altman to where the money is.

More broadly still, it perfectly encapsulates the AI alignment problem, which in the end is also a human alignment problem

And that’s why we are probably not going to “solve” it so much as hope we don’t have to.