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Coming back to this... While you are correct that debt for government doesn't work the way it does for households, this is not that issues.
A government having debt at a high level only really works if they also control the currency they have it in, like the US, China, Japan, etc. France being part of the Euro complicates it dramatically.
Second, this is not just France. It's a 'developed' nation issues. Seven of the twelve countries above 100% are G7 or G20 members. As in Japan, Italy, the United States, France, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Spain. And China is at 99% debt to GDP. So in other words nearly all major economies are starting to have interest impacts on their GDP. There are some standouts like Nederland, Germany, Australia, South Korea, etc,
Combine this with the coming demographic inversion, let alone whatever the fuck the Tech sector thinks it's doing, and we have some major issues for the next generation to deal with...
Politicians will work with it, but probably do the shortest term solution they can at the last possible min, because that is what has happened and is currently incentivized.
The exchange escalated sharply when Watters pressed El-Sayed on gender-affirming care for minors. “Sex change for minors. Do you support that?” Watters asked. El-Sayed, a doctor and former public health official, responded, “I just think the government shouldn’t tell you what kind of healthcare you should have.” Watters pushed further, asking, “So you think it’s OK for a parent to slash his kid’s ding-a-ling off?” El-Sayed shot back, “Do you really want to have this conversation? Are you circumcised?”
A visibly caught-off-guard Watters replied, “Yeah, but I mean that’s a personal question, doctor.” When Watters argued circumcision is “different than castration,” El-Sayed maintained his point.
“I’m just saying that yes, circumcision is surgery on a kid’s ding-a-ling,” he said. By bringing up circumcision, El-Sayed was attempting to argue that society already accepts parental rights and medical decision-making regarding surgical procedures on a minor’s genitalia, and that the government should not single out specific healthcare choices. But his clunky comparison gave Watters an in.
The host called the comparison “wacky,” telling El-Sayed, “Michigan’s not going for that. That is sick stuff.”
The interview quickly drew a swarm of reactions from conservative media figures. YouTuber Benny Johnson wrote on X that El-Sayed had shocked Watters by “demanding to know if Fox News host is CIRCUMCISED live on-air,” adding, “I’ve never seen more of a nightmare interview.”
Commentator Nick Sortor wrote, “Abdul El-Sayed says CIRCUMCISION is the same thing as SEX CHANGES FOR MINORS. These people are SICK.”
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who served as White House press secretary during Donald Trump’s first term, said, “This is the radical left. This is who they are. Insane and sad."
Commentator Clay Travis wrote, “Holy s--t, Abdul El-Sayed said circumcision is similar to sex change operations on minors.
”Former White House deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson piled on as well, writing that El-Sayed was “2 for 2 on comparisons that make him look like an absolute insane person.”
Conservative strategist Mike Davis was blunter still.“Goodbye, Abdul,” he wrote. “You just guaranteed your defeat. Dingaling.”
Incredibly so as the US is politically corrupt, but not in the way people normally think about corruption. Lawrence Lessig wrote a decent book on the frame of this calling it Gift in Kind corruption, rather than Quid Pro Quo.
And then if you magnified this beyond the US context vastly harder to create an international framework where this is enforceable and upheld without loopholes causing breakdowns.
In theory a good idea, but in the global context it won't arrest this without international cooperation... And good luck with that in this age. Maybe in the 90s, but now...pffft.
While they did well environmental to produce this and even from a cost to consumer, there are many hidden costs to the power produced which will test France in the coming years as their fleet of reactors and the coming debt-to-gdp crisis means the tens of billions required to overhaul it might be tough to subsidize.
“Everyone knows what the problem is: The organizations that bring young staffers to Washington, D.C. have spent the last decade prioritizing blind ideological loyalty instead of competence or intelligence,” said a senior GOP congressional staffer, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel issues. “We have a generation of rabid, incompetent idiots.”
Of specific concern are those labeled groypers — technically, followers of the self-described “White Identitarian” Gen Z streamer Nick Fuentes, though it’s also used as a catch-all term of abuse for young, anti-establishment right-wingers, akin to the usage of “neocon” in the other direction. Fuentes, who has millions of viewers and a deeply antisemitic and misogynistic worldview, gained celebrity among young conservatives as a pro-Trump internet personality and far-right campus agitator. He has since turned on the president for his handling of the Epstein files and his support of Israel and the war in Iran. (Fuentes did not respond to a request for comment.)
He's so full of shit: "The technology is really simple," he told ABC7. "A car drives by, we take a picture. It's a static picture of a car, and then we read the license plate. That's what the technology is -- it's actually not that complicated, it's pretty simple."
When in fact these use AI to build what the company calls a "Vehicle Fingerprint" to identify each car by make, model, color, body type, and distinguishing features like bumper stickers, roof racks, dents, decals, and even objects in truck beds. They can track and identify vehicles even when license plates are missing, obscured, or swapped for an 6-12 frame interaction. Moreover it is a database of metadata allowing them to characterize personality, trends, habits, and patterns across 80,000 cameras in 49 states. That's just the plate readers.
They've grown to include 'first responder' drones, audio sensors, gunshot detection sensors, and full video surveillance in both the public and private sphere.
And worse is it's real-time cross-jurisdictional alerting, which has seen multiple false reports.
So it's damn well not just a static picture of a car, but surveillance capitalism.
You would enjoy a part of this essay talking about the Airline's experience dealing with automation:
They realised that many pilots flying highly automated jets were becoming what Vanderburgh called “Children of the Magenta Line”.
But you see, we have become what I call children of the magenta. [Note: In modern cockpits, the magenta line is the brightly colored route shown on the flight display, a digital path generated by the navigation computer.] You know, we think we have to have those magenta lines on the map and that magenta V-bar that’s steering us toward that line, or for some reason, the plane won’t fly.
...
That’s why his core message is:
We are not automation managers. We are captains and pilots, and by our aviator skills, we are to ensure the vertical and lateral path of these planes at all times. We will use the wonderful tools of automation that have been provided to us to help us with that task. But when the automation is not maintaining the intended flight path, we will turn it off and maintain the path by our skills.
Automation excels in routine situations, but it can’t improvise when things go wrong. In Vanderburgh’s words:
Automation lacks the ability to create flexible responses to unanticipated changes in flight path requirements. So in these circumstances, a lower level of automation should lower workload and thereby preclude us from becoming task-saturated and losing our situation awareness.
It's an interesting historical frame of this AI automation downward spiral you describe.
What happened
The intrusion started where AI platforms are uniquely exposed: the data-processing pipeline. A malicious dataset abused two code-execution paths in our dataset processing (a remote-code dataset loader and a template-injection in a dataset configuration) to run code on a processing worker. From there, the actor escalated to node-level access, harvested cloud and cluster credentials, and moved laterally into several internal clusters over a weekend.
The campaign was run by an autonomous agent framework (appearing to be built on an agentic security-research harness - used LLM still not known) executing many thousands of individual actions across a swarm of short-lived sandboxes, with self-migrating command-and-control staged on public services. This matches the "agentic attacker" scenario the industry has been forecasting
...
The asymmetry problem
When we started the log analysis, we first used frontier models behind commercial APIs. This did not work: the analysis requires submitting large volumes of real attack commands, exploit payloads, and C2 artifacts, and these requests were blocked by the providers' safety guardrails, which cannot distinguish an incident responder from an attacker. We ran the forensic analysis instead on GLM 5.2, an open-weight model, on our own infrastructure. This had a second benefit: no attacker data, and none of the credentials it referenced, left our environment.
This experience points to a gap worth planning for. We do not know which model powered the attacker's agents, whether a jailbroken hosted model or an unrestricted open-weight one; either way, the attacker was bound by no usage policy, while our own forensic work was blocked by the guardrails of the hosted models we first tried. The practical lesson for defenders: have a capable model you can run on your own infrastructure vetted and ready before an incident, both to avoid guardrail lockout and to keep attacker data and credentials from leaving your environment. This is not an argument against safety measures on hosted models, and we are sharing this feedback with the providers concerned.
(My emphasis added)
Sonnet 4.6 price equivalent, with half to a third of it's tok/s. It'll be interesting to see if the near gpt 5.6 or opus 4.8 level is accurate.
Not without waiting the 120 days, or that's how I'm understanding this game. And if they did, the Administration would probably do the same. It a technically correct method that skirts the spirit of the law.
They've been doing this with US Attorneys in several states, to get what they want. They did the same with Tessa Gormon in the same district, and Donald Kinsella in NY.
This is a good topic for LegalEagle or lawfaremedia.org or similar, so watch for something soon.
Google's introduction of AI Overviews in 2024 broke that bargain. Instead of the list of familiar blue links that previously sat at the top of Google’s search page, the new AI Overviews used the content of those links — effectively the actual news reporting — to create a summary, while pushing down and out of sight the links from which it was scraped.
This is what The Verge’s Nilay Patel calls “Google Zero.” Google scrapes the internet for content, without paying, then reassembles it on its own site, so users never leave. Readers get the news without visiting the source that reported it. And until now, if anyone did choose to opt out of being scraped for AI Overviews, Google would only let you do that by also crippling your presence in Search. So in effect, say no and Google forces you off Search.
Nice news website you have there. Be a shame if someone de-listed it.
Publishers faced an impossible choice: allow Google to steal and repurpose their work for AI systems without payment and eventually go out of business, or object, disappear from the internet and probably go out of business even faster.
The CMA has now rightly recognized that this is no choice at all and ordered Google to allow news publishers to opt out — without being removed from the internet entirely.
- JumpDeleted
Permanently Deleted
Say more about the reason it's move viable please.
Indeed this was probably Convolutional Neural Network
This is the prize https://scrollprize.org/
Chapter 5: The Money Speech
The panel was called "Doing Well By Doing Good" and it was the eleven o'clock session in the Aspengletscher Room, which was the second-largest room, the largest having been reserved for a sovereign wealth fund that was launching a foundation to study the problems its other division created.
Dagny had not planned to come to Davos. She had spent her life regarding the place as a kind of trade show for people who had confused having opinions about industry with industry, and nothing she had seen since arriving had revised the view. But Francisco d'Anconia was on the eleven o'clock panel, and she had not spoken to Francisco in nine years, and there had been a time — she did not let herself finish the sentence anymore, but there had been a time — and so she sat in the fourth row with a lanyard around her neck and a bottle of water that had been flown in from a glacier ninety kilometers away, and she waited for the man she had once believed was the most serious person alive.
He came out last. He was still beautiful in the specific way of men who have never once worried about money, a beauty that Dagny had mistaken, at nineteen, for the glow of competence. The moderator — a journalist who had written a flattering book about three of the four panelists — asked him the question she had clearly been told he liked.
"Francisco, there are people in this world who will tell you that money is the root of all evil. What do you say to them?"
And Francisco d'Anconia leaned into the microphone and gave the speech.
It was, Dagny had to admit, a magnificent speech. She had heard versions of it before — across a dinner table, years ago, when she had thought it was the truest thing anyone had ever said to her. So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of money? He moved through it the way a great cellist moves through a piece he has played a thousand times, and the room went quiet, and somewhere to her left a venture capitalist was nodding with his whole upper body. Money as the tool of free exchange. Money as the antithesis of the gun. Money as the verdict men pass on the worth of what they offer one another, the one judge that cannot be bribed because it is the bribe, refined into honesty. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. The applause, when it came, was the warm self-applause of a room that has heard itself described as the moral center of the universe and found the description fair.
Dagny did not applaud. She raised her hand.
The moderator, who did not know her, took the question because Francisco's eyes had already found her in the fourth row and something had crossed his face that the moderator mistook for delight.
"That was beautiful," Dagny said, and meant it, and hated that she meant it. "I have one question. It's a small one." She stood, because she had spent her whole life learning that you say the true thing standing up. "What does d'Anconia Copper make?"
Francisco smiled. "I beg your pardon?"
"Copper, presumably. That's the name. So I want to be specific, because you've just given a very moving account of money as the measure of what a man produces and offers in exchange — the verdict, you said, that can't be bribed. So I'm asking about the production. The thing being verdicted." She kept her voice pleasant. The glacier water was very cold in her hand. "How many tons did d'Anconia Copper bring out of the ground last year? Which mines? You don't have to be exact. Round to the nearest operating mine."
There was a pause of the kind that does not happen at Davos, and the room noticed it the way a body notices a skipped heartbeat.
"d'Anconia," said Francisco smoothly, "is a holding company."
"Since when?"
"Since 2003."
"So the answer is none." Dagny nodded, slowly, as if working it out, though she had worked it out on the flight. "You don't bring up copper. You hold the companies that hold the companies that used to. So when you say money is the verdict men pass on the worth of what they offer one another — Francisco, what is it, exactly, that you offer?"
She had not come to humiliate him. She wanted to be clear about that, later, in the motel, alone. She had come because she had spent the months since Colorado pulling a single thread, and the thread had led from Ellis Wyatt's flare stack to a man in Connecticut who was paid not to approve things, and from there to a structure, and from the structure to a name, and the name kept being this one. She had come because she needed to know whether the most serious person she had ever met was in on it or had been fooled by it, the way she had been fooled by it, and she could see now, watching his face find and discard three different expressions, that there was a third possibility she had not allowed for, which was that there was no difference between the two.
Because Dagny knew the rest of the story. Everyone in the industry knew the rest, they just told it as a tragedy or a scandal depending on which conference they were at. d'Anconia Copper was being destroyed. The great five-generation fortune was being run into the ground — mines shuttered, the San Sebastián works written off in a fiasco so total it had become a business-school case study, the stock a long red slide. And there was a romantic version of this, a version Dagny had wanted very badly to believe, in which Francisco was destroying his own empire on purpose, nobly, to deny its fruits to the looters, suffering the world's contempt as the price of a secret integrity.
She had checked the filings.
It was a dividend recapitalization. Several of them, actually, in a tidy cadence. You take the old company — the real one, the one his great-great-grandfather had clawed out of a mountain — and you load it with debt, and you use the borrowed money to pay an enormous special dividend to the shareholders, who are, when you trace the boxes, mostly him. The cash comes out the top. The debt stays at the bottom, with the mines, and the towns built around the mines, and the men in the towns. Then the thing that everyone calls destruction happens, on schedule, to the bottom, while the top — sunburned, eloquent, beloved, in the second-largest room in Davos — explains that money is the one honest judge in an dishonest world.
He had not been denying the looters the fruit. He had been the fruit's last and most efficient eater. The nobility and the asset-stripping were not two stories. They were one story, and the only thing the nobility added was that the workers in the San Sebastián towns got to feel, on top of everything else, that their ruin had been somebody's principle.
"Dagny," Francisco said, very quietly, off the microphone now, just to her, and for one second his face was nineteen again and so was hers. "You wouldn't understand what I'm doing."
"No," she said, and she found she was not angry, which frightened her more than anger would have. "I think I finally do. That's the problem." She set the glacier water down on her empty seat. "It's a very good speech, Francisco. You should keep giving it. It's the most valuable thing d'Anconia still produces."
She walked out before the Q&A resumed. Behind her the moderator recovered the room with practiced grace, and the panel moved on to the next question, which was about impact, and the venture capitalist to her left resumed nodding, and Francisco d'Anconia, the most serious man she had ever known, picked the microphone back up, because the eleven o'clock session ran until noon and there was, after all, still time on the clock and an audience that had paid to be told what it already believed.
Fair point...
I think it can do both:
The company makes its "Buria" turret, an autonomous remote weapon station that can be placed in a fixed position on a tripod and fire grenades or a machine gun. Mykyta Rozhkov, Frontline Robotics' chief business development officer, described it as "basically a metal robotic arm for a grenade launcher" or another weapon.
At the start of last year, the main use was placing it in a hidden position where it could fire on the enemy and blunt Russian attacks. But now, the weapons station is being used on ground robots, "so it can be mobile and be used as a small tank," Rozhkov said.
Surprisingly close:
Chapter 4: The Sanction of the Victim
The first one to disappear was a man named Ellis Wyatt, and the manner of his disappearance was widely discussed. In the original account of these events, Wyatt vanished in a pillar of fire. He had built, out of nothing but his own intransigent genius, a method for drawing oil from shale that the experts had called impossible, and when the looters came for it he had set his own wells ablaze rather than surrender them, leaving behind a single defiant note: I am leaving it as I found it. Take over. It's yours. It was, everyone agreed, a magnificent gesture. It was the gesture of a man who would rather destroy his life's work than let it be operated by lesser hands.
Dagny went to Colorado to see the fire. There was no fire. There was a chain-link fence, and behind the fence there were the wells, and the wells were running—running, in fact, harder than they ever had under Wyatt, running twenty-two hours a day with a skeleton crew and deferred maintenance and a flare stack that a man from the county had already cited twice. A sign on the fence said WYATT ENERGY SOLUTIONS, A Portfolio Company of Mulligan Holdings LP.
"Where is Mr. Wyatt?" Dagny asked the one human being she could find, a contractor named Gita Mehra who was checking pressure gauges with the expression of someone who has been asked to keep a building standing using only her hands.
"Gone," said Gita. "They closed in March. The whole thing. He held out for the multiple."
"The multiple."
"Eleven times EBITDA. They told him he was leaving money on the table at nine and he believed them." Gita tapped a gauge that was reading in a color Dagny did not like. "He's in Aspen. Or Lisbon. Somebody said Lisbon."
This, Dagny would discover over the following weeks, was the pattern, and the pattern was so consistent that it could not be coincidence and was therefore, in the manner of all patterns that cannot be coincidence, simply a market.
She had spent years believing that the great producers were vanishing because the world had grown hostile to greatness—that somewhere there was a force, malign and organized, that hated the competent for the crime of their competence and was hunting them to extinction. She had pictured this force as a committee of grey men. She had pictured it as the slow gravity of envy. She had, in her worst nights, pictured it as a kind of strike: the men of ability withdrawing their ability from a world that had not earned it, retreating to some hidden valley to wait out the collapse they had been too proud to prevent.
The truth was that they had taken the money.
They had, every one of them, been approached by a polite young person with a deck. The deck had thirty-one slides and the thirty-first slide was always the same: a number, and the number was always larger than the producer had ever imagined attaching to the thing he loved. And the producer had looked at the number, and had thought about his back, and his board, and the regulator from the county, and the fact that he was sixty-three and had not taken a vacation since 1998, and he had signed. And the polite young person had thanked him sincerely, because the sincerity was real—and then the polite young person's firm had loaded the company with the debt it had used to buy the company, in the way that a man might purchase a house by handing the house its own mortgage and instructing it to pay.
And then they stripped it.
Dagny learned the vocabulary the way a doctor learns the names of tumors. Sale-leaseback: you sold the building your factory stood in, took the cash, and then paid rent—to yourself, except it was not yourself anymore—for the privilege of remaining where you had always been. Dividend recapitalization: you borrowed money in the company's name and paid it to the people who owned the company, so that the company now owed millions of dollars for the experience of having been purchased. Add-on: you bought three of your competitors and fired everyone whose job existed twice, and called the firing a synergy, which was a beautiful word, Dagny thought, a word that meant two things working together and had been made to mean a man named Eddie cleaning out his locker.
It was, she came to understand, not destruction. That was the part she could not make peace with. Wyatt had not burned his wells. Nobody had burned anything. The wells still pumped, the metal still poured, the trains—her own trains—still ran. The thing that had been destroyed was harder to name. It was the slack in the system. It was the spare part in the storeroom and the second inspector on the platform and the engineer who stayed late because he wanted the bridge to be right rather than merely adequate. It was every margin of safety that did not appear on a quarterly statement, harvested and sold off and converted into a wire transfer to a fund whose investors were, when Dagny finally traced them, three university endowments, a Canadian pension plan, and a sovereign wealth fund belonging to a country that did not believe in elections. The looters, she had been taught, were the men who took without producing.
She sat with that sentence for a long time, in a rented car outside a fence in Colorado, watching Gita Mehra keep a billion dollars of infrastructure alive with a clipboard and a prayer, and she understood at last that the sentence was correct. She had simply been told, for her entire life, to look for the looters in the wrong direction. She had been told to look down—at the workers, at the regulators, at the men who asked for a thing they had not made. And the whole time the money had been moving the other way, up, in volumes so large and through channels so respectable that it had never once been required to call itself theft. Her phone buzzed. It was a calendar reminder, set by her assistant, for a call she had forgotten she had agreed to. 3:00 PM — Intro call w/ Midas Mulligan, Mulligan Holdings. Re: "strategic options for Taggart."
Dagny looked at the wells. The flare stack burned its small, illegal, profitable flame against the Colorado sky—not a defiant fire, not a magnificent gesture, just a controlled burn of something valuable that it was cheaper to waste than to capture.
She picked up the phone.
"This is Dagny Taggart," she said. "I'd like to know who John Galt is. And I think you're going to tell me he's a limited partner."
She had spent years believing in a particular story about how the world worked, and the story went like this: that somewhere above her, above the track and the schedules and the freight, there existed a class of people who made things happen. Who took the risk. Who saw, where others saw nothing, the shape of a thing that could be built, and who then built it, and who deserved — by the iron logic of having built it — to keep what the building earned. She had believed this story so completely that she had organized her life around being one of those people. She had thought it was the only story there was.
The story was not, she now understood, false exactly. It was just very old. It described something that had once happened, to someone, generations ago — to the man who actually laid the first Taggart line across a continent with his own surveyors and his own debts and his own appalling appetite for risk. That man had existed. Dagny had his portrait in the lobby. What no one had mentioned was that the story ended with him, and that everyone since had merely been standing on the spot where he had stood, collecting the rent of his having stood there, and calling the rent genius.
Ellis Wyatt had not been a builder. Ellis Wyatt had been the third owner of a thing a builder built, and he had sold it to a fourth, and the fourth had a thesis about synergies. The fire in the original account — the magnificent, defiant fire — had been the only honest thing anyone had ever attributed to him, and even that was invented. He had not destroyed his wells rather than let lesser men run them. He had sold his wells to the lesser men, at a premium, with a representations-and-warranties clause, and the lesser men were running them right now, badly, twenty-two hours a day, and the difference between Wyatt's defiance and Wyatt's exit was eleven times EBITDA and a flight to Lisbon.
This was the thing they called going on strike.
In the book Dagny had been living inside — she was beginning to suspect she had been living inside a book — the great men withdrew their genius from an ungrateful world, and the world, deprived of them, went dark. It was a kind of threat dressed as a tragedy: be grateful, or we leave, and then you'll see. And Dagny had been grateful. That was the part that kept her awake in the motel outside Glenwood Springs, listening to the flare stack she could not see. She had been so grateful. She had given them what the book, in its one moment of accidental honesty, had a name for.
The sanction of the victim.
It had taken her until Colorado to understand that the phrase did not mean what the book intended. The book meant it as an accusation against the productive — against the genius who lets himself be looted because he has been guilted into it. But standing at the chain-link fence of Wyatt Energy Solutions, A Portfolio Company of Mulligan Holdings LP, watching Gita Mehra hold a power plant together with her two hands while the man whose name was on the gate drank something cold four thousand miles away, Dagny finally saw who the victim actually was, and whose sanction had actually been required, and how freely — how proudly — it had been given.
It was hers. She had sanctioned all of it. She had run the trains.
"You should get that flare looked at," she said to Gita, because it was the only true and useful thing she could think of to say.
"I've put in the ticket," Gita said, not looking up. "It goes to a queue. The queue goes to Connecticut. In Connecticut there is a man whose entire job is to not approve the ticket. He is very good at his job." She tapped the gauge that was reading in the color Dagny did not like. "He's the most productive man in the company. You should see his bonus."
Dagny drove back to the airport. Behind her, the wells ran on, holding up a sky that no one in Lisbon had thought about in months, and somewhere in Connecticut a man declined a maintenance request and was, by every measure the book respected, a hero.
Chapter 3: The Top and the Bottom
The board met on the fourth Tuesday of the quarter, as it always did, in a room at the top of the Taggart Building where the windows had been engineered to be unopenable, which Dagny had always assumed was a safety measure and had only recently come to suspect was a metaphor. There were eleven of them around the table, and not one of them had ever laid a length of rail. This was not, in itself, a crime. Dagny had read enough about the history of her own industry to know that the men who designed bridges were rarely the men who riveted them, and that there was no shame in the division of labor—that a railroad was, in fact, precisely the kind of thing that required a great many people doing a great many different jobs, none of whom could do all of it, all of whom were necessary. She believed in this the way other people believed in God.
What troubled her was that the eleven men around the table did not appear to do any of the jobs. They did not design and they did not build and they did not maintain and they did not, as far as she could determine, decide. They approved. They received documents prepared by people three floors down, and they nodded, and they expressed concern about the timeline, and they asked whether the projections had accounted for headwinds, and then they voted to return four hundred million dollars to themselves.
"The buyback," said the chairman, whose name was Orren Boyle III and who had been placed on the board by a fund that had been placed on the board by a larger fund, "is simply the most efficient allocation of capital available to us at this time."
"We need that capital," Dagny said. "The Rio Norte Line is failing. I have track in Colorado laid in 1946 that I am running freight over in 2026. I have a foreman in Pennsylvania—" she stopped, because she had been about to say his name, and realized she did not know if anyone else at the table would recognize that a foreman could have one.
"The market," said Boyle, "disagrees with you about where the value is."
And here it is worth pausing, because in the original account of these events, there was a category of person called the looter—a parasite who produced nothing, who fed upon the productive, who demanded the unearned and called it justice. The looter was the great villain of that telling. He came dressed as a bureaucrat or a beggar or a brother-in-law, and he was always, always, asking for something he had not made.
The looters were real. The telling had simply gotten the address wrong.
They were not, it turned out, in the breadlines or the regulatory agencies. They were here, in the room with the unopenable windows, and they were not asking. They already had it. They had voted it to themselves on the fourth Tuesday of the quarter, and they would do it again next quarter, and the railroad would get four years older while the stock got one afternoon richer, and the word for what they were doing was not theft, because they had written the laws that defined theft and had thoughtfully left themselves out of it. The word for what they were doing was returning value to shareholders, and the shareholders were, in the main, themselves.
Dagny lost the vote eleven to one.
Six hundred miles away, the John Galt Line was being built by people, and it is the unusual privilege of this edition to be able to tell you who they were.
The grading crew was led by Maria Restrepo, who had come up through the Colorado Department of Transportation and could read a slope the way a doctor reads an X-ray, and who had turned down a desk job twice because she could not stand the meetings. The rail itself was set by a gang of nine, and the man who walked the line behind them checking gauge was named Tom Okafor, and he was sixty-one years old and had a tremor in his left hand that vanished completely the moment he picked up a track gauge, which his doctor found fascinating and which Tom found unremarkable, because the work was the one place his body still agreed with him.
There was a welder named Sofia Lindqvist who was the best in the division and knew it. There were two brothers, the Delgados, who did not speak to each other off the clock for reasons that predated the railroad and would outlast it, and who could nonetheless hang a length of rail in perfect silent coordination because the work did not require them to forgive each other, only to be competent at the same time, which they were. There was a kid named Devon Pratt on his first season who was going to quit in August and come back in the spring, the way they all did, the way the work pulled them back.
In the original account, the John Galt Line was an achievement of two people—the woman who financed it and the man who invented the metal—and the line was named, fittingly, after a third person who had done nothing at all. The hundreds of human beings who actually placed the rail were present in that telling only as a kind of weather: a condition the geniuses worked through, occasionally inclement, never named.
They had names. They laid forty miles of track in a season that the board had written off, and they did it under a deadline set by people who had never met them, to prove a point in an argument they had not been invited to, on a line named after a man whose only verifiable accomplishment was being born to the right grandfather.
When the first train ran the John Galt Line at eighty miles an hour, the newspapers ran a photograph of Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden standing in the cab, and the caption named them both.
Tom Okafor watched it go by from the embankment at milepost 31, where he had set the gauge with his own steady hands, and then he picked up his tools, because there were eleven more miles, and the rail did not care whose name was on it, and that—though no one in the room with the unopenable windows would ever understand this—was the only honest thing in the whole arrangement.
Ask Lemmy @lemmy.world Has USA crime actually dimished in 2025?
News @lemmy.world Hotly contested mayoral election isn’t just about the candidates. The NYPD’s future is also at stake