Kansai International Airport (KIX) in Osaka, Japan, has achieved a remarkable 30-year record of never losing a piece of luggage since its opening in 1994. This means that every bag, out of millions handled annually, has reached its intended destination without getting misplaced.

🚨 BREAKING: ICE secretly deported Luis Leon, an 82-year-old torture survivor and U.S. legal resident of nearly 40 years, after he walked into an immigration office to replace a lost green card. Instead of processing the request, ICE handcuffed him, detained his wife for 10 hours, and later told the family; through a fake “lawyer,” that he was dead. Turns out, ICE quietly transferred him through a Minnesota detention center and dumped him in Guatemala, a country he has zero ties to. There’s no deportation paperwork, no public record. His family only found him alive after relatives in Chile tracked him to a Guatemalan hospital. Leon suffers from diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart issues. The DOJ is now under fire, but this is the Trump-era immigration machine still in motion—cruel, unaccountable, and lawless. If they can disappear an elderly, law-abiding U.S. resident… They can disappear anyone.

Thinking about this observation from @tylercowen again:

Come to Mason's economics department, I will train you.

What happened after Sputnik? @ATabarrok provides a striking summary: NSF funding tripled in a year and increased by a factor of more than ten by the end of the decade. The National Defense Education Act overhauled universities and created new student loan programs for foreign language students and engineers. High schools redesigned curricula around the “new math.” Homework doubled. NASA and ARPA (later DARPA) were created in 1958. NASA’s budget rocketed upwards to nearly 5% of all federal spending and R&D spending overall increased to well over 10% of federal spending. Immigration rules were liberalized (perhaps not in direct response to Sputnik but as part of the ethos of the time). Foreign talent was attracted. Tariff barriers continued to fall and the US engaged with international organizations and promoted globalization. The U.S. answered Sputnik with bold competition not an aggrieved whine that America had been ripped off and abused.

The highest worker salaries in the history of capitalism. i.e. outside of a handful of CEOs and a tiny number of sports stars.

I don’t even know what this is, Salem MA

no fucking way a man named Eli Dourado is breaking this story

The reason the US, instead of cranking up education, R&D etc as it did in response to the USSR’s Sputnik, is going for full retrenchment in response to China’s DeepSeek, is none other than Zero Sum Thinking, @atabarrok argues quite compellingly. 😱

It is a major policy failure that the US cannot accommodate top AI conferences due to visa issues.