Sen. JD Vance has fashioned himself as a different kind of Republican. He is an “anti-regime,” “anti-elitist” populist who believes that America’s social order is “tilted toward the few.” He has decried traditional economic conservatism as an ideology that “subordinates human life and community to a false ideal of the market somehow existing independent of our society.” His conception of a just economy is purportedly informed by Catholic social teaching — specifically, the imperative to be “sympathetic with the meek and poor of the world without treating them primarily as victims” and “protective of children and families and with the things necessary to ensure they thrive.” In his address to the Republican National Convention, Vance suggested that Trump holds similar priorities, lauding him for narrowing the “divide between the few, with their power and comfort in Washington, and the rest of us.” And yet, many of the Republican ticket’s actual policies bear little trace of this skepticism of markets or concern for the left-behind.  This is especially true of Trump’s newly revealed health care plan — or, at least, what the campaign has revealed of it. On Sunday, Vance disclosed that the new, “anti-regime” Republican Party’s plan for fixing America’s medical system is … to deregulate the health insurance market so that insurers can refuse coverage to those who need treatment the most.  The GOP ticket’s dismally familiar health care plan tells us two things about the party’s ascendant populism. First, it is much more novel in its rhetoric than its governing priorities. And second, even where it plausibly privileges “the many” over “the few,” it does not prioritize the weak over the strong.   At last week’s presidential debate, Trump conceded that he did not have a health care plan so much as “concepts of a plan.” This admission was a political liability: If a candidate who’s been promising to replace Obamacare for a decade is still brainstorming his alternative, he might not make the most diligent or decisive commander in chief.  Yet actually spelling out what the right (still) believes about health care policy might be even more damaging. Or so Vance’s remarks on Meet the Press Sunday would suggest.  On that program, NBC’s Kristen Welker asked Vance to explain what — if anything — Trump planned to change about America’s health care system. The Republican VP nominee replied, “He, of course, does have a plan for how to fix American health care, but a lot of it goes down, Kristen, to deregulating insurance markets, so that people can actually choose a plan that makes sense for them.” Vance proceeded to say Trump would protect people with preexisting conditions and ensure everyone has access to the doctors they need. But he did not specify how Trump would do this. More pertinently, the one concrete policy Vance did detail would actually involve making health care coverage less affordable for those with chronic illnesses. Here’s the relevant part of Vance’s answer: [Trump would] implement a deregulatory agenda so that people can pick a health care plan that fits them. Think about it: A young American doesn’t have the same health care needs as a 65-year-old American. And a 65-year-old American in good health has much different health care needs than a 65-year-old American with a chronic condition. We want to make sure everybody is covered, but the best way to do that is to actually promote more choice in our health care system and not have a one-size-fits all approach that puts a lot of the same people into the same insurance pools, into the same risk pools, that actually makes it harder for people to make the right choices for their families. Vance’s sunny rhetoric here disguises his plan’s inegalitarian moral priorities.  It is true that the young and healthy have different medical needs than the old and sick. And before the Affordable Care Act’s regulations, the former could sometimes procure cheaper insurance tailored to their (currently) limited needs.  But this came at a social cost. Insurers were able to offer cheap health coverage to those who barely needed it by screening out those with preexisting conditions. In Vance’s terminology, they constructed low-risk pools: By only including people who were unlikely to require expensive treatments in their plans, they could profitably provide low-premium insurance to the young and well.  Meanwhile, sick and/or older Americans on the individual insurance market either went without coverage or were forced to pay dramatically higher premiums in order to cover the high cost of their care. Some state governments tried to defray this cost somewhat by subsidizing high-risk pools. But enrollees still paid much higher premiums than the typical market rate, and their coverage often excluded the treatments they needed most. The Affordable Care Act effectively forced the healthy to subsidize the sick. It required insurers to include those with preexisting conditions in their plans and cover all medically necessary procedures. To guarantee that insurers could still turn a profit and that coverage remained (at least somewhat) affordable for all, the government provided consumers with insurance subsidies.  The upshot of all this was that coverage became a little more expensive for some healthy people, while growing much cheaper for the old and seriously ill. If one believes that we live in a society — in which certain communitarian obligations take precedence over individual freedom — then this would seem like a good trade. Better to make a healthy 27-year-old pay a slightly higher premium than force a cancer-stricken 55-year-old to forgo treatment, or incur massive debts to finance chemotherapy — especially since the former can, at any moment, find themselves in the latter’s predicament.  Notably, Americans already accept this arrangement as common sense when it comes to employer-based insurance, which covers a slight majority of the population. A company’s older or sicker employees do not generally pay higher premiums than their younger or healthier colleagues. Instead, all pool their risks together, with the medically fortunate subsidizing those who aren’t as blessed.  And yet, for the minority of Americans who purchase insurance on the individual market, Vance wants to unwind this compulsory solidarity. He aims to increase the entrepreneurial freedom of insurers, and discretion of consumers, at the expense of the needy. Some would say this sounds a lot like a policy that “subordinates human life and community to a false ideal of the market.” Vance evidently disagrees. Vance’s vision for health care policy helps clarify the character of the right’s burgeoning “populism.” On trade and immigration, Vance’s ideology may prize a nationalistic conception of the common good above free markets. But on most economic questions, its iconoclastic rhetoric belies its fealty to conservative orthodoxy — and thus, to “the ruling class” whom Vance loves to deride.  As Trump’s running mate, Vance is campaigning on tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy and deregulation for health insurers. The rest of Trump’s economic agenda is rather hazy. But if his first term is any guide, it would also involve curtailing workers’ collective bargaining rights, reducing workplace safety standards, and attempting to throw millions off of Medicaid. Vance has not seen fit to criticize any aspect of this record.  All this raises the question of what, precisely, Vance means when he decries “neoliberalism” and says he wishes to serve the many and not the few.  In my estimation, he offered a clue to his intentions the day before his appearance on Meet the Press.  Vance’s main preoccupation in recent weeks has been the Haitian immigrant community of Springfield, Ohio, and its fictional attacks on longtime residents’ pets. On Saturday, the left-wing commentator Krystal Ball took exception to Vance’s hateful rhetoric, which had helped inspire bomb threats in Springfield.  Vance replied to Ball’s critique by accusing her of believing that “20,000 cheap laborers should be dropped on a small Ohio town.” To Vance, Ball’s intolerance for his demonization of Haitian immigrants proved that she was not really a “populist,” but rather (perhaps unwittingly) a proponent of “neoliberalism.” That latter term is used to describe a multitude of different beliefs. But used pejoratively, neoliberalism denotes a commitment to unfettered capitalism above all else.  For Vance, deregulating insurance markets at the expense of the vulnerable is not neoliberal or anti-populist. But arguing that politicians should not spread incendiary lies about immigrants is.  Populism, so construed, is not about supporting the weak in their conflicts with the powerful. “The few” it takes aim at are not the economic elite (whom it wishes to shower in tax relief and regulatory favors), but rather, certain categories of the disadvantaged.  Foreign-born immigrants from poor countries comprise a small minority of the US population. And the same is true of the chief beneficiaries of the ACA’s regulatory reforms. According to a 2017 report from the Kaiser Family Foundation, “in any given year, the healthiest 50% of the population accounts for less than 3% of total health care expenditures, while the sickest 10% account for nearly two-thirds of population health spending.” When Vance suggests that the interests of native-born Americans take absolute precedence over those of Haitian immigrants — or that the healthy should not have to pool their insurance risks with the sick — he is technically arguing for the many, not the few. (Of course, the idea that immigrants and native-born Americans cannot mutually prosper is contradicted by more or less the entirety of the nation’s history. And the concept of denying health care to the old and sick is deeply unpopular.)  The Republican ticket’s problem with free markets, meanwhile, is less that they reinforce privilege than that they sometimes erode it. To the invisible hand, the Haitian worker is not morally distinguishable from the native-born one. To Vance, however, the American-born worker who wishes to improve his station through toil and risk-taking is a hero — while the Haitian immigrant who wishes to do the same is a “cheap laborer” and social menace. To be sure, Vance has occasionally advocated for “populist” policies that aren’t inegalitarian. But in allying with Trump, he’s whittled his populism down to a reactionary core. The GOP is for the many over the few only insofar as they are for the privileged over the disadvantaged. Vance can call that “anti-regime” post-neoliberalism. I’d call it establishment conservatism.

HTC has announced the Vive Focus Vision, a new VR headset that builds on the Vive Focus 3 with features like color passthrough and better PC tethering support. The $999 Focus Vision is available for preorder from now until October 17th on HTC’s website. The Focus Vision can be used either as a standalone device or tethered to your PC using USB-C. It’s essentially a beefed-up version of the Focus 3, which the company released in 2021 — it has the same 2448 x 2448 per-eye resolution and 120-degree field of view and also uses a Snapdragon XR2 chip. But it gains features like dual 16MP cameras with color passthrough, and it can now automatically adjust the lenses to compensate for the distance between your eyes. HTC is going for gamers...

YouTube creators can now break their videos up into different seasons and episodes to make them easier for viewers to navigate — and binge-watch — on TV. The upcoming feature comes as YouTube has increasingly been pushing into the living room, with YouTuber revenue on TVs up 30 percent year over year, according to the company. Content creators can soon tailor their uploads for viewers in a format that looks very similar to Netflix and other streaming services when viewed on the TV, with full-screen episode descriptions and a hierarchy of seasons and episodes to navigate. YouTube has not described how the new formatting will translate to desktop and mobile UI, but expect to see it in some form on all...

Apple unveils the new color Satin Black, but save $110 on the rugged previous Apple Watch Ultra 2 with GPS and cellular.

A promotional image for Amazon's 4-Series Fire TVs. A lawsuit is seeking to penalize Amazon for allegedly providing "fake list prices and purported discounts" to mislead people into buying Fire TVs. As reported by Seattle news organization KIRO 7, a lawsuit seeking class-action certification and filed in US District Court for the Western District of Washington on September 12 [PDF] claims that Amazon has been listing Fire TV and Fire TV bundles with "List Prices" that are higher than what the TVs have recently sold for, thus creating "misleading representation that customers are getting a 'Limited time deal.'" The lawsuit accuses Amazon of violating Washington's Consumer Protection Act. The plaintiff, David Ramirez, reportedly bought a 50-inch 4-Series Fire TV in February for $299.99. The lawsuit claims the price was listed as 33 percent off and a "Limited time deal" and that Amazon "advertised a List Price of $449.99, with the $449.99 in strikethrough text.” As of this writing, the 50-inch 4-Series 4K TV on Amazon is marked as having a "Limited time deal" of $299.98.

You'll have to verbally tell them "Read my notifications" now.

A few months ago, I wrote about a proposal called the End Kidney Deaths Act, which seeks to make sure that every one of the more than 135,000 Americans who get diagnosed with kidney failure every year has access to a kidney transplant.  Its method is simple: a federal tax credit worth $10,000 a year for five years, paid to anyone who donates a kidney to a stranger. It’s the kind of thing that would’ve helped a lot when I donated a kidney back in 2016. Elaine Perlman, a fellow kidney donor who leads the Coalition to Modify NOTA, which is advocating for the act, estimates the measure will save 100,000 lives over the first decade it’s enacted, based on conversations with transplant centers on how many surgeries they can perform with their current resources. Polling has shown this kind of measure has overwhelming public support, with at least 64 percent of Americans supporting a system where a government agency compensates donors. Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. Since we last covered it, the Act has taken some huge strides forward. It has been introduced in the House of Representatives with two Republicans (Reps. Nicole Malliotakis of New York and Don Bacon of Nebraska) and two Democrats (Reps. Josh Harder of California and Joe Neguse of Colorado) in support of it. Dozens of supporters took to the Hill last week for a lobby day, meeting with staff for over 50 other senators and representatives. But it’s also started to generate some real opposition. This is to be expected. In the half-century or so that organ donation has been a safe and reliable procedure, many people, including those running some kidney care advocacy groups, have expressed opposition to the idea of compensating kidney donors for our work. Compensation has been banned ever since the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, the law Perlman’s coalition seeks to modify. Admitting we’ve made a mistake for 40 years and counting is hard. Each year, about 47,000 people die prematurely due to the kidney shortage. Over 40 years, the death toll reaches into the millions. Failing to pay donors has killed a whole lot of people. Surveying the whole landscape of anti-compensation arguments could fill up a whole book (and has!), so I’ll only address a few here. But none of them are persuasive, and members of Congress weighing the bill should reject these arguments in favor of paying donors fairly for the work we do to prevent deaths from kidney failure. 1) Kidney donation is too dangerous to pay people to do: This would be a very good argument against donation if it were true — but it’s wildly false. While kidney donation comes with risks, they’re quite small. A just-released study found that the donor’s risk of death in the actual surgery, which was already very low, has dropped by two-thirds over the past decade. For the decade from 2013 to 2022, which includes my donation in 2016, there were 58,656 living kidney donors in the US. Five died within 90 days of the operation. That’s a mortality risk of 0.9 per 10,000. For comparison, in 2022, there were over 100 deaths from work injuries for every 100,000 working loggers in the US, a death rate every year that’s about 10 times larger than the one-time risk of kidney donation. Roofers, fishers, and truck drivers all had annual death rates at least twice as high as the risk of death from kidney donation. For sure, these workers deserve better safety protections, just as even five deaths among donors is five too many. But no one would credibly argue for banning the practice of roofing because it’s too dangerous. Why should that argument work for kidneys? 2) Kidney donation exploits or coerces the poor: This argument takes a number of forms, but it’s based on the intuition that offering money to donate will disproportionately push poor people to become donors and that this constitutes exploitation because they would not have donated without compensation, and thus are donating in part because of their own financial deprivation. The Oxford philosopher Janet Radcliffe Richards notes that this argument, like the one above, proves too much. “It applies to just about all paid work,” she writes in The Ethics of Transplants, “Unless you would do your job for no payment … anyone who employed you or bought what you offered for sale would in this sense be exploiting you.” While the idea that all wage labor is exploitative is hardly new, it would be silly to draw the conclusion that wage labor should be banned and that workers should not be allowed to be paid. A similar but distinct argument is that this kind of payment is not exploitative but coercive: The lure of cash actively forces people to donate, like a blackmailer or extortionist does. This just isn’t what the word “coerced” means. Coercion means using threats or force to limit a person’s options so they do what you want. Paying for kidney donation expands options, rather than limiting them.  The late philosopher Alan Wertheimer, who literally wrote the book on coercion, puts it bluntly: “Genuine offers do not coerce. Period.” The End Kidney Deaths Act’s offer of money for donors is a genuine offer. It cannot be coercive. I should note that the End Kidney Deaths Act could be altered to avoid this concern. It could be written so that only wealthy people (perhaps those making $400,000 or more) are eligible for the tax credit, so we can be sure they were not exploited. Is that better? Or does it offensively cut off poor people from a valuable benefit? I think the latter. 3) We’ll get fewer kidney donations if donors are compensated because it will no longer feel altruistic: This is known as the “crowding out” hypothesis, and it was the argument longtime compensation critic Alexander Capron made to NPR in their piece on the End Kidney Deaths Act: “When something goes from being something which people give to being something that is bought, the givers stop giving.” The problem is that Capron has no evidence for it. (I emailed him asking for some and never heard back.) When it comes to blood donation, the most recent meta-analysis on the topic found that the bulk of estimates point to cash or cash-like incentives increasing it, not decreasing it. In the case of blood plasma, which is more time-consuming and physically draining to donate than whole blood, monetary incentives have proven dramatically and obviously more effective than altruistic ones. The United States and Germany compensate plasma donors, while Canada, the UK, and Australia do not.  Sure enough, the latter three countries import a majority of the blood plasma they use from countries where donors are paid. In a shocking twist, paying people for their work results in more work being done. In the kidney case, the same would likely be true. A recent survey conducted by the National Kidney Donation Organization (which represents living kidney donors) of 288 of its members, shared privately with Vox, found that 97.9 percent said they would’ve been as likely or even likelier to donate had they gotten a tax credit.  If you believe kidney donors, incentives work. The country with the shortest kidney waitlist in the world is Iran, which not coincidentally is the only country that currently allows compensation. More to the point, the whole theory that paying people to donate blood or kidneys would make them less likely to do so is sufficiently bizarre that it’s hard to see how it even theoretically could be true, except perhaps at very low levels of compensation.  There’s no other area of human life where we assume that monetary incentives are actively counterproductive. We do not worry that paying salaries to doctors and nurses will “crowd out” their altruistic reasons for working in health care, or that letting firefighters accept wages “crowds out” their natural desire to save people from burning buildings. The correct response to “people donate more blood when they’re paid to donate blood” is “well, duh.” And the correct expectation to have about paying people to donate kidneys is that they’ll donate more kidneys. I studied philosophy in college, and I enjoy dissecting the meanings of concepts like “exploitation” and “coercion” and “commodification” as much as the next dork. But I must admit I find the tendency of some philosophers to use kidneys as a kind of playground for thought experiments about the limits of markets to be borderline offensive. Their arguments aren’t just theoretical. They lend respectability to policy statements from practitioners like the jaw-droppingly inane Declaration of Istanbul, a joint statement by various transplant doctor and nephrologist organizations that states compensating donors “leads inexorably to inequity and injustice.”  The document offers exactly zero empirical evidence for this statement because there is none. “There is no argument whatsoever here, only smoke and mirrors,” Radcliffe Richards rightly notes. “For a major international statement, widely endorsed, this is appalling.” It is appalling, and it has contributed to a situation where each year in the US sees only about 25,500 kidney transplants but over 135,000 new end-stage kidney disease diagnoses. That means some 110,000-odd people, each year, who plausibly could use a kidney donation cannot receive one because there is not enough supply. The way you increase labor supply, in any field, is to raise the wage. Not enough nurses? Pay nurses more. Not enough waiters? Pay your waiters more. Not enough kidney donors? Here’s a crazy idea: Pay us. Correction, September 18, 1:15 pm: A previous version of this article misstated the Coalition to Modify NOTA’s estimation of how many lives the End Kidney Deaths Act would save. It is now estimated to be 100,000.

AI startup Runway has made a name for itself building generative models seemingly trained on unlicensed content from around the internet. Now, the company has signed a deal with Lionsgate that will give it access to the studio’s massive portfolio of films and TV shows. Today, Lionsgate — the studio behind films like the John Wick and Hunger Games franchises — announced that it is partnering with Runway to create a new customized video generation model intended to help “filmmakers, directors and other creative talent augment their work.” In a statement about the deal, Lionsgate vice chair Michael Burns described it as a path toward creating “capital-efficient content creation opportunities” for the studio, which sees the technology as “a...

Unlike solar panels that can only generate power while the sun’s shining, Aurea Technologies’ new Shine 2.0 portable wind turbine can potentially work all day long. That is, as long as the weather cooperates and provides an 8mph breeze needed to keep the turbine’s blades spinning. Now available for preorder through a Kickstarter campaign offering discounts on its full $571 retail pricing for early backers, the Shine 2.0 is an improved version of the company’s first portable wind turbine that arrives with several welcome upgrades. The Shine 2.0, and an included three-foot-tall support with stability...

Artist's conception of a dark matter filament containing a galaxy with large jets. (Caltech noted that some details of this image were created using AI.) . At those distances, the jets could easily send material into other galaxies and across the cosmic web of dark matter that structures the Universe. Jets are formed in the complex environment near a black hole. The intense heating of infalling material ionizes and heats it, creating electromagnetic fields that act as a natural particle accelerator. This creates jets of particles that travel at a substantial fraction of the speed of light. These will ultimately slam into nearby material, creating shockwaves that heat and accelerate that, too. Over time, this leads to large-scale, coordinated outflows of material, with the scale of the jet being proportional to a combination of the size of the black hole and the amount of material it is feeding on.

Scientists have found evidence that levels of enterovirus D68, which can cause a rare, polio-like condition in kids, has been spiking nationally since August.