Is Nathan Fielder interested in making something innovative and great, or does he only really care about making money?

That's technically the question You Can See Everything, the new A24 documentary co-directed by Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, asks about its subject, Elizabeth Holmes, the Theranos founder and convicted fraudster currently in federal prison. 

As the documentary progresses, however, it's a question one increasingly asks about Fielder himself. 

You Can See Everything was billed as an intimate look at the day-to-day life of Holmes, her romantic partner Billy Evans, and their two children, in the days before she reports for her 11-year prison sentence.

In truth, that only describes the first half of the three-hour-long film, in which Fielder and his camera crews are embedded in Holmes and Evans' cramped San Diego beach house in the month preceding her incarceration.

In part one, we truly do see everything, from Holmes making breakfast for the kids and talking to lawyers about last-minute appeals to Evans showering naked. 

All the while, Fielder obsessively explores in his own meta-comedy style a question many have asked about Holmes: Were the lies she told about Theranos' diagnostic machines merely a scam to rip off investors? Or had she actually convinced herself that these falsehoods were at most white lies in the service of a great and revolutionary technology on the cusp of becoming a reality?

Then, after 90 minutes of this exploration, Holmes checks in to prison, and Fielder's primary subject disappears from the film. The focus then shifts to Evans and whether or not he's solely responsible for a new unethical scheme Holmes has found herself enmeshed in.

In a Fielderesque reenactment, it's revealed to the audience that Evans conditioned the documentary's access to him and Holmes on the couple being paid a percentage of the film's profits.

Any ethical documentarian would have to say no to this ask. 

Subjects being economically disinterested in the films they're appearing in is what separates real documentaries, which are supposed to accurately portray real life, from fictional films and public relations puff pieces. 

Incredibly, however, Fielder, Oppenheim, and A24 eventually agree to Evans' demand for a cut of the film's profits.

Once this crooked bargain is made, You Can See Everything then shifts to exploring whether Holmes was aware that she'd be profiting from the film or whether this was a deal the domineering Evans secured without her knowledge. 

Fielder tells us that he believes the answer will shed light on whether Holmes actually sees herself as a world-changing inventor or whether she really is just out for the money. 

Fielder eventually makes this point directly to Evans during an on-camera confrontation and in a reenactment of his unfilmed meeting with Holmes in prison. By accepting payment for the documentary, the two are undercutting their case that Holmes is more than a wealth-obsessed fraudster, he tells them.

And by forfeiting their rights to back-end profits, they can make the audience more sympathetic to their case that Holmes did have motivations beyond a paycheck. 

As a humble viewer, I confess I found this investigation somewhat boring. For starters, it seemed obvious to me that Holmes was in on the scheme to get paid for the documentary from the beginning.

Moreover, it's all kind of beside the point. Once the deal to pay Evans was inked, the documentary has been irrevocably changed into an elaborate rip-off. The only question remaining is whether the subjects or the audience will be the ultimate sucker. 

When Fielder pointedly pushes Evans and Holmes to surrender profits they're contractually entitled to, he's no longer a disinterested filmmaker exploring the couple's psyches. He's an economically interested party pressuring business partners to back out of money they've been contractually promised or else risk extreme embarrassment in the film he's making.

If Fielder fails to convince the couple to surrender their rights, moviegoers are left with the knowledge that a portion of their ticket revenue is benefiting a convicted fraudster. 

If the director does succeed in his pressure campaign, it means that there's more profit to go around for the makers of the film. 

A documentary about conmen itself becoming a con would not be an uncharacteristic Fielder bit.

His projects frequently feature a deliberate, escalating blurring of the lines between art and reality. See, for instance, the second season of his show The Rehearsal, in which an investigation into airline pilots' mental well-being culminates in Fielder becoming a licensed 737 pilot while waiting on an autism diagnosis. 

Something similar can be said for the connection between the themes in the documentary and co-director Oppenheim's recent feature film Primetime about the making of the reality show To Catch a Predator. That movie was also about how TV producers can script reality and invent crimes all for the benefit of a show that's allegedly meant to merely document them.

You Can See Everything pulls off something similar. Its investigation into Holmes' motives leaves one seriously questioning the filmmaker's probity. Perhaps that makes it a genius bit of meta commentary on the unreality of documentaries.

Ultimately, it doesn't really matter. There's no getting around the fact that Fielder made a crooked bargain to get his documentary made and then used his power as a director who did, in fact, see everything to screw people out of money they had been promised. 

One can imagine that the victims of Holmes' Theranos scam will find You Can See Everything a frustrating film to watch. At the end of the day, this woman defrauded them of hundreds of millions of dollars. Her precise motives for doing so probably aren't all that interesting to them.

I certainly feel a similar way as a paying viewer of the unethical travesty that is You Can See Everything.

The post Nathan Fielder Made a Dishonest Movie appeared first on Reason Magazine.

C’è questa bizzarra teoria sulla pace in Ucraina secondo cui la guerra finirà soltanto smettendo di mandare agli ucraini le batterie antimissili che proteggono le città e i civili della nazione aggredita. Il corollario di questa stravagante teoria, che alcuni sostengono sia di sinistra, ma che in realtà è stata già messa in pratica da Donald Trump a maggior gloria di Vladimir Putin, è che dovremmo riprendere i rapporti commerciali, in particolare energetici, con la Russia, che, a quel punto, grazie a questi sedicenti pacifisti, non solo troverebbe i cieli e il terreno liberi per distruggere e avanzare come non gli è riuscito in quasi cinque anni sul campo di battaglia, ma questo avanzamento sarebbe addirittura finanziato dai paesi occidentali.

A dimostrazione che questi non sono pacifisti, ma guerrafondai pro-Russia (grazie, Christopher Hitchens, per la definizione), in effetti è probabile che, seguendo queste idee strampalate, la guerra finisca, ma con essa finirebbe anche l’Ucraina e la difesa dell’Europa (salvo che poi la guerra continuerebbe da qualche altra parte, nel Baltico, in Moldova, in Polonia o altrove, ma dai geopolitici alle vongole che infestano il discorso pubblico italiano non si può pretendere molto di più).

Poi ci sono gli ipocriti, per non dire altro, promotori della soluzione diplomatica e amareggiati per l’assenza dell’Europa in questo processo di pacificazione, i quali, però, dimenticano che la soluzione diplomatica e la presenza europea nel processo di pacificazione sono fallite più volte per il preciso rifiuto russo a partire dal 2014, ma in realtà anche da prima, almeno dal 2008, da quando la Russia ha invaso la Georgia. Il consenso generale, dall’America all’Europa, è stato quello di consentire a Putin di fare più o meno quello che gli piaceva.

Gli stolti, inoltre, dimenticano che ogni giorno, ogni maledetto giorno, da anni, i russi rifiutano tutte le ipotesi negoziali che non siano lo smembramento della nazione ucraina e della sua identità culturale, ancor prima della cessione dei territori contesi.

Dietro la richiesta di nuove iniziative diplomatiche, che i russi peraltro non accettano, c’è un gigantesco e insincero non detto: fin qui la Russia ha rigettato anche le più generose aperture trumpiane, presentategli sui tappeti rossi in Alaska e altrove, anche perché il Cremlino sa – e lavora intensamente affinché ciò accada – che a breve la linea Trump potrebbe prendere il sopravvento anche in Europa, con Marine Le Pen e Jean-Luc Mélenchon, entrambi filorussi e antieuropei, che a primavera potrebbero contendersi il ballottaggio francese e cambiare la rotta europeista di Emmanuel Macron, il quale peraltro aveva tentato in tutti i modi di far ragionare Putin, usando perfino la famigerata carta del «non umiliare la Russia».

C’è poi l’ascesa dei neonazi e dei rossobruni in Germania. Vedremo se ci sarà un’ondata nera in Spagna, per non parlare del Regno Unito. Arrivano buone notizie – e in controtendenza – dalla Serbia (come già dall’Ungheria e dalla Moldova), dove ieri il governo filorusso di Aleksandar Vučić ha perso le elezioni.

Infine c’è l’Italia, a offrire una grande speranza alla Russia per un 2027 glorioso. Siamo, come al solito, il paese guida della nuova ondata filorussa e rossobruna, con il vicepremier Matteo Salvini che, nel giorno dell’anniversario del patto politico della Lega col partito di Putin, è stato rieletto segretario, promettendo che in Consiglio dei ministri ora si batterà per fermare gli aiuti all’Ucraina.

Una posizione che trova qualche timida accoglienza nel partito del fu «lettone di Putin» e nelle file dei Fratelli d’Italia, minacciati ideologicamente dall’ex generale pro-russo Roberto Vannacci. Per ora, a parole, Giorgia Meloni resiste, anche se un po’ meno nei fatti, ma quanto potrà durare questa posizione sotto costante attacco di Salvini, Vannacci e del centrosinistra a vocazione contiana?

Dall’altra parte, le cose sono speculari e altrettanto deprimenti, con Giuseppe Conte che fece sfilare l’esercito russo lungo le strade italiane durante il Covid, alla guida di una setta anti-occidentale che organizzava viaggi nella Crimea occupata e partecipava festante ai congressi russi del partito unico di Putin.

Conte, come Salvini e Vannacci, con il quale, infatti, vota di conseguenza al Parlamento europeo, si batterà per fermare gli aiuti all’Ucraina assieme alla sinistra-sinistra di Avs e ad alcuni degli aspiranti centristi del campo largo, da Alessandro Onorato a Vincenzo De Luca.

Conte esercita un’egemonia deleteria sulla sinistra, o presunta tale, e costringe sempre più il Partito Democratico ad abbandonare la posizione sull’Ucraina che ha tenuto dal 2022 assieme alla famiglia politica socialista europea, in un’oscena e bizzarra spirale di resa al populismo e alla linea Trump.

Con questo scenario elettorale, che nel 2027 potrebbe smembrare l’Europa e dare il via libera alle mire imperialiste di Mosca, per quale motivo uno come Putin, che finora non ha avuto nessuna intenzione di fermare la guerra, dovrebbe farlo proprio ora, quando la Francia e l’Italia potrebbero facilitargli la strada verso Kyjiv che i suoi carri armati non sono riusciti a percorrere?

La guerra scatenata da Putin si può fermare soltanto in un modo: proteggendo gli ucraini e aiutandoli a respingere missili, droni e scarponi chiodati di Mosca, fino al punto da rendere insostenibile lo sforzo finanziario e umanitario per l’economia e la società russa.

Questa cosa, al momento, la capiscono soltanto i paesi dell’ex Patto di Varsavia, che a ogni elezione democratica spiegano al resto d’Europa di non voler tornare sotto il giogo russo; la Gran Bretagna; i rappresentanti dell’Unione europea; i liberali, i socialisti e i democratici europei; Giorgia Meloni, perfetta a parole, meno con i fatti; e il piccolo ma combattivo spazio politico occupato da Carlo Calenda, Pina Picierno (e in Francia da Raphaël Glucksmann), assieme alla minoranza sempre più martoriata e indebolita del Partito Democratico.

L'articolo Le strampalate teorie sulla pace in Ucraina, e il ventre molle italiano proviene da Linkiesta.it.

The Canberra star was two days into a fortnight’s break in Phuket when he received the call-up from Kevin Walters. Now he’s preparing to make his Australia debut.

Canberra withdrew their offer to Hudson Young on Monday – three hours later, the Sydney Roosters did likewise with Sam Walker.

Milano–Cortina 2026 è stato un trionfo per l’Italia. Il record di 30 medaglie nell’edizione di casa resterà per sempre impresso nella storia dello sport azzurro. Tra i simboli del successo ci sono Federica Brignone e Francesca Lollobrigida, capaci di vincere due ori, Arianna Fontana, che ha stabilito il nuovo primato italiano di medaglie olimpiche con 14, e Federico Pellegrino, che ha regalato alle staffette dello sci di fondo due podi. Tutti atleti alla fine della loro carriera.

Pellegrino ha appeso gli sci al chiodo a marzo 2026, lasciando un vuoto nello sci di fondo, che ora è senza un leader, capace di nascondere le difficoltà del movimento. Anche Dorothea Wierer, regina del biathlon, che ha fatto uscire il suo sport dalla nicchia nel nostro Paese, raggiungendo trionfi mai visti prima, si è ritirata. Brignone, dopo il miracolo olimpico, è ancora alle prese con la riabilitazione dal grave infortunio dell’aprile 2025. In un’intervista a Eurosport, ha detto che non è più disposta a sciare con il dolore. L’intenzione di tornare c’è, ma vista l’età, 36 anni, e il recupero che dura da 1 anno e mezzo, ci vorrà tempo per rivederla in gara.

Lo stesso vale per Sofia Goggia, che ha patito un’infezione virale durante il ritiro in Sud America. La bergamasca potrebbe rientrare a inizio dicembre, ma non c’è una data certa. Fontana deve ancora svelare il suo futuro nello short track, non è chiaro se proseguirà e se la vedremo in gara questo inverno. Lollobrigida ha annunciato sui social la sua seconda gravidanza e per forza di cose salterà la stagione del pattinaggio di velocità. La campionessa olimpica di 3.000 e 5.000 metri, però, ha manifestato la volontà di puntare ai Giochi 2030 in Francia.

Della “vecchia guardia”, ossia coloro che già nei quadrienni precedenti avevano ottenuto medaglie olimpiche o mondiali, rimangono in piena attività solo Michela Moioli nello snowboard cross, Lisa Vittozzi nel biathlon e Dominik Paris nello sci alpino. Senza i suoi pilastri, l’Italia deve ricostruire il movimento in vista delle Olimpiadi 2030. Può sembrare un paradosso, ma con il ritiro e lo stop forzato di atleti che negli ultimi 15 anni hanno fatto la storia degli sport invernali l’unica via è ripartire. E bisogna farlo dai giovani. Tommaso Giacomel, al rientro dopo l’aritmia cardiaca che lo ha costretto a fermarsi durante la mass start olimpica, ha detto che è stata la sua estate peggiore e difficilmente potrà lottare per la classifica generale, ma è un talento su cui costruire il futuro del biathlon italiano, assieme a Vittozzi. Lo stesso vale per Flora Tabanelli nello sci freestyle. Post bronzo olimpico, la 18enne è stata operata al legamento crociato anteriore del ginocchio destro, fratturato a novembre 2025, e sta ultimando il recupero. Giovanni Franzoni è la grande speranza dello sci alpino. È esploso nella scorsa stagione, vincendo l’argento olimpico in discesa.

Da lui riparte il settore maschile, mentre al femminile punta su Laura Pirovano e Marta Bassino, che rientra nel gigante di Soelden dopo aver saltato l’intera scorsa stagione per infortunio. Tra i giovani talenti c’è anche Simone Deromedis, oro olimpico nello ski cross, che andrà a caccia della Coppa del Mondo generale, dopo aver chiuso secondo negli ultimi due anni. Lo slittino dovrà confermare i fasti di Milano Cortina 2026, dove ha vinto due ori e due bronzi. Tra gli atleti in rampa di lancio ci sono Riccardo Lorello nel pattinaggio di velocità, bronzo nei 5.000 ai Giochi, Elisa Confortola, Thomas Nadalini e Pietro Sighel nello short track. Le certezze restano Andrea Giovannini e Davide Ghiotto nello speed skating e lo snowboard italiano nel gigante parallelo.

Ad aprire il sipario sulla stagione invernale sono sci alpino, short track e pattinaggio di figura, cominciate nella notte. A seguire, il 13 novembre è fissata la prima tappa di Coppa del Mondo di pattinaggio di velocità. Il 21 e 22 novembre partono salto con gli sci, bob e skeleton. Sci di fondo, combinata nordica, freestyle, snowboard e biathlon scattano la settimana successiva; mentre slittino e sci alpinismo debuttano a inizio dicembre. L’Italia ha ancora frecce al suo arco, ma non ha più l’abbondanza che a Milano–Cortina 2026 ci ha consentito di salire sul podio in 12 discipline diverse. Per ritrovarla bisogna ripartire dai giovani, da quelli già affermati, ma soprattutto dagli altri, per mantenere la versatilità che negli ultimi anni ha contraddistinto gli sport invernali italiani e ci ha regalato le gioie a cinque cerchi.

L'articolo Una nuova era senza i veterani: così l’Italia degli sport invernali cerca di ripartire dopo Milano-Cortina proviene da Il Fatto Quotidiano.

Ever since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, a torrent of money has flowed into building out data centers to power the AI boom.

The efforts reached a fever pitch the day after Donald Trump’s second inauguration in 2025, when a bevy of AI luminaries including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Softbank founder Masayoshi Son crowded into the Oval Office to announce a $500 billion private investment in data centers.

But as the public has grown jittery about the impacts of AI on society and the job market — and story after story has landed about the downsides of hosting data centers in local communities — the buildout has emerged as a major political flashpoint and a key issue in the looming midterms.

The data industry’s headwinds aren’t just political, either. As the Financial Times reports, serious cracks are forming at the financial and logistical level, especially as serious AI revenue remains elusive.

Numbers cited by the paper are eye-popping. Drawing on data from regulatory intelligence outfit RegLayer, the FT reports that 47 large data center projects have already fallen through this year. Analysts at the equity research firm Bernstein only believe that about 35 percent of planned facilities are feasible.

All those canceled projects are due to a lot of factors, including local communities mobilizing against them, but it’s also macroeconomic. The buildout is taking place during a period of high interest rates and shaky bond markets, and people involved with the effort told the paper that the situation is “threatening their ambitions.”

Some of the plans were shaky to begin with. The FT reports that top labs like Anthropic and OpenAI have pushed so hard for the developments, believing them to be key to their success, that they’ve swallowed outsized costs and deemphasized due diligence. Investors are taking notice: stock in CoreWeave, a cloud provider closely linked to the AI data center industry, has fallen by more than 27 percent over the past month.

The really big question, though, is what happens to all these data center projects if the bottom starts to fall out of the AI industry financially, a situation that many economists have warned is a possibility over the past few years. For now, things are still chugging along — albeit much more slowly than anticipated.

“People aren’t just dropping their shorts for data centers anymore,” one unnamed executive told the FT. “It’s much harder today to finance a data center.”

Read full story here…

Before I walked into Milwaukee County Stadium in 1982, I had never been to a professional sporting event. I was 9 years old, and I can vividly recall being overwhelmed by the lights and the number of people there. The first-place Milwaukee Brewers were playing the Oakland A’s, and Rickey Henderson tied the record for most stolen bases in a season. The Brewers would go on to play in the World Series that year, losing to the St. Louis Cardinals in an epic seven-game series, and even though we didn’t get to celebrate a championship, I imagined a full life of cheering on a winning team.

It was the last time the Brewers would make the playoffs for 26 years. During that time, I grew hardened, believing I would die before I ever saw the Brewers return to the World Series. Bad personnel moves and a payroll that couldn’t match the league’s top-tier teams made winning seem like mere folly. Fans showed up at the games to cheer on the racing sausages more than the actual players on the field.

Yet when the Brewers and Tampa Bay Rays open the World Series on Friday, both teams’ highest-paid players will earn salaries rivaling the price of the animatronic bird that Kelly Clarkson so desperately desired. Neither franchise spends like a superpower. Neither plays in a media capital. And neither got here by doing what most of baseball has decided is the only way to win.

It would be tempting to cast these two teams as rebels against the analytics nerds, a pair of stubborn traditionalists sticking it to the spreadsheet. It would also be wrong.

The Brewers won a franchise-record 103 games, then swept the two-time defending champion Los Angeles Dodgers — a hedge fund masquerading as a baseball team — in the National League Championship Series. Milwaukee is making its first World Series appearance since 1982. The Rays, meanwhile, went 98-64 for the best record in the American League. They did it on a payroll that ranks 25th in baseball and in what is arguably the sport’s toughest division.

It would be tempting to cast these two teams as rebels against the analytics nerds, a pair of stubborn traditionalists sticking it to the spreadsheet. It would also be wrong. The Rays are perhaps the most analytically obsessive organization in professional sports. They treat roster construction the way a quant treats arbitrage. The Brewers’ pitching staff finished second in baseball in strikeouts, because Milwaukee believes in velocity and spin rate as devoutly as anyone in Silicon Valley believes in disruption. Nobody here is burning copies of “Moneyball.”

What these teams have figured out is subtler and more interesting. Analytics is a tool, not a philosophy. And the data, read honestly, keeps pointing back to things your Little League coach told you for free.

Look at how they score. Milwaukee and Tampa Bay finished first and second in the league in batting average. Both were top five in stolen bases. Both were top seven in ERA. The Brewers were tied for second-to-last in home runs, yet they finished second in all of baseball in runs scored. That last fact should be impossible in the modern game, where the prevailing theory holds that you swing as hard as you can, accept the strikeouts and wait for the three-run homer. Milwaukee kept putting the ball in play, taking the extra base and making the defense prove it could make a throw.

This is the real lesson of “Moneyball,” which was never entirely about on-base percentage. It was about finding what the market undervalues. In 2002, that was walks. In 2026, after a generation of front offices poured money into training hitters to focus on exit velocity and launch angles, the undervalued asset turns out to be the player who makes contact. Or the one who can play three positions. Or who goes first-to-third on a single. When every team bids up the same skill, the bargain bin overflows with fundamentals.

Call it situational hitting, tight defense and multidimensional players. Not long ago, that was just called “baseball.” It is also, not incidentally, more fun to watch. A ball in play is a play. A strikeout, a walk or a solo homer is an event the other eight fielders watch like spectators.

Contrast this with the New York Yankees, who have spent roughly the GDP of Lithuania assembling a lineup of lumbering sluggers. Their approach is built on the assumption that baseball is a home run derby with occasional defensive interruptions. It produces impressive highlight reels and October collapses in roughly equal measure.

Call it situational hitting, tight defense and multidimensional players. Not long ago, that was just called “baseball.” It is also, not incidentally, more fun to watch.

A lesson here extends well beyond the diamond. American institutions have spent the last decade optimizing for the home run. In politics, the cable news haymaker, the floor speech engineered for clips, the fundraising email written in all caps are all big swings meant to circumvent the actual work of legislating. Both parties have come to treat governing as something staffers do between appearances: passing a budget on time, staffing an agency competently and filling the potholes are the sacrifice bunts of public life. Nobody makes a highlight package out of them, and so nobody gets paid to do them.

But the scoreboard does not care about the highlight package. Teams that strike out 1,600 times a year still lose in October to pitchers who can deliciously locate pitches on the corners. And governments that specialize in outrage still find, eventually, that outrage does not deliver the mail. Competence is unglamorous until it becomes the only thing that matters.

The Brewers and Rays have shown that you can use every modern tool available and still respect what the old tools were for. Data told them where the inefficiencies were. Discipline let them exploit those inefficiencies. That combination is rarer than it should be, in baseball and everywhere else.

So whichever team wins, the 2026 World Series will crown a franchise that refused to confuse flash with substance. In a culture that increasingly prefers entertainment to competence, that alone qualifies as a revolutionary act, even if it looks a lot like the game your grandfather used to watch.

The post Why the Brewers-Rays World Series matchup is a revolution for Major League Baseball appeared first on MS NOW.

When the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act was still a work in progress, the Senate briefly inserted a ban on corporate ownership of single-family rental housing so sweeping that it might well have killed off the small but growing build-to-rent sector. 

After furious activism by the housing supply boosters, who had been the main advocates for the law's many other provisions, that investor ban was significantly pared back. 

The final version of ROAD, which became law in July, prohibits investors who own 350 single-family rental homes from buying new ones. But it also includes a long list of exemptions for large investor purchases of single-family rentals.

The primary exemptions include homes purchased as part of a build-to-rent project and dilapidated homes that the investor spends significant money renovating. 

The new restrictions go into effect this coming January. On Thursday, the Treasury Department released a proposed rule that would create definitions for terms that go undefined in the law and clarify the scope of "excepted purchases" of single-family housing that large investors can still make. 

Build-to-rent housing that large investors can still buy is defined as a new single-family home that's never been owned by an owner-occupier, is purchased within 18 months of the home receiving a certificate of occupancy, and is occupied by a renter. 

Protected "renovate-to-rent" homes are defined as homes that had major building code violations that were fixed by the large institutional buyer and for which the investor spent at least 15 percent of the home's purchase price on improvements. 

The rule also provides definitions for rental homes owned as part of a program to boost homeownership, which is another excepted purchase large institutional investors will be allowed to make. Those programs are generally defined as programs in which the renter has the right of first refusal to buy the home and where the rent receives financial support from the homeowner to purchase the home. 

Taken together, the clarified exceptions in the Treasury rule still leave a lot of room for large institutional ownership of single-family homes in keeping with the final text of the ROAD to Housing Act. They won't have to sell the homes they already own. They can still add to the supply of investor-owned rental housing through substantial rehabs and build-to-rent projects. 

Nevertheless, the Treasury rules will impose numerous paperwork burdens on investors who'll now have to track and report, for example, precisely how much money they've spent renovating a purchased rental house or else risk a huge fine. 

Large investors who purchase a single-family home in violation of ROAD are liable for a maximum civil penalty of $1 million per home purchase. 

The proposed Treasury rule highlights what a glaring exception the investor restrictions are to the overall spirit of ROAD. Through a variety of means, the law attempts to reduce the regulatory burden on new housing. Now, large investors will have to absorb significant compliance costs just to prove that they're adding new rental housing supply in precisely the right way. 

The post Under Proposed Treasury Rule, Corporate Homebuyers Who Don't Track Their Receipts Face $1 Million Fines appeared first on Reason Magazine.

On this week's episode of Freed Up, Robby Soave and Christian Britschgi condemn Vivek Ramaswamy's new attack ad against opponent Amy Acton before discussing their predictions for the 2026 midterm elections. Next, the boys get biblical with references to their favorite parables as they discuss Tyler Cowen's latest article on why he thinks Elizabeth Holmes—and most other non-violent female criminals—should not be in prison. The episode wraps with a thoughtful discussion on aging, state attorneys general, and the latest Meta settlement.

 

00:00—Vivek Ramaswamy ad controversy

20:00—2026 midterm elections

25:50—Should Elizabeth Holmes be in prison?

49:20—Getting older

58:55—An update on Rep. Ilhan Omar

1:03:10—The importance of grain

1:06:14—Robby and Christian extol author Michael Crichton

1:11:30—The war in Ukraine should end.

1:14:50—Meta settled with the state of New Mexico

1:20:00— Christian continues his crusade against state attorneys general.

 

If you enjoy Freed Up, come watch Robby debate at our upcoming Reason Versus in D.C. Tickets are available here. 

The post Vivek Ramaswamy, Elizabeth Holmes, and Jesus appeared first on Reason Magazine.

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© Illustration: Fatima Ruiz

Happy Tuesday, and welcome to another edition of Rent Free. This week, we're going to jump right into it with a philosophical question: What is an accessory dwelling unit anyway? 

It's a question that officials in Somerville, Massachusetts, are realizing they didn't know the answer to after learning that a state law allowing ADUs in single-family neighborhoods could also require them to approve three-story backyard mini-apartments. 

As the Boston Globe reported on Sunday, Somerville's "deep ethos in favor of new housing" is being tested by the extent of the state law. Elected officials are describing the potential for three-story ADUs as a "joke," and the area's state lawmakers, including one who voted for the state law, are demanding reforms to stop them. 

The law in question was a statewide accessory dwelling unit (ADU) legalization tucked inside a major housing package of mostly new spending programs that passed in 2024. 

The bill required municipalities to allow ADUs of either 900 square feet or half the size of the primary dwelling (whichever is smaller) anywhere single-family homes are allowed. A subsequent rule issued by state regulators also forbade localities from imposing height and bulk limits on ADUs that are stricter than the limits imposed on primary dwellings. 

That latter rule is what's causing Somerville's freakout. 

Because the town allows triple-decker apartments (a three-story triplex common in New England) in all its single-family zones, the state rule means that it must also allow ADUs to be three stories tall. 

The Globe story notes that the mini-triple-deckers could still only be 900 square feet, meaning each floor of a mini-triple-decker would have to be pretty small. Thus far, no one has proposed building an ADU tower in Somerville. 

Even so, the town is worried that someone will eventually propose one of these "out-of-scale" units that it'll have to approve. Its officials are now agitating for changes to the state law to prevent this. 

On the one hand, one can perhaps understand why Somerville officials feel blindsided. 

The text of the 2024 ADU law allows localities to set "reasonable" height and bulk limits on accessory units. It was state regulators who decided after the law's passage that requiring ADUs to be shorter than the primary unit was "unreasonable." 

On the other hand, allowing a second home on a lot to be as tall as the first house sounds "reasonable" enough. Can one complain about out-of-scale development when the new unit is the same height as an existing home and a little bit smaller?

Somerville is not the first city where people's own colloquial definition of an accessory unit as "a tiny home that doesn't bother anyone" has clashed with official regulatory definitions that allow ADUs to be a fair bit bigger. 

San Diego's ADU Bonus program once allowed a technically unlimited number of ADUs to be built on single-family parcels near transit stops. (Height and bulk regulations imposed practical limits on how many units could fit on a site.) 

That enabled developers to build what were, in effect, ADU apartment complexes on large single-family lots throughout the city. This year, the city imposed new restrictions to stop these "monster" ADU developments, including a per-lot accessory unit cap. 

The latest dust-up in Somerville, like the San Diego controversy before it, provides several lessons about the realities of housing reform. 

The first is that the definition of "accessory dwelling unit" is completely arbitrary. 

In Massachusetts, an ADU is a 900-square-foot home that can be one story or three stories, depending on the town and zoning district it's being built in. 

In Montana, it's a 1,000-square-foot unit. In California, state law can require localities to allow ADUs as large as 1,200 square feet. Under certain conditions, these ADUs can even be sold separately from the main house. 

At a certain point, an accessory dwelling unit is just a dwelling unit. A house is a house. 

The second lesson is that any ADU reform that is actually intended to produce new housing units is going to cause controversy.  

State and local laws allowing ADUs have been one of the more common forms of housing reforms to pass. 

Supply-boosters see them as a way to get a modest number of new units. Supply skeptics don't see much to object to about allowing someone to install a kitchenette and bathroom in their garage.  

If the ADU regulations don't allow much more than the garage conversion, supply-boosters will be disappointed and push for expansions of the law. California passed dozens of ADU laws before they started enabling actual units to be built. 

If an ADU law actually allows more homes, the ADUs will look like homes, and the supply skeptics will be mad. 

No amount of branding or planning will resolve the inherent conflict of some people wanting more development while others oppose it in their neighborhoods. 

Thus far, Massachusetts' ADU law has been modestly productive. The state's ADU survey reports that 2,048 ADU permits have been issued since the state law went into effect in January 2025. About half of those units are attached ADUs (think the garage with the kitchenette). 

That's a little under 10 percent of Massachusetts total housing production during that time, per the Census Bureau's building permit survey.  

At 50 units permitted, Somerville has actually approved the second most ADUs of any jurisdiction in the state. (Boston has only approved 49.) 

But now that it's facing the prospect of allowing ADUs that look like actual homes, it's starting to get cold feet about the new law. 

---

Quick Links

• Speaking of Massachusetts, the town of Marblehead (of "are we kind of being pricks?" fame) has at last had its rezoning plan, which allows apartments in more districts, accepted by state officials. 
• While Spain is tightening its tenant protections and rent controls in the face of housing protests, Portugal is trying to remove regulations on its rental housing industry. Either way, housing protesters are clashing with police. 
• Single-family homebuilder confidence continues to drop. 
• The Urban Institute has a new white paper on whether data center development is coming at the expense of housing development. 
• A new report on home construction in Chicago finds that the practice of aldermanic privilege (where individual aldermen can veto projects in their district) is strangling development. 

The post ADU Nihilism appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Father Patricio Molinari's fatal accident was captured on video during a livestreamed Mass in Ecuador

Sottovalutare Elly Schlein è un errore: potrà piacere o no, ma la segretaria del Pd non è una sprovveduta, come pensano alcuni grandi vecchi del suo partito. Schlein è una seria professionista della politica, brava a farsi scivolare addosso le feroci critiche che riceve dalla destra e a smontare i complotti orditi dentro casa, ma anche pronta a liquidare con una certa spregiudicatezza quel pezzo di partito insoddisfatto dell’addio alla vocazione maggioritaria del Pd.

All’assemblea nazionale di domenica, Schlein ha fatto le sue proposte su sanità, istruzione, ed economia, delineando di fatto il programma del governo di centrosinistra, astutamente senza mai fare cenno a Giuseppe Conte né ad altri fastidiosi ma ininfluenti alleati. La realtà però è leggermente diversa da come l’ha prospettata Schlein davanti ai compagni di partito, perché in questi anni la linea di Conte è stata più egemonica della sua, che al contrario è stata sempre gregaria perché concentrata a tenere insieme i cocci populisti e radicali dell’opposizione.

Alla Nuvola di Roma, Schlein è stata molto abile a trasformare l’improbabile coalizione che vorrebbe guidare fino a Palazzo Chigi in un’alternativa sociale a Giorgia Meloni. Ma non ha fugato i dubbi sulla difesa dell’Ucraina, come hanno sottolineato durante il dibattito Giorgio Gori e qualche altro riformista. Sono rimaste anche le ambiguità su Israele, come ha fatto notare Marco Pierini, così come l’ipocrisia furbetta e truffaldina del “no al riarmo nazionale” e del “sì a quello europeo” come se Schlein non sapesse che l’Europa è una confederazione di Stati e che la difesa (purtroppo) non è materia di competenza di Bruxelles, ma dei singoli paesi membri. Quindi dire di no all’aumento della spesa pubblica sulla difesa e di sì alla difesa comune europea, nel pieno di un attacco russo alle istituzioni democratiche europee, è un modo ingannevole e disonesto per cercare di salvare la rispettabilità europeista del Pd, lasciando però, come imposto dagli alleati di coalizione, che l’Europa resti in balìa delle mire imperialiste russe e degli umori dell’America trumpiana.

Questi dubbi, queste ambiguità, queste ipocrisie nei prossimi mesi dovranno poi confrontarsi con le istanze degli alleati che le alimenteranno ulteriormente, fino a spostare il posizionamento della coalizione di sinistra su territori molto lontani da quello originario e fondativo del Partito Democratico e del socialismo europeo.

È sbagliato sottovalutare Schlein, d’accordo, ma finora a dare le carte è sempre stato Conte, non lei.

L'articolo Schlein fa sul serio, ma le carte le dà ancora Conte proviene da Linkiesta.it.

Janeese Lewis George, a D.C. councilmember and the city's presumptive next mayor, has come out against pending legislation that would allow autonomous ride-share vehicles onto city streets, citing the technology's potential to eliminate the jobs of ride-share human drivers. 

"DC is facing a jobs crisis. Rushing the legalization of autonomous vehicles is irresponsible given the anticipated AI-related job displacement and disruptions that put countless workers at risk," she said on X yesterday.  

DC is facing a jobs crisis.

Rushing the legalization of autonomous vehicles is irresponsible given the anticipated AI-related job displacement and disruptions that put countless workers at risk.

— Janeese Lewis George (@Janeese4DC) October 15, 2026

In a follow-up post, she said that the D.C. Council should delay consideration of a pending bill that would allow Waymo, which is currently testing its technology with human safety operators on District streets, to offer autonomous rides to the public.  

Ever since Lewis George won a commanding victory in D.C.'s Democratic mayoral primary earlier this year, pundits and wonks have been trying to read the tea leaves on how the Democratic Socialist will govern. 

D.C.'s economy is currently in a rough spot. Unemployment is high. The housing market is down. Population growth is slowing.  

Lewis George's comments about Waymo suggest the mayor has a deeply mistaken view about the effects and benefits of technological innovation. Contrary to her contention, Waymo legalization is unlikely to exacerbate a "jobs crisis" for at least three reasons. 

The first reason she's wrong is that very few D.C. residents work full-time as ride-share drivers. On her Capital Commonsense Substack, Ashley Schapitl reports that, by Lewis George's own estimate, there are only 200 District residents who work full-time as ride-share drivers.

For comparison's sake, the District has a labor force of roughly 400,000 people. So even if Waymo displaced all human drivers in the District, it would be a statistical nonevent. 

Few headlines, for instance, reported that D.C.'s labor force shrank by 1,000 people between May and June. Neither did many outlets report that the labor force grew by roughly 600 people between July and August. 

Yet here the mayor is talking about a "jobs crisis" over what would be an even smaller change in the number of employed workers in the city. 

The second reason not to fear an exacerbated "jobs crisis" as a result of Waymo legalization is that autonomous vehicles (A.V.s) will not completely replace human rideshare drivers in the foreseeable future. 

In the cities where Waymo has been active for years, A.V.s are still responsible for a minority of rideshare rides. 

That's the case in Phoenix, where Waymo has been offering autonomous commercial service since 2020. In an article from April, Business Insider cites one study that put Waymo's market share at 16 percent of ride-share rides. 

In other words, 84 percent of ride-share rides are still being performed by humans a full six years after A.V.s came onto the scene. 

That isn't to say the impacts of A.V.s are necessarily positive for human drivers' earnings.

Another study by Gridwise from August 2025 found that A.V.s appeared to be marginally reducing drivers' hourly pay and number of trips per hour. That's evidence of the market for rides becoming more competitive, but it's not, as of yet, evidence of a job apocalypse. 

Network design matters too. In places like Los Angeles and San Francisco, Waymo is a standalone competitor to traditional ride-share companies like Uber and Lyft. In Austin and Phoenix, Waymo partners with Uber to offer rides on hybrid human-and-A.V. networks. 

A report by EnoTrans, funded by a grant from Lyft, found that the later cities' hybrid networks actually increased human drivers' trips per hour. Their pay-per-hour fell, albeit less steeply than in cities without hybrid networks. 

All of that is to say that while Waymo, as a competitor to human-operated ride-share services, shouldn't be expected to have a positive impact on drivers' earnings. It shouldn't be expected to have a catastrophic impact on them either. 

The third and final reason that Lewis George is wrong to think that Waymo will worsen a coming "jobs crisis" is that Waymo's employment impacts are not limited to its effect on competing human drivers. 

If Waymo earns any market share at all, it'll be because it's offering some travelers a better transportation option than the ones that currently exist. Increased ease of travel within the city would be expected to raise employment levels, not lower them. 

If Waymo makes it easier or cheaper for people to get from home to the office or from the office to their kids' school, they might be more willing to live in D.C. over Arlington or Silver Spring. If it's more convenient to get to the movies or dinner, residents will be more willing to patronize local businesses. 

None of that even touches on the economic and human benefits of Waymo's likely positive impact on road safety. 

The direct effects of Waymo on drivers' employment must be weighed against all the other economic activity that autonomous vehicles will facilitate. 

In the long run, the economic effects of autonomous vehicles may well be revolutionary. In the foreseeable future, they'll make the market for for-hire rides slightly more competitive. 

A reasonable assumption then is that Waymo will have a modest, but positive, impact on overall economic activity and employment in the District, even if it has a modest, but negative, impact on the small number of full-time ride-share drivers who live here. 

If the new mayor can't even tolerate that level of economic disruption, that does not portend good things for D.C.'s economy under a Lewis George administration. 

The post Presumptive D.C. Mayor Janeese Lewis George Demands Halt to Waymo Legalization To Protect Drivers' Jobs appeared first on Reason Magazine.

La dimostrazione eclatante che la posizione cosiddetta pacifista sulla guerra scatenata dalla Russia contro l’Ucraina è, quando va bene, ipocrita si è avuta in queste ore di ennesimo e vile attacco di Donald Trump e Elon Musk all’Ucraina, al suo presidente e al suo popolo.

Trump ha stretto un grottesco, inutile, e inapplicabile accordo con Vladimir Putin sul gasolio russo, in violazione delle leggi del suo Congresso e al solo fine propagandistico interno per scaricare sull’Ucraina, e non sulla guerra in Iran, le responsabilità del prezzo alto della benzina a poche settimane dal voto di metà mandato. Inoltre, da Mar-a-Lago, Trump ha ripreso a insultare e a minacciare Volodymyr Zelensky, dopo qualche mese di pausa, e ha smesso di passare agli ucraini parte delle informazioni di intelligence che servono ad anticipare la difesa della contraerea missilistica. Musk, invece, ha rallentato la connessione di Starlink in Ucraina e ha minacciato di staccare del tutto la spina, costringendo gli ucraini a rinunciare alle azioni belliche con i droni che così tanti danni hanno fatto alle infrastrutture offensive, energetiche e di approvvigionamento russe.

Il risultato della bravata del duo Trump-Musk è che i missili russi ora entrano nello spazio aereo ucraino indisturbati e poi colpiscono i civili ucraini come mai prima d’ora.

In linea generale, se le parole avessero un senso, un pacifista dovrebbe chiedere all’aggressore di fermare gli attacchi e non all’aggredito di smettere di difendersi, invece mai in quasi quattro anni abbondanti di guerra russa all’Ucraina ci sono state iniziative dei leader progressisti italiani o manifestazioni del fronte pacifista per chiedere alla Russia di fermare la guerra.

Ormai è diventato normale, malgrado sia un atteggiamento controintuitivo e moralmente osceno, che il sedicente pacifista italiano chieda all’Europa di non sostenere più l’aggredito, di non fornirgli le batterie antimissili che difendono la popolazione civile dall’attacco russo, e di inviare in Ucraina, anziché missili, un inviato di pace, come se fosse l’Ucraina a volere le guerra, al fine poi di intavolare una trattativa che la Russia non ha nessuna intenzione di intraprendere e che ogni giorno rigetta in tutte le lingue, a meno che la soluzione diplomatica sia la completa resa degli ucraini.

Questo è il teatrino dell’orrore cui assistiamo da oltre quattro anni, inscenato soprattutto da una parte della sinistra che si riempie la bocca della parola pace mentre con i fatti lavora per la continuazione della guerra russa.

Le ultimissime intemerate di Trump e Musk contro Zelensky e l’Ucraina scoperchiano però l’ipocrisia politica di quello che a buon diritto viene chiamato Campo Lavrov.

Qui non si tratta di cambiare linea politica sul “no alle armi” o sulla necessità di far terminare la guerra, né di mettere in difficoltà i leader dei partiti che provano a mantenere unita la coalizione elettorale. Qui ci sono i due più spudorati esponenti della destra nazionalista globale che, prendendosi una pausa dal gettare nel caos il mondo e dal sostenere tutti i movimenti neonazi del pianeta, minacciano l’aggredito, accarezzano l’aggressore cercando anche di fare affari personali, e mettono in pratica un piano di disimpegno per massimizzare le vittime civili ucraine.

Per i capi della sinistra “pacifista” non potrebbe esserci un’occasione più facile e doverosa di questa per criticare Trump e Musk e difendere le vittime innocenti della guerra, anche senza cambiare la linea politica sullo stop all’invio delle armi difensive.

Eppure non c’è stato nessun leader del Campo Largo o del fronte intellettuale pacifista che in queste ore abbia criticato Trump e Musk, dimostrando così in modo plastico l’impostura della posizione “pacifista”, ma anche la fine della gloriosa sinistra anti totalitaria, e la trasformazione del Campo Largo non solo in Campo Lavrov ma anche in Campo Mar-a-Largo.

Un fronte progressista che rifiuta di difendere l’aggredito, che non disturba mai l’aggressore, e che non riesce nemmeno a criticare i due più grandi fascistoni del pianeta impegnati a facilitare l’imperialismo russo può essere definito in qualsiasi modo, tranne che con l’aggettivo progressista.

Il più grande intellettuale della sinistra anti totalitaria, il compianto Christopher Hitchens, aveva svelato la vera natura dei pacifisti pro Saddam Hussein. Una lezione valida anche nel 2026. Oggi i pacifisti italiani non solo pretendono la resa degli aggrediti ucraini e non fanno niente per fermare l’aggressore russo, ma non trovano nemmeno il modo di censurare le mascalzonate di Trump e Musk contro l’Ucraina e l’Europa. Come scriveva Hitchens, questi non sono pacifisti, «non vogliono la pace, sono a favore della guerra, e tifano per gli avversari».

L'articolo Quelli che non criticano Trump sull’Ucraina non sono pacifisti, ma guerrafondai che tifano per gli avversari proviene da Linkiesta.it.

Da chiarire le circostanze del ricovero, di recente il rapper avrebbe avuto un alterco con un altro detenuto

CAPE TOWN, South Africa — A steady stream of chacma baboons flows down the walking path in the beautiful wooded ravine that leads up to Admiral’s Kloof, on the slopes of Table Mountain National Park. The score of baboons (Papio ursinus) descending the ravine — half of the 44-strong Waterfall troop — are on their way to raid the naval barracks at the bottom, in the affluent suburb of Simon’s Town. A baboon monitor with a paintball gun slung over his shoulder stands and watches as a car marked “Shark Spotters”, the name of the NGO responsible for the monitors, pulls up to transport three of his colleagues to try and head them off. On this particular June morning, the effort is futile. The sound of the monitors’ paintball guns and the screeching of juvenile baboons fighting over choice morsels fills the air for 45 minutes, while the agile primates scale trees and buildings, and grab what looks like a bag of cereal from an unattended kitchen on the base. While the monitors manage to get some of the baboons out of the barracks, others move toward the surrounding suburb. Simon’s Town, the harbour, and the red brick walls of the Waterfall Barracks as seen from Admiral’s Kloof. Image by Barry Christianson for Mongabay. A WhatsApp group set up by the Cape Baboon Partnership to alert residents about the whereabouts of the troop, recorded 25 such raids between June 11 and July 11. Cape Town city officials are ready to…This article was originally published on Mongabay

We might wonder, though, how God can forgive sin and yet “not clear the guilty”? Isn’t that the nature of forgiveness: to clear guilt, to leave wrongs unpunished? This tension confronts us all throughout Scripture, as well as our experiences in life: How can God be both good and just? One answer is that in... Continue Reading