News is coming so fast these days. Here's a few things that caught me this week.
New York took AI away from 600,000 school kids. And the only part of our economy that lost jobs in August was the part that builds the machines. Those two sat next to each other in my notes all week and I still can't tell if they're the same story.
Who Pays, and Where People End Up
1. A Medicaid rule, and a shift in who lives where
One story is about paperwork, the other is about dementia. They decide the same thing, which is where a person ends up when they can't manage alone anymore.
The work requirement. CMS put a work requirement on Medicaid on June 1. Adults 19 to 64 in the expansion group need eighty hours a month of work or school, in 43 states and DC, running by January 1, 2027. The exemption list is where the real decisions get made, and the one I'd point you at is "medically frail." The law says medically frail. The rule adds a test on top, where the condition has to really stop you from doing the eighty hours. So a word that isn't in the law is doing a lot of the work, and the people who'll have the hardest time proving they're too sick are the same people the exemption is for. Twenty-five states sued on June 29 and that's their lead argument.
The shift nobody announced. Forty-four percent of assisted living residents have Alzheimer's or another dementia. In nursing homes it's 41. In 2012 it was 49 and 40 the other way. The lines crossed and nobody said a word.
Put them together. Where a person with dementia ends up gets decided by what they qualify for, and what they qualify for gets decided by whether somebody in the family can fill out forms correctly during the worst week of their life. Care shouldn't depend on which building had a bed that week. We all know it does, and we mostly don't say it out loud.
2. A THC and CBD combination reduced agitation in advanced dementia
In the LiBBY Phase 2 trial, a combination of THC and CBD significantly reduced agitation in advanced dementia. That was July, in London.
Agitation sounds like a small clinical word. It isn't. It's the thing that ends a family's ability to keep somebody at home. The drug usually reached for there is an antipsychotic, and those carry a black box warning for increased death in elderly patients with dementia.
There are 158 dementia drugs in trials right now and almost all of them aim at the plaques. This one aims at four o'clock in the afternoon. Maybe that sounds like a smaller ambition. I don't think it is.
3. New York took generative AI away from 600,000 students
On September 2, New York City schools announced a one-year ban on generative AI from 2-K through eighth grade. About 600,000 students, two thirds of the system. Companion chatbots are out in every grade, high school included. A group of students, teachers, parents and unions will study it and publish what they find.
Two weeks earlier the Department of Education told schools to weigh teaching value over engagement. The federal guidance said choose carefully. The biggest district in the country said not yet, and put a date on it.
I don't know if this is right, and most people don't either. We pick a side and then go looking for reasons. But the best argument for it might have nothing to do with learning. A companion chatbot is built to be used a lot. That's the whole business. And these kids are eight.
Work, Money, and What Got Announced
4. Everybody argued about AI taking jobs. Then the jobs report came out.
Three pieces of news in one week about people losing work, and together they tell the opposite of the story we all spent the month telling each other.
The jobs report, September 4. Payrolls up 162,000, unemployment steady at 4.1 percent. Restaurants added 59,000, schools 42,000. Exactly one sector went the other way: information, down 23,000, and the losses inside it included computing infrastructure.
Uber, September 2. Cutting about 10 percent of staff, roughly 3,300 people. It's also ending remote work for nearly everybody, leaving about 1 percent, which is a much bigger change to a person's life than a reorg chart suggests.
Campbell's, September 3. Cut 13 percent of its salaried staff. That's soup. Not a model, not a chip, not an agent. Soup.
So in the month we spent arguing about whether AI takes the jobs, the only part of the economy that shed them was the part that builds the machines. I'm not saying AI isn't changing our work, because it plainly is. I'm saying the shape of it looks nothing like the shape we keep getting handed.
5. The market stopped expecting rate cuts and started expecting a hike
Two stories, and the second explains the first. Your power bill is what inflation is made of.
The Fed. Held rates at 3.5 to 3.75 percent in July on a 9 to 3 vote. Three dissents out of twelve is a lot, and it usually means the next meeting is genuinely undecided. Inflation is running about a point higher than anyone expected a year ago, and after Chair Warsh spoke at Jackson Hole the odds of a September increase jumped. For most of this year the argument was how many cuts. Now it's whether there's a hike.
The grid. PJM, covering 13 states and DC, expects to be about six gigawatts short of what it needs by 2027. Data center demand nationally has gone from 23 gigawatts in 2023 to 42 today.
Electricity isn't really a tech story, it's a household bill. Household bills are inflation, and inflation decides whether the Fed can cut. So we're all downstream of somebody else's data center now, whether we use the thing or not. When my utility rate moves, nobody explains it to me in terms of somebody's training run. I just pay it.
6. Three enormous numbers, and one of them already happened
Two of these are promises and one is a fact, and you can't tell which from the headline.
Agility Robotics, June 24. Going public at a $2.5 billion valuation. The number in every writeup was the order book, more than $300 million of Digit v5 orders. I read the filing. That figure is "subject to the realization of certain contractual milestones," and Digit v5 hasn't launched yet. The number nobody led with: more than 65,000 hours of operation across nine customer sites, Schaeffler and GXO and Toyota among them. That one already happened.
Apple and Broadcom, July 8. More than $30 billion for over 15 billion US-made chips through 2031.
TSMC, July. Another $100 billion into Arizona, total about $265 billion.
I'm not saying any of it is fake. What a company agrees to spend tells you what it believes. But 65,000 hours happened, and $300 million is something somebody promised to try. They get printed the same way, so we read them the same way, and we probably shouldn't.
Security, and Who Was Watching
7. Three break-ins in one week, and only one was a computer problem
Separately these are routine. Together they say that finding the hole and fixing the hole are completely different jobs.
SonicWall, September 1. Two flaws already being exploited, one rated 10.0, the top of the scale. CISA gave federal agencies until September 5 and told them to do forensic triage instead of just patching. Three days. That's CISA saying out loud they assume somebody is already inside.
Microsoft Exchange, disclosed August 11. As of August 31, about 21,899 internet-facing servers were still unpatched. Published, scored, understood by anyone who cared to look, and three weeks later almost twenty-two thousand of them were sitting there.
McKesson, August 28. Someone took data out of third-party applications. The method wasn't an exploit. It was phone calls to employees.
The problem isn't that we can't find the holes. We find them, publish them, score them, put a federal deadline on them. Then twenty-two thousand servers just sit there. And the ones that did get patched still lost to a guy on the phone with a believable voice.
8. One agency caught itself. The other needed a whistleblower.
Same situation from opposite ends, both the same week.
The Labor Department. Its own investigators found the former Labor Secretary violated the department's harassment policy. Nobody made them look.
The Postal Service. An official filed a whistleblower report saying the agency is pushing ahead with a secretive and rushed effort to carry out an executive order, despite a court order blocking it, warning that technical problems could stop millions of voters from getting or casting mail ballots. Here a court order wasn't enough and somebody had to go public.
So sometimes the machinery works on its own, and sometimes the only thing standing there is one person willing to put their name on a piece of paper. From the outside I don't think we can tell which kind we're in until afterward. Hmmm.
One flag: I'm working from a report of the postal filing, not the filing. That's weaker footing than I like.
Overseas
9. The IAEA found 73 tonnes of uranium nobody had declared
The IAEA concluded that Syria under Assad failed to declare nuclear material and activities tied to an unfinished reactor at Deir ez-Zor. Inspectors got in after Assad was pushed out in 2024. The finding is about 73 metric tons of natural uranium metal at an undeclared site, now under agency monitoring. Rafael Grossi said the al-Kibar reactor, the one Israel bombed in 2007, was the type that could produce material usable in weapons.
A nineteen-year-old question, finally answered. It ran for about a day. I hadn't heard a word until I went looking, and I'm somebody who goes looking.
Health
10. Higher tyrosine was linked to a shorter lifespan in men
A study of more than 270,000 people in the UK Biobank found higher blood levels of the amino acid tyrosine linked to a shorter lifespan in men. The paper is from February and keeps resurfacing.
Tyrosine isn't exotic. It's in cheese, meat, eggs and soy, your body makes its own, and it's the raw material for dopamine and thyroid hormone. It's also sold in a bottle as a supplement for focus.
Before anybody changes their breakfast: a blood level sits downstream of a hundred things, and an effect showing up in men and not women either means something real or something boring about who's in the study. Still, 270,000 people is a serious number, and that bottle is on a shelf right now.
Things That Made Me Sit Up
11. Antarctica gained a record amount of ice, and the reason was in the tropics
East Antarctica gained roughly 695 billion tons of ice between 2021 and 2023, the largest gain the GRACE satellites have measured. The cause wasn't anywhere near Antarctica. Warming in the tropical Pacific set off a wave in the atmosphere that traveled south and pushed enough moisture toward the continent to come down as unusually heavy snow. It reversed nothing, and the researchers say so plainly, because Antarctica has been losing about 140 billion tons a year for two decades. What I like is the mechanism: warm water near the equator, and two years later it's snow at the bottom of the world, carried by a wave nobody standing in either place would ever feel.
12. A dark matter detector saw one event it can't explain
A mile under South Dakota sits a tank of ten tonnes of ultrapure liquid xenon called LUX-ZEPLIN, the most sensitive dark matter detector we've built. It waits in the dark for something to bump into a xenon atom. On September 1 the team said it found one.
One event, in 220 days of data. They put the odds of it being ordinary background at about half a percent, which is short of the bar physics uses to call something a discovery. So they aren't calling it one. Rick Gaitskell put it plainly: "We are not claiming to have seen dark matter. But we have seen something interesting that we want to share."
Dark matter is supposed to be most of the matter in the universe and we've never caught a piece of it. What these people have, after years of work under a mile of rock, is one blip they can't explain and won't claim. So they published it and asked other physicists to go check.
They could have sat on it until they were sure, or oversold it and had a week of headlines. They did neither. Maybe that's the whole job. Somebody patient enough to look, and honest enough about what they actually found. Hmmm.. Food for thought.
See you next week.
