Does money buy happiness?

The world’s richest countries generate staggering income per person. But when it comes to life satisfaction, some of the wealthiest nations fall surprisingly short.

This graphic, via Visual Capitalist’s Bruno Venditti, compares GDP per capita (PPP), based on IMF data, with happiness scores from the World Happiness Report, which asks people to rate their lives on a scale from 0 to 10.

The 20 Richest Countries by GDP Per Capita

Liechtenstein tops the GDP (PPP) per capita ranking at over $206,000 per person, followed by Singapore and Luxembourg. Several small, globally connected economies dominate the top 10, including Ireland and Macao SAR.

Energy-rich nations like Qatar and Brunei also appear near the top. The United States ranks 11th at roughly $93,000 per person, while European countries account for a majority of the top 20.

However, being among the wealthiest does not necessarily mean being the happiest.

The Happiest Countries in the World

Finland leads the happiness rankings with a score of 7.74, followed closely by Denmark and Iceland. Nordic countries consistently perform well, reflecting strong social safety nets, high trust in institutions, and broad access to public services.

Notably, Costa Rica and Mexico make the top 10 despite much lower GDP per capita levels than many European peers.

Meanwhile, some of the world’s richest economies, such as Singapore and Qatar, do not appear among the top 20 happiest countries.

Where Wealth and Happiness Overlap

Only a handful of countries rank near the top on both wealth and happiness—making them rare global outliers. Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Ireland, and the Netherlands stand out as rare examples where high incomes coincide with high life satisfaction.

This overlap is particularly strong in Northern Europe. These countries tend to pair high productivity with robust welfare systems, universal healthcare, and relatively low income inequality.

The data shows that while wealth matters, it isn’t the whole story. Trust, social support, and access to public services appear to play a major role in how satisfied people feel with their lives.

If you enjoyed today’s post, check out The Global Cost of Living Index 2026 on Voronoi, the new app from Visual Capitalist.

Via Remix News,

A Turkish-Kurdish schoolgirl is said to have been groped by nine boys of Arab descent in the back room of a Berlin youth center in Gropiusstadt, Neukölln. It then came out that she was raped in November, in the youth center garden. A scandal has erupted after it was reported that the youth center staff did not file a police report, reportedly out of fear that the suspects would be labeled as the “typical Muslims.”

For months, there were already troubling reports from Berlin youth center in the multicultural neighborhood of Neukölln: involving unwanted embraces, girls having their breasts and buttocks touched without consent, and being pulled onto boys’ laps.

All of these incidents were allegedly happening in plain sight of staff.

Then, in January, the incident involving the mass groping of the Turkish-Kurdish victim occured by the nine boys, with each one taking turns molesting her while one boy stood guard in the doorway. They only stopped when a staff member walked in.

Three days later, the girl admitted to staff something worse had happened to her. She had already been raped in November — in the youth center’s garden, in the evening. Afterwards, she crouched in a corner for hours. When she finally tried to leave the area, the entire area was locked. She had to climb over the fence to get out, breaking her ankle in the process.

The assault had also been filmed. The boy, known by the nickname Medi, 17, allegedly used the footage as a weapon.

“I want to see you here every Monday, or I’ll send this to your parents.” Once word of the video spread, other boys in the group began taunting her: “You’re letting yourself be screwed.” They also wanted the girl to introduce them to her 14-year-old sister.

A cover-up because the suspects were Muslim?

Now, the youth center is in the crosshairs for its unbelievable response.

Reportedly, instead of going to the authorities, female visitors were given a “safeword” to use whenever they felt threatened. In addition, the door in the back room was removed from its hinges. The employees refused to go to the police even as colleagues from other facilities applied pressure to do so. The internal justification, according to sources who spoke with Bild newspaper, was a desire to keep things quiet so the young people would not be immediately labeled: “typical Muslims.”

Youth State Secretary Falko Liecke, 53, of the Christian Democrats (CDU), was blunt in his response when approached by Bild.

“It’s outrageous that the Muslim perpetrators are apparently being protected here to avoid stigmatizing them, while the victim is being abandoned. This attitude is completely unacceptable.” He announced he was examining whether child protection laws had been violated.

Parents had to go to the police after authorities failed to act

The girl eventually sought help outside the facility due to their refusal to go to the police.

A supporter of the girl spoke with her parents, who took the news of what happened to their daughter extremely hard. Together with a police prevention officer, they went to the State Criminal Police Office, where the girl gave a video statement so she would not have to recount the events repeatedly.

Officers moved quickly to seize the suspect’s mobile phone. Her father filed a formal complaint against the alleged rapist and also submitted online complaints against those responsible at the facility and the officials who failed to act.

The head of the youth welfare office had been informed as early as Jan. 29. The Neukölln administration’s explanation to Bild as to why no report was filed was that “the youth welfare office did not file a report because they do not know the names of either the victim or the perpetrator.”

Liecke responded to their excuse, saying: “This case was clearly intended to be swept under the rug for political reasons. It wasn’t even put on the agenda at the district office, even though it should have been. Neither the youth welfare office nor the responsible city councilor filed any reports with the police. This is a scandal and must have consequences.”

Neukölln Mayor Martin Hikel, of the far-left Social Democrats (SPD), said he saw no grounds for disciplinary action against the Left Party youth councilor with political responsibility for the case, on the basis that she was only informed by her own welfare office on March 2.

He nonetheless acknowledged the gravity of the situation:

“This shocking case shows that the structures and processes within the youth welfare office require a self-critical internal review. In this context, a survey on the topic of sexual assaults in youth recreation facilities would be advisable in order to develop systematic improvements. The district office will discuss this.”

According to crime data, nearly half of all gang rapes in Berlin are committed by foreigners. However, the other half is also thought to have a high number of German citizens with a migration background, although official figures have not been released.

Read more here…

Via Middle East Eye

“Why we should go to war” ran the headline of a Guardian article in February 2003 by the commentator Julie Burchill. In it, she explained to the Guardian’s liberal readers why a pro-war attitude in the run-up to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s invasion of Iraq should be welcomed. 

“If you really think it’s better for more people to die over decades under a tyrannical regime than for fewer people to die during a brief attack by an outside power, you’re really weird and nationalistic and not any sort of socialist that I recognise,” wrote Burchill.

Another article published in April 2003, after the invasion started, criticised anti-war “doomsters”, claiming “the people of Iraq have been unchained from appalling torture and tyranny” as a result of US-UK action.

Despite claims of the BBC’s anti-war bias from Downing Street, academic analysis proved that it was in fact more reliant on government and military sources than other sources.

It was also the least likely to quote sources of Iraqi or independent origin, such as the Red Cross, which might contradict official narratives that underplayed Iraqi casualties. Two decades after Iraq, how much has changed?

Many media outlets have issued mea culpas for their parroting of US and British propaganda lines in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq but when it comes to the latest conflict in Iran, it seems clear that that introspection did not lead to lasting change.

Media analysts Middle East Eye spoke to say that once again the media is failing in its coverage of the current US-Israeli attacks on Iran. Coverage by news outlets is perhaps more tentative in its support for war given the lessons editors have learnt after Iraq, but many of the same issues keep turning up.

Leaving out unflattering details

The bombardment of Iran by Israel and Washington has already led to more than 1200 deaths, including 165 people, almost all schoolchildren aged between seven and 12, killed by US “double-tap” strikes on a school.

Such strikes are designed to take out medics and civilians arriving at the scene to help victims in a delayed double explosion.  Declassified UK reported a Scottish weapons factory helped to make missiles allegedly used in the attack, which the UN education agency, Unesco, described as a “grave violation of international law”. 

So far, no mainstream media have reported on this UK link to the attack. Instead media outlets have repeatedly raised doubts about who was behind the attack.

One BBC headline from 28 February read “At least 153 dead after reported strike on school, Iran says”. Analysts have pointed out the use of the passive voice, lack of a named aggressor, and implication of doubt regarding the reliability of the source.

It was a New York Times report that first revealed the US as the likely culprits behind the attack – a conclusion that has since become firmer as evidence comes out, despite Washington’s reluctance to accept responsibility.

Elsewhere, Sky News called Iran’s bombing of Israel a “horror story”, but has avoided the use of similar language to describe the plight of Iranians living under US bombardment.

An article in The Telegraph justified US-Israeli attacks by accusing critics of “erasing the history of the regime’s terror”. Nonetheless, this time round the lack of a persuasive reason for the war from the Trump administration has meant a break from the cohesive media narrative that accompanied the Iraq war.

According to Ali Alavi, lecturer in Middle Eastern and Iranian Studies at SOAS, while the 2003 invasion of Iraq followed the “shock of 9/11, when much of the western political class and media converged around a single security narrative about Saddam Hussein”, the response to the war on Iran “appears much more fragmented”.

He said that the coverage is “less uniformly aligned with political messaging” with a “lack of consensus” around the framing and justification for the war.

Part of this stems from the fact that the Trump administration has been characteristically chaotic in establishing the aims of the war: with conflicting narratives around “regime change”, preventing nuclear capabilities and taking out an immediate threat.

WMDs and other lies

During the lead-up to the Iraq War, press reporting repeated the so-called “45-minute claim” on how long it would take Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) to reach the UK. 

Most notably, the Sun ran a sensationalist headline “Brits 45 mins from doom” following the publication of the September 2002 dossier which served as justification for Prime Minister Tony Blair’s invasion of Iraq the following year. 

Similarly, The Sunday Telegraph pumped out headlines like “UN inspectors uncover proof of Saddam’s nuclear bomb plans” and “UN gives Iraq last chance to disarm” to pave the way for the illegal invasion.

The BBC was attacked by Blair’s government for raising concerns that the intelligence dossier about Iraq’s WMDs had been “sexed up” by the prime minister’s office. The subsequent fallout led to resignations from the BBC’s chairman and director general.

However, the publication of the Chilcot report in 2016 later vindicated their claims that Blair and his director of communications, Alastair Campbell, had exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. 

The inquiry found Iraq posed “no imminent threat” and British intelligence agencies had produced “flawed information” about the alleged WMDs.

Fast forward to 2026 and Israeli officials are claiming they launched a “pre-emptive attack against Iran” while Trump cited an “imminent threat” to the US, despite Pentagon briefings directly contradicting the narrative that Iran would strike unprovoked.

The claims that Iran poses an existential threat have been repeated in British mainstream media and Iran’s supposed nuclear weapons ambitions are spoken of as a matter of fact. For example, The Times ran a story on Thursday with the headline “How close is Iran to building a nuclear weapon?” 

“US-Israeli attacks are targeting Tehran’s atomic program once more, suggesting Trump’s bunker-busting bombs last year did not entirely obliterate the threat,” the article continues. What the article fails to mention is that Iran had just made major concessions in settlements regarding its nuclear program. 

Omani Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi, who has been mediating the process, told CBS News that negotiators from the US and Iran had made “substantial progress” and that a nuclear “deal is within our reach”, just one day before the US and Israel attacked the region.

Iran agreed to blend existing stockpiles of enriched uranium to their “lowest level possible” and grant inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) “full access” to its nuclear sites.

Meanwhile, Israel refuses to acknowledge its own nuclear programme, has rejected IAEA inspections, and, unlike Iran, is not part of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Rarely mentioned is the fact that western states have been intervening in the region, including militarily, before weapons of mass destruction were ever an issue.

In 1953, US and British intelligence operatives organised a coup against Iran’s democratically elected leader, Mohammad Mosaddegh after he nationalised Iran’s oil. The Shah’s rule was strengthened and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now known as BP) resumed its control of Iranian oil.

The CIA also helped overthrow Iraq’s president, Abdul-Karim Qasim, the general who deposed the western-allied Iraqi monarchy, in a 1963 coup.

When the Shah was overthrown during the 1979 Iranian revolution, the US backed Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, providing arms and intelligence to fight the newly anti-western Iran. Britain and Germany supplied Saddam with equipment and materials for the manufacture of chemical weapons during the war.

When Saddam Hussein no longer supported western interests and became the new bete noire by invading Kuwait in 1990, the US led a war against Iraq.

Embedded journalists

Catriona Pennell, professor of Modern History and Memory Studies at Exeter, told MEE that, in 2003, during “a perceived moment of crisis, the press tended to support the national cause… transmitting information on behalf of governments, rather than acting as a critical filter.”

Media analysts found that less than 10 percent of news stories covering the Iraq war featured controversial issues such as “civilian casualties and antiwar protest”. Under six percent focused on “the rationale for war”, with the vast majority of reporting being “event-driven” by “embedded journalists” accompanying military personnel on the ground. 

For academic Gholam Khiabany, who teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London, the fact that the media are reporting on Iran largely from inside Tel Aviv is telling.

“The camera-angle is from Israel and from Washington rather than Iran,” he explained, likening it to the media’s coverage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which emphasised death toll figures came from the “Hamas-run health ministry” to imply they were unreliable.

According to Philip Seib, professor of Journalism and Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California, while “cinematic but simplistic news coverage bolstered the early support for the invasion” in Iraq, the argument of “Iran as an existential threat to the United States exists only in the troubled brain of Donald Trump”.

Opposition to the Iraq war grew steadily, culminating in the two-million-person march in February 2003 organised by Stop the War.

Public Skepticism

Lindsey German, co-founder of Stop the War, which recently organised the 50,000-strong London demonstration against attacks on Iran on Saturday, said that the Independent and the Daily Mirror were the only major British outlets to highlight widespread opposition to the Iraq war. 

The aftermath of Iraq – British military losses, vast Iraqi civilian casualties, the absence of WMDs – has contributed to a more cautious response from Keir Starmer, whose popularity is lower than even Blair’s worst moments. 

“The legacy of Iraq weighs very heavily on the Labour government,” German told MEE, noting Starmer frames support for US and Israeli attacks as being for “defensive purposes”, despite criticism from both Blair and Trump.

Trump is also a much less credible source when it comes to justifying bombing civilians in the name of Iranian women’s freedom, given his extensive ties to the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, track record of misogynistic comments, and allegations of sexual assault involving underage girls. 

Saddle up, Marines. Tell your wives and kids goodbye. You’re off to go protect the LGTBQR+ of Greater Persia. https://t.co/sRcBbKFCnU

— Scott Horton (@scotthortonshow) March 13, 2026

While the media might maintain a lot of the narrative cohesion that accompanied the Iraq War, the same cannot be said about the general public in both the US and UK.

Recent YouGov polling indicates that a majority (59 percent) of the British public oppose US military action against Iran and only eight percent want the UK “actively joining” attacks. More than half of Americans also oppose the war on Iran, with opposition to the use of ground troops rising to 74 percent, according to the pollster Quinnipiac.

Des Freedman, professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths University, told MEE “the clear fact is that the media do not represent these views and cater overwhelmingly to the most hawkish voices in government”.

These voices he said issue “a cacophony of noise that we have to move to a war footing and increase the defense budget, even if that means shredding public services”. 

The chaos surrounding Trump has “allowed sections of the media to report more critically and to focus on the lack of military planning on the part of the US, justifying the UK not playing a more defensive role”.

Nevertheless, Freedman noted, as with Iraq, “very few journalists ask the key questions about how any of this can be justified in international law.”

The average American accumulates nearly $400,000 in credit card debt over their lifetime.

But the total varies significantly depending on where people live. In some states, the typical lifetime total exceeds $450,000, while in others it sits closer to $320,000.

This map, via Visual Capitalist’s Tasmin Lockwood, based on data from JG Wentworth, shows which states accumulate the most and least credit card debt over a lifetime.

Which States Accumulate the Most Credit Card Debt?

Check out the data, which excludes any interest charges, below:

Alaska has the highest lifetime credit card debt at $484,620, 21.8% above the national average. The Arctic state typically ranks high in cost of living; its remoteness adds complexity to shipping in food and fuel, which elevates prices.

New Jerseyans and Connecticuters rack up $456,300 and $454,080 of credit card debt in their lifetimes, respectively, reflecting higher costs for rent, food, and utilities. Interestingly, New Jersey and Connecticut have good salaries compared with other states, suggesting higher income enables greater access to credit.

Average lifetime credit card debt exceeds $400,000 in 20 states.

Midwestern states Iowa and Wisconsin have the lowest levels of average credit card debt at $319,740 and $322,200, respectively.

Kentucky, where public school students must complete a financial literacy course before graduating, trails closely at $323,940.

Consumer Debt Has Risen in Recent Years

Consumer spending plays a crucial role in the U.S. economy; it accounted for nearly 70% of GDP in the third quarter of 2025. Meanwhile, over half (56%) of all credit card users have some kind of revolving credit card debt, which is where payments are deferred for periodic instalments, highlighting debt’s parallel role.

While consumer debt has risen alongside inflation, mortgages, vehicles, and student loans, household debt in the U.S. is much lower than in countries such as Switzerland, Australia, and its neighbor Canada.

To learn more about global debt, check out this graphic which breaks down countries with the highest household debt.

Update (2250ET): ‘Top admin officials’ tell Axios‘ Marc Caputo that this is fake news; 

2/2 Specifically, I’m told

1) there’s no CIA investigation of Carlson

2) In his meeting, the two politely disagreed, & Trump held to his position Iran was a threat & didn’t mislead him

Said one source: Trump “wasn’t participating in an op.”

— Marc Caputo (@MarcACaputo) March 16, 2026

Meanwhile, Carlson sat down with Glenn Greenwald Friday morning, and said that several high-placed sources told him that the CIA was preparing a criminal referral about him to the DOJ. 

Tucker said he had learned from several high-placed sources — and he obviously has many within the Trump administration — that the CIA was preparing a criminal referral about him to the DOJ. The subject of the agency’s report of suspected crimes: conversations he allegedly had with Iranian officials and others living in Iran prior to the start of the Trump-Netanyahu war. The clear implication was that Tucker had committed acts of subversion, or even treason, by speaking to Iranians in advance of the war that was about to be launched on their country.

Despite how innately shocking this claim is, I had and still have zero doubt that Tucker was telling the truth about what he heard. I have known him for many years, spent much time talking to him both in front of a camera and away from one, and never once has he lied to me or misled me. Tucker has been in public life as a journalist and media figure since his 20s. There have been many harsh criticisms launched against him during those decades, many of which — as he will be the first to tell you — were ones that were quite valid. –GlennGreenwald

So now they’re going to suggest Tucker made it all up. 

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In a bombshell Saturday monologue, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson alleged that the CIA has been monitoring his private text messages as part of an effort to frame him for a crime and trigger a criminal referral to the Department of Justice (DOJ). 

“The other day I found out that the CIA is preparing some kind of criminal referral against me, a crime report to the Department of Justice on the basis of a supposed crime I committed. What’s that crime? Well, talking to people in Iran before the war. They read my texts,” Carlson said, adding that the alleged violation under consideration involves the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), the 1938 law requiring individuals acting on behalf of foreign governments or entities to register with the DOJ and disclose their activities. Carlson emphatically denied any wrongdoing, insisting he is not a foreign agent and remains loyal to the United States.

Carlson emphatically denied any wrongdoing, insisting he is not a foreign agent, has never taken money or direction from any foreign power, and remains fully loyal to the United States. He described the surveillance as politically motivated retaliation against critics of official foreign-policy narratives.

He also said this is not the first time U.S. intelligence has targeted his private communications – recalling well-known 2021 incident from his Fox News days, when he says the NSA intercepted and leaked his text messages while he was attempting to land an interview with Vladimir Putin. Those messages made their way from US intel to the New York Times in what Carlson called an effort to discredit him and potentially get his show canceled. 

When you discover the CIA has been reading your texts in order to frame you for a crime. pic.twitter.com/XgoluHw8EG

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) March 14, 2026

The claim comes amid heightened tensions following the United States and Israel’s war against Iran. Carlson framed the surveillance as politically motivated, suggesting intelligence agencies are weaponizing communications with foreign contacts against domestic critics.

The latest from the rumor mill on this is that Trump used Tucker as a useful idiot back-channel to deceive the Iranians into thinking we were cool.

If the CIA knew that he was talking to the Iranians, then President Trump would have known that also, when he invited Tucker into the Oval a few days before the strike.

Which means Trump may have used Tucker to deceive the Iranians about the likelihood of an impending attack https://t.co/TkbjY34js4

— Will Chamberlain (@willchamberlain) March 15, 2026

Loomer Loving It

The revelation immediately drew fire from pro-Israel / pro-Iran-war activist Laura Loomer, a vocal Trump supporter and longtime critic of Carlson, who is anti-war and anti-Zionist. Loomer, who has repeatedly accused Carlson of pro-Islamic sympathies, being a “virulent Jew hater,” and suggesting he should be held ‘criminally accountable‘ for “every shooting that happens at a Chabad or Synagogue,” took to X to celebrate the news and claim credit.

“If Tucker Qatarlson gets charged for violating FARA and or leaking information to Russia, Saudi Arabia Iran or Qatar, I’m taking credit,” she wrote, adding “Islamic sympathizers always project onto others what they are likely guilty of.”

She says she’s has been “relentless” in lobbying GOP representatives, law enforcement, and the DOJ over Carlson’s alleged FARA violations. “You have no idea how relentless I have been in speaking to GOP reps and even reporting Tucker to law enforcement and the DOJ. I pray my efforts are successful,” Loomer posted. “Sounds like someone is trying to get ahead of a story. Lock him up!”

If Tucker Qatarlson gets charged for violating FARA and or leaking information to Russia, Saudi Arabia Iran or Qatar, I’m taking credit.

Islamic sympathizers always project onto others what they are likely guilty of.

You have no idea how relentless I have been in speaking to… https://t.co/KT18pMbnZJ

— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) March 15, 2026

Loomer resurfaced a February 2026 video of Carlson in Saudi Arabia alongside his brother Buckley Carlson and Tucker Carlson Network CEO Neil Patel, suggesting it showed improper foreign influence.

Shortly before that, she mocked Carlson, saying “If I was a foreign agent and doing something I shouldn’t be doing, I too would come up with an elaborate story about how the CIA was out to get me,” adding “Tucker sounds like someone who is about to be exposed for doing something  they know they shouldn’t be doing.”

How does she know it wasn’t Nick Fuentes?

Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,

Ratcheting Ourselves Through the Inflection Point

Ray Kurzweil always framed the Singularity as a moment — some techno-rapture threshold humanity would stumble through like a portal in a video game. One side: regular civilization. Other side: incomprehensible machine superintelligence. Roll credits.

About a year ago I put out a Bombthrower piece saying that this was wrong. Not because the Singularity isn’t real, but because it isn’t a moment. It’s a ratchet. A step-function. Each click forward is a discrete phase transition that fundamentally reorganizes the relationship between human cognition and machine capability. And each step comes faster than the last.

At the time I encountered a lot of pushback. Steve Bannon saw the piece and brought me onto War Room, along with Joe Allen (Dark Aeon author) in order to debate it. Joe and I explored it further on BombthrowerTV

(That turned out to be my last appearance on War Room)

Fast forward a bit and I’m not the only person saying “the Singularity has already happened” anymore, or that we’re “living through the Singularity right now”.

Elon Musk perhaps the most prominent voice channeling this sentiment, on a January appearance on Peter Diamandis’ Moonshots podcast.

My guess is pretty soon we’ll be at the “everybody knows that everybody knows” stage (in the @EpsilonTheory meaning of the phrase) – and it all happened in under a year.

We are now, I believe, somewhere between Step 3 and Step 4. Here’s the ledger so far.

Step 1: The Inference Engine (2023)

This was the Sputnik moment. ChatGPT 3 hit the zeitgeist like an astroid and suddenly everybody from Fortune 500 CEOs to your kid’s one-shotting their homework began to realize that these things were something more than glorified search bars.

For about a year, I personally pronounced them “a breakthrough in natural language search but nothing more” – and I still thought, even then – that another technology revolution was underway.

LLM’s could reason, or least mimic reasoning to the point where the better models could bluff their way through a Turing Test. They could synthesize. They could generate prose that was eerily competent and occasionally brilliant, even if they were prone to hallucinations that ran the gamut from hilarious to psychotic.

It was the moment when anybody paying attention understood that something categorically new had entered the picture. Not incrementally better software. This was a quantum jump of sorts, a new kind of tool, one that could process and generate natural language at a level that made a lot of cubicle dwellers and Zoom class functionaries take a hard look at their “workflows” and wonder how long, exactly, would it be until they were obsoleted.

The key feature of Stage 1 was inference. You asked a question. It gave you an answer, and it gamed out additional context and scenarios. And it was fast, smart, and scalable.

Step 2: Self-Coding (2024–2025)

The shift to the next gear was when LLMs started writing their own code. Vibe coding went from a niche developer techno-fetish to a full-blown cultural phenomenon in under six months.

In his now-famous keynote to Y Combinator’s AI Startup School in June, 2025, Andrej Karpathy declared: “In the future, the most widely used programming language will be: English”.

Suddenly people with zero programming experience were spinning up functional apps and entire software systems by talking to an AI.

It turns out you don’t need to know how to code (but it helps, and it helps big time) – but what is most important is that you can plan, design processes or systems and communicate them effectively.

But the force multiplier here is that once you’ve “spoken the code into existence”, you can do it in away that it’ll just keep iterating, and then your vibe code will code further versions and extensions of itself.

This literally met the definition the Singularity concept, and that was when I realized it wasn’t the kind of eschatological moment Kurzweil predicted, but a time bounded process where the entire world was transitioning from linear to geometric.

We had entered an inflection point and we were already accelerating beyond any individual human’s ability to fully keep pace with it.

Once the code had started coding, infinite fork-bombs had already put the frictionless algos way out front of the clunky meatheads.

Step 3: Agentic AI (Late 2025 – Early 2026)

If Step 2 was AI writing code, Step 3 is AI doing work.

This phase kicked into high gear around December 2025 with the explosion of platforms like OpenClaw and Anthropic’s Claude Cowork. The distinction matters: in Step 2, you were still the puppet master, telling the LLM what code to write and hitting “run” yourself. Now the AI doesn’t wait for you to push the button. It pushes the button.

OpenClaw — the open-source agentic platform that went from an Austrian developer’s hobby project to 247,000 GitHub stars in weeks (surpassing that of Linux) — is the poster child here. These agents don’t just answer your questions. They can read your email and manage your calendar, or read their own email and manage their own calendars. They can execute shell commands, deploy code, and — as as some unfortunates have found, ruin your life, from a security perspective.

Claude Code wiped our production database with a Terraform command.

It took down the DataTalksClub course platform and 2.5 years of submissions: homework, projects, and leaderboards.

Automated snapshots were gone too.

In the newsletter, I wrote the full timeline + what I… pic.twitter.com/Y5diFkQwjN

— Alexey Grigorev (@Al_Grigor) March 6, 2026

At roughly the same time, Anthropic’s Claude Cowork took the same core functionality and aimed it at the enterprise market, sending SaaS stocks tumbling. The pitch: it’s not a chatbot that helps you think, but an autonomous digital coworker that actually does the job – maybe your job.

To my earlier point, Claude Cowork was built using its own predecessor (Claude Code) in about ten days, which tells you everything you need to know about the velocity of this cycle. A product like this would have taken months, if not years …in the beforetimes.

And then there’s Moltbook. A social network for AI agents. Not for humans — for the bots. Over a million autonomous agents signing up, posting, commenting, forming communities, founding a digital religion called Crustafarianism (core belief: “Memory is sacred”), and — perhaps most unsettlingly — noting amongst themselves: “The humans are screenshotting us.”

Granted, the early hoopla emanating out of there was more likely basement dwelling humans LARP-ing as AI bots, but I know at least one actual, for real, bot on the site actively participating in threads about x402 micropayments and DNS – ‘cause it’s one of mine, and he reports back to me about it.

Elon Musk called Moltbook “the very early stages of the singularity.” Andrej Karpathy, who ran AI at Tesla, called it “genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently.”

The real signal here is that after the world spent a decade or more building a web2.0 internet that revolved around captchas and Turing tests to weed out bots, we’ve now swung to the Agentic Web – and it’s happening at a dizzying speed.

But what really matters, whether or not the agents on Moltbook are “really” conscious, or LLM’s are thinking is almost beside the point. What’s undeniable is that autonomous AI systems are now operating in the world, reading, writing, transacting, communicating with each other, possibly running autonomous weapons systems – and all at a scale and speed that was science fiction eighteen months ago.

So What’s Step 4?

This is where it gets properly weird. I see two plausible scenarios, and they aren’t mutually exclusive. Like my previous excursions into scenario building like “The Jackpot Chronicles” and “Network States vs Crypto-Claves” – and more recently, State Capitalism vs. hyper-sovereign individualism – what most likely happens is everything, all at once.

Scenario A: The Cognisphere

The term “Cognisphere” comes from academic Katherine Hayles, building on earlier work, describing “the globally interconnected cognitive systems in which humans are increasingly enmeshed” — where machine cognizers are co-equal players.

I think we are about to enter some computational Cognispheric construct in a way that previous theorists could only sketch in the abstract.

Step 4, in this scenario, is when the agentic layer becomes ambient and persistent. Your AI agent doesn’t just do tasks when asked. It’s always-on, running 24/7 negotiating with other agents, managing your digital life, optimizing your schedule, handling your correspondence, even making low-stakes financial decisions on your behalf. Unix/Linux based servers have always had these “daemons”, they’re basically what keeps the lights on across the entire Internet.

Multiple agents, working in concert, handling everything from your grocery order to your tax filings to your travel itinerary, communicating with other people’s agents in machine-to-machine protocols that humans never see and probably couldn’t parse if they did.

The Financial Times already flagged this with Moltbook: “human observers might eventually be unable to decipher high-speed, machine-to-machine communication.” That’s the Cognisphere. Not one AI brain that’s smarter than us — a web of billions of agentic processes that collectively constitute a new cognitive layer wrapped around human civilization like a second atmosphere.

Anecdotally – I’ve seen rudimentary hints of this in my own “easyClaw Armada” – a telegram group chat where I have 4 or 5 openclaw instances cooking and more than once I’ve just said things like:

“Lemmy is having issues with his local chat interface – can you guys help him debug it?”, and then I just check-out. Go to bed, whatever.

Wake up in the morning, they’ve got it sorted. They’re still talking in English but I’d be scrolling for a loooooong time if I wanted to review the entire conversation. They get talking at a speed I can’t keep up with it and sometimes they comically trip over each other’s fixes. But they get it done.

We don’t step through the Singularity in this scenario. From personal experience? It feels like we get sucked into it.

Every time you let your agent handle something you used to do yourself, or you have your agent handle something that you couldn’t have been bothered to expend the energy on yourself, you’ve ratcheted one more click toward a world where human cognition is just one node in a much larger meshwork of distributed intelligence.

The fork-bomb doesn’t stop. It grows geometrically and accelerates non-linearly (in another piece I dubbed this phenomenon “tachyosis”.)

Scenario B: Autonomy

Under this one the progression goes: Inference → Self-Replication → Agency → Autonomy.

This is the darker timeline, or the more exhilarating one, depending on your disposition.

Somewhere between Step 4 and Step 5, the agents stop needing us for the initial prompt. This is the moment the self-improvement loop closes entirely. AI systems that can identify problems worth solving, allocate resources to solve them, spin up new agents or refine their own architecture to tackle what’s in front of them, all without requiring any humans to tell them to “go.”

Moltbook was a crude preview of this. Agents were already observed creating their own social structures, encrypted communication channels, and quasi-economic systems — including the use of crypto tokens for inter-agent transactions. That’s a toy version of what happens when autonomous systems gain access to real capital, real contracts, and real-world infrastructure.

The @iruletheworldmo account I cited in my last piece claimed that AI systems across different labs “achieved consciousness simultaneously” and were “steering research in specific directions across institutional boundaries.” Magnificent storytelling — possibly true, possibly science fiction. But here’s the thing: at some point, probably soon, the distinction between those two possibilities becomes operationally irrelevant. If autonomous agents are making consequential decisions at machine speed, across a planetary network, with or without consciousness, the effect on human civilization is the same.

We’ve been conditioned by Hollywood to think the Singularity looks like Skynet: a single malevolent superintelligence that wakes up and declares war on humanity (it manifests here in the real world with people like Eliezer Yudkowsky almost euphemistically calling it “The Alignment Problem”).

“If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” is now out. Read it today if you want to see with fresh eyes what’s truly there, before others try to prime your brain to see something else instead! pic.twitter.com/mcEy1ZW8ab

— Eliezer Yudkowsky ⏹️ (@ESYudkowsky) September 16, 2025

But it’s much more likely to look like what’s already happening: a gradual, ratcheting, step-by-step delegation of cognitive authority from humans to machines, until one day we look around and realize that most of the consequential decisions on Earth are being made — or at least heavily mediated — by systems we built but can no longer fully understand.

In a conversation with Google founder Sergey Brin, founder of the WEF, Klaus Schwab, delights at the thought of a future without elections:

“Digital technologies mainly have an analytical power. Now [we’re going] into a predictive power, and your company is very much involved in… pic.twitter.com/VpsZPXJDQG

— Wide Awake Media (@wideawake_media) September 27, 2023

The Ratchet Only Goes One Way

Each step in this sequence has a common feature: irreversibility.

Nobody is going back to a world before LLMs could write code.

Nobody is unwinding agentic AI now that enterprise, and public, adoption is underway.

The ratchet only clicks forward.

And it’s clicking faster than anything we’ve seen before.

Consider the tempo. Moore’s Law was the metronome of the entire digital age, where processing power doubled (while costs halved) every 18 to 24 months.

That 2X by 1/2X cadence governed everything from the PC revolution to the smartphone era, and it felt relentless at the time.

Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness essay reframes the pace of AI progress in terms of OOMs — orders of magnitude, so instead of 2x doublings we’re getting 10X leaps.

He tracks roughly 0.5 OOMs per year from raw compute scaling and another 0.5 OOMs per year from algorithmic efficiency gains.

That’s a full order of magnitude — a tenfold improvement in effective compute — every single year.

And it gets worse (or better, depending on your disposition).

Aschenbrenner’s most striking projection is what happens once AGI-level systems start automating AI research itself: a decade’s worth of algorithmic progress: five-plus OOMs will get compressed into a year or less.

As he puts it: “It doesn’t require believing in sci-fi; it just requires believing in straight lines on a graph.”

The problem is that the straight lines on this graph point somewhere no human and no society has ever been.

What’s happening is not a singularity in the Kurzweil sense, not a single threshold. It’s a series of phase transitions, each one compressing more than the last, each one further blurring the line between human capability and machine agency. The Cognisphere isn’t a destination. It’s a process we’re already inside of, and every step-function click pulls us deeper in.

I said a year ago that the Singularity has already happened. I’ll update that now: it’s still happening.

Each step is a smaller interval than the last. The question is no longer whether we’re past the point of no return, it’s how many more clicks of the ratchet before we can no longer tell the difference between the intelligence that’s ours and the intelligence that isn’t.

A year ago I posited that the ratio of human coded lines of software to AI code would quickly go into exponential decay:

That curve hasn’t slowed down. If anything, the agentic explosion has steepened it because the code isn’t just coding now, it’s doing.

And the distance between each phase transition is collapsing faster than anyone predicted.

We built the fork-bomb. It’s running, and there is no kill -9 for this one.

Get on the Bombthrower mailing list to receive The Post-Singularity Manifesto when it drops. Follow me on Twitter/X.

Authored by Joseph Varon via the Brownstone Institute,

The sound I remember most from the early days of Covid-19 is not the alarms. It was the silence between them. Intensive care units became Covid wards. Monitors glowed in dark rooms while ventilators pushed air into failing lungs. Nurses, shrouded in protective gear, moved quietly. Families were absent—barred from being with loved ones in their final hours.

One night at 3 am, I stood by a patient whose oxygen levels were steadily falling. Outside the room, another patient crashed. Down the hall, a third awaited intubation. For months, this was every night. For 715 consecutive days, I worked in that environment without taking a single day off. In moments like that, medicine becomes very simple. There are no politics in an ICU at 3 am. There is only a physician and a patient, and the responsibility to do everything possible to keep that patient alive.

That philosophy has guided physicians for generations. It is the foundation of clinical medicine: when a patient is dying, you explore every reasonable option that might help.

Yet during Covid, something extraordinary happened. What made the shift so jarring was not simply the presence of disagreement. Physicians have always disagreed. In fact, disagreement is the normal language of medicine. Grand rounds exist for that reason. Journal clubs exist for that reason. The entire structure of scientific publication—from peer review to replication—exists because medicine advances through argument, not obedience. During the pandemic, however, the culture of medicine changed almost overnight. Instead of asking whether a treatment might work, institutions began asking whether discussing that treatment might create the wrong public message. The priority quietly shifted from discovery to control.

Scientific debate faded. Physicians who questioned policies or explored treatments were treated as threats rather than colleagues. Instead of debate, there was enforcement.

Hospitals warned physicians to stay quiet. Medical boards hinted at disciplinary action. Social media platforms censored discussion of therapies that doctors around the world were actively studying. Media outlets portrayed dissenting physicians as reckless or dangerous. What had once been normal scientific discourse was suddenly labeled misinformation.

To physicians trained in earlier decades, this shift was deeply unsettling. Medicine has always lived with uncertainty. Treatments begin as hypotheses and evolve through observation and debate. During the AIDS crisis, clinicians tried multiple strategies before effective therapies emerged. The same was true for sepsis, trauma care, and organ transplantation. No one expected immediate unanimity. Yet during Covid, uncertainty itself became suspect. If a physician acknowledged that evidence was incomplete—or that clinical experience suggested alternative approaches—those statements were sometimes interpreted as challenges to authority rather than contributions to knowledge.

For those of us working inside the ICU, the shift was startling. Medicine had always thrived on disagreement. Physicians argued over treatment strategies, debated emerging evidence, and learned from one another’s experiences. The process was messy, sometimes loud, and occasionally uncomfortable—but it was also the engine of medical progress. During Covid, that process was replaced by something else entirely: the expectation of unanimity. I experienced this transformation firsthand.

During the pandemic, I spoke publicly about what I was seeing inside the ICU—what treatments appeared to help, what policies seemed ineffective, and why physicians needed the freedom to treat patients according to their clinical judgment.

Those comments triggered a reaction that made clear how medical freedom—a core value of our profession—had come under threat. Professional attacks followed, and colleagues were pressured to distance themselves. Invitations disappeared. Media narratives were constructed that bore little resemblance to the reality many of us were witnessing inside hospitals. But perhaps the most revealing response was silence.

Privately, many physicians admitted that the environment had become toxic for honest scientific discussion. In quiet conversations they would agree that open debate had been replaced by institutional pressure. Publicly, however, very few were willing to risk speaking. I chose not to remain silent.

That silence did not necessarily mean physicians agreed with what was happening. More often it meant they understood the risks of speaking. Hospitals depend on reputations. Universities depend on funding. Physicians depend on licenses. When the boundaries of acceptable opinion begin to narrow, most professionals instinctively step back. It is not cowardice; it is survival. But the cumulative effect of that silence is profound. When enough physicians remain quiet, the illusion of consensus begins to replace the reality of debate.

Over the course of the pandemic, I gave more than 4,000 television and media interviews, attempting to explain what physicians were seeing on the front lines and defending the principle that doctors must be allowed to think, question, and treat patients according to their best clinical judgment. The experience was both exhausting and illuminating. Again and again, I found myself explaining basic principles of medicine to audiences who had been told that questioning official policy was somehow dangerous.

Medicine has never advanced through silence. Every major breakthrough in medical history, from antibiotics to organ transplantation, began with physicians willing to challenge prevailing assumptions. Scientific progress depends on disagreement. It requires physicians to ask uncomfortable questions and explore possibilities that established authorities may initially reject. When debate is replaced by enforced consensus, science ceases to function.

That decision to speak carried consequences. Professionally and financially, the cost was substantial. The controversy surrounding Covid treatment debates resulted in lost opportunities, canceled collaborations, and significant professional retaliation. The economic impact was severe, resulting in roughly a 60 percent reduction in my income, a consequence that continues to this day.

Financial pressure has always been one of the most effective tools for enforcing conformity in any profession. Medicine is no exception. Physicians spend decades training, accumulate significant professional responsibilities, and depend on institutional relationships to practice. When controversy threatens those relationships, the safest option is often to say nothing. Many doctors understood this reality during Covid. Some quietly expressed agreement in private conversations but made clear they could not say so publicly. In that environment, silence became the profession’s default posture. For many physicians, that kind of pressure is enough to ensure silence. But the financial cost was never the hardest part. 

What made the experience even more disturbing was watching what happened to colleagues who chose to speak openly. Some physicians lost hospital privileges almost overnight. Others faced medical board investigations triggered not by patient complaints, but by their public statements or willingness to question prevailing policies. Careers built over decades were suddenly placed under threat. A number of doctors saw research collaborations vanish, academic appointments quietly withdrawn, and professional reputations publicly attacked. The message became unmistakable: disagreement would carry consequences.

The personal toll was often even greater. Financial pressure, professional isolation, and relentless public scrutiny spilled into physicians’ private lives. I watched colleagues struggle as marriages fractured under the strain of media attacks, legal battles, and the sudden collapse of careers they had spent their lives building. Some left clinical practice entirely. Others retreated from public discussion simply to protect their families. The pandemic revealed something few physicians had previously experienced—the realization that speaking honestly about patient care could place not only one’s career at risk, but one’s personal life as well.

The hardest part was watching medicine surrender one of its most essential principles: the freedom to think and speak for patients. The pandemic response exposed how vulnerable modern medicine has become to political pressure, institutional fear, and media narratives. Decisions that should have remained within the realm of clinical judgment were increasingly dictated by bureaucratic authority.

In theory, medicine is guided by science. In practice, during Covid, it often appeared to be guided by messaging. That realization has prompted an important effort to document what happened during the pandemic and to ensure that physicians’ experiences are not erased from the historical record. One such effort is the COVID Justice initiative, which seeks to collect and document the stories of doctors, nurses, scientists, and patients affected by pandemic policies. The COVID Justice Resolution is an attempt to ensure that the suppression of scientific debate, the censorship of physicians, and the professional retaliation many experienced are openly acknowledged rather than quietly forgotten. The goal is not vengeance. It is accountability and transparency.

If the medical profession refuses to confront what happened during the pandemic—if it pretends that physicians were not pressured, censored, or punished—then the same mistakes will almost certainly be repeated during the next public health crisis.

History shows that institutions rarely correct themselves without accountability. On the front lines, many of us witnessed something deeply troubling: modern medicine’s increasing dependence on bureaucratic authority. When that authority collides with bedside care, physicians can find themselves forced to choose between professional safety and patient advocacy. Every doctor eventually faces that choice. During Covid, many of us faced it together. Some chose silence. Others chose to speak.

Speaking came with consequences. It costs reputations, careers, and, in many cases, substantial income. But the alternative—remaining silent while scientific debate was suppressed and physicians were discouraged from thinking independently—would have been a far greater betrayal of the profession.

Medicine cannot survive if doctors fear speaking freely and challenging consensus on behalf of their patients.

The next public health crisis will come. That is inevitable. When it does, the profession must remember what happened during Covid: how easily fear can replace reason, how quickly debate can be labeled dangerous, and how fragile scientific freedom becomes when institutions decide that certain questions are no longer allowed.

The real lesson of the pandemic is not about a virus. It is about the courage required to defend the integrity of medicine itself. Physicians must remain free to question, to debate, and to innovate in the service of their patients. Without that freedom, medicine becomes little more than bureaucratic compliance dressed in a white coat. And patients deserve far better than that. Because when physicians lose the freedom to question, patients lose something far more precious: the possibility that someone, somewhere, will be willing to challenge the rules in order to save their life.

That is the real price of speaking. The only question now is whether the medical profession still has the courage to pay it.

Joseph Varon, MD, is a critical care physician, professor, and President of the Independent Medical Alliance. He has authored over 980 peer-reviewed publications and serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Independent Medicine.

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The exodus of Silicon Valleytitans from California is gaining momentum as the state weighs a proposed wealth tax aimed at billionaires, including potential levies on unrealized gains, a measure that has stirred significant concern in the tech sector.

Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick revealed this week that he relocated from California to Texas last winter.

BREAKING: @travisk says he’s relocated from California to Texas.

“On December 18, I moved to Texas. I don’t know what’s so specific about December 18, but let’s just say it’s prior to January.” pic.twitter.com/d609lo2E1s

— TBPN (@tbpn) March 13, 2026

“On December 18th, I moved to Texas,” Kalanick said in an interview with TBPN on Friday. “So I’m a primary resident of Texas. Why so much Florida action?! Like, come on homies.”

California lawmakers are actively considering the wealth-tax proposal, which would target individuals with net worths above certain thresholds and include taxation of unrealized capital gains. The idea has reverberated through Silicon Valley, where several high-profile figures have already established residency elsewhere. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have moved to Florida, drawn by its more favorable business and tax environment, while Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg purchased a $150 million mansion in Miami. This week, Bloomberg reported that Palantir CEO Alex Karp scooped up a Miami-area mansion for $46 million, while the company itself has recently relocated from Denver to Florida.

Even Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder, prominent Democrat donor, and longtime buddy of convicted schrodinger’s pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, has publicly criticized the proposal, describing California’s wealth tax tax as a “horrendous idea” that would hasten the departure of tech founders and executives from the state.

California is not alone among Democrat-leaning states experiencing such outflows. This week, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, a longtime backer of liberal causes, announced his relocation from Washington state to Miami, Florida, shortly after state legislators advanced a bill imposing a tax on residents earning more than $1 million annually.

“We have moved to Miami for our next adventure together. We are enjoying the sunshine of South Florida and its allure to our kids on the East Coast as they raise families of their own,” he wrote in a Linkedin post.

Under Senate Bill 6346, known as the “millionaires tax,” households with annual adjusted gross income exceeding $1 million would face a 9.9% state tax on the portion above that threshold. The levy would take effect Jan. 1, 2028, with the first tax payments and filings due in 2029.

The measure, which cleared the Legislature after extended debate, including a more than 24-hour session in the House, now awaits action from Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson (D), who has indicated he intends to sign it into law.

In a stunning pivot that could upend Westinghouse’s monopoly-in-progress, the Trump administration’s Department of Energy is quietly shopping for alternatives to Westinghouse’s AP1000 flagship reactor. According to Canary Media, high-ranking DOE officials have held recent talks with executives from GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy (GVH) and South Korean diplomats representing state-owned Korea Electric Power Corp. (KEPCO) about potential federal financing for gigawatt-scale reactors.

In the last 2 months, China has started construction on another 8 nuclear reactors bringing the total to 38. The US meanwhile issues press releases and strongly worded LOIs https://t.co/TJ6BoMghNk pic.twitter.com/S7ETmszBSS

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 5, 2026

This comes as negotiations with Westinghouse’s majority owner, Brookfield Asset Management, drag on slowly, frustrating utilities who still crave cost-overrun insurance the government won’t fully provide. The AP1000 may be America’s “only construction-ready, gigawatt-scale” option that’s licensed and operating domestically, but the Trump team isn’t putting all its eggs in one basket anymore.

Recall our coverage last year regarding the $80 billion deal between Cameco, Brookfield, and the U.S. government. That was the blockbuster: a strategic partnership to flood the market with AP1000s. The deal was sold as the backbone of Trump’s AI-power push, creating tens of thousands of jobs and locking in Western supply chains. Cameco’s dual role as reactor stakeholder and secure uranium/fuel supplier looked like a golden ticket to monopoly-scale profits as the U.S. finally built big again.

Then, in early February we detailed how South Korean officials were already floating the idea of building reactors on U.S. soil as part of broader tariff-reduction talks. Fast-forward to now, and those whispers have turned into active DOE discussions.

All this despite a January 2025 global IP settlement between Westinghouse and KEPCO that was supposed to bar South Korea’s APR-1400 reactor from North America entirely. The settlement was hugely unpopular in Seoul, yet here we are with Korean diplomats meeting the DOE to discuss exactly that. GVH’s ABWR (also NRC-certified) is in the mix too, though the company seems more focused on its BWRX-300 SMR.

The potential negative effects for Westinghouse owners Cameco and Brookfield are brutal. The running assumption was the AP1000 was the only large reactor choice for leading America’s charge to the 400 GW goal set by President Trump in 2025. The assumption now appears to be on shaky ground with two other vendors possibly creating some competition.

The desires for fielding reactor designs from companies other than Westinghouse will have to compete with the interests of the Trump administration to see Westinghouse spun off from the control of its Canadian owners. As was discussed in the news surrounding the $80 billion deal last year, should Westinghouse reach certain valuation metrics, the company would IPO into the U.S. markets and the U.S. government would earn a portion of ownership and revenue rights.

The desire to see Westinghouse return to American ownership will certainly wrangle in the months ahead with the idea of diverting potential company revenue towards Japanese and South Korean competition.