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Image: Mr.Nelson design for The Verge / Getty Images

A presidential campaign is an expression of ideology, often vocalized as a number of promises. Sometimes, those promises are made even when they’re outside the scope of what a president can enact. With Vice President Kamala Harris taking on former President Donald Trump, The Verge’s election guide attempts to cut through the noise of electioneering to identify the actual policies at stake. For the tech industry, many issues hang in the balance, including the regulatory power to govern AI, monopolies, and cryptocurrency. More broadly, this election will determine the future of electric vehicles and how the US approaches climate change.
But The Verge’s stake in this election is larger than just the tech issues. Every day, we walk our readers through the collective action problems that bedevil hardware, software, the internet, and all the other building blocks that make up our future. Once you start looking for collective action problems, you see them everywhere. What’s at stake in this election is whether it’s the government’s job to solve these problems — or whether anyone should even bother trying.

Image: Mr.Nelson design for The Verge / Getty Images

A presidential campaign is an expression of ideology, often vocalized as a number of promises. Sometimes, those promises are made even when they’re outside the scope of what a president can enact. With Vice President Kamala Harris taking on former President Donald Trump, The Verge’s election guide attempts to cut through the noise of electioneering to identify the actual policies at stake. For the tech industry, many issues hang in the balance, including the regulatory power to govern AI, monopolies, and cryptocurrency. More broadly, this election will determine the future of electric vehicles and how the US approaches climate change.

But The Verge’s stake in this election is larger than just the tech issues. Every day, we walk our readers through the collective action problems that bedevil hardware, software, the internet, and all the other building blocks that make up our future. Once you start looking for collective action problems, you see them everywhere. What’s at stake in this election is whether it’s the government’s job to solve these problems — or whether anyone should even bother trying.

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Image: The Verge Photo by: CHONA KASINGER/Bloomberg and ULIEN DE ROSA/AFP via Getty Images

It matters which story you tell about the future of artificial intelligence. Is AI just a tool for humans to use, like any other software? Is it a malignant force acting to destroy creativity? Will it create robots bent on destruction? Or will it make the world incredible, beautiful, equal, perfect in ways we can’t even begin to imagine?
This will shock you, but some of the men running the biggest companies in AI think it’s the latter. Both OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have recently written blog posts — Altman’s short and pithy, Amodei’s long and thorough — about the AI-powered world they hope to help create. These are powerful men with huge teams and vast resources at their disposal; it matters a lot what they think they’re building.

On this episode of The Vergecast, The Verge’s Kylie Robison joins the show to discuss the dueling CEO blogs, including the things Amodei and Altman agree on and the things they don’t. She also talks us through some of the big model launches left to come this year, and what it means that the endless game of LLM oneupsmanship might soon be ending.
After that, Will Poor tells us the story of ShakeAlert, an app and platform designed to alert millions of people when an earthquake is coming. If you’ve ever read that famous New Yorker article, you know why Will’s nervous about earthquakes. It turns out we have some ways to help people — though there are some pretty surprising challenges in the way.
Finally, Allison Johnson joins Will to answer a question from the Vergecast Hotline (866-VERGE11, or email vergecast@theverge.com!) about the Camera Control button on the iPhone 16. Apple had a lot to say about how fast it is… but we had to find out for ourselves.
If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, beginning with AI:

Sam Altman: The Intelligence Age
Dario Amodei: Machines of Loving Grace
Anthropic’s CEO thinks AI will lead to a utopia — he just needs a few billion dollars first
OpenAI plans Orion AI model release for December

And on ShakeAlert:

From The New Yorker: The Really Big One

ShakeAlert
MyShake for iOS and Android

From Apple: How to turn on emergency and government alerts on the iPhone

Ready.gov’s earthquake advice

And on the Camera Control:

Apple iPhone 16 and 16 Plus review: all caught up
Apple iPhone 16 Pro review: small camera update, big difference

Image: The Verge Photo by: CHONA KASINGER/Bloomberg and ULIEN DE ROSA/AFP via Getty Images

It matters which story you tell about the future of artificial intelligence. Is AI just a tool for humans to use, like any other software? Is it a malignant force acting to destroy creativity? Will it create robots bent on destruction? Or will it make the world incredible, beautiful, equal, perfect in ways we can’t even begin to imagine?

This will shock you, but some of the men running the biggest companies in AI think it’s the latter. Both OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have recently written blog posts — Altman’s short and pithy, Amodei’s long and thorough — about the AI-powered world they hope to help create. These are powerful men with huge teams and vast resources at their disposal; it matters a lot what they think they’re building.

On this episode of The Vergecast, The Verge’s Kylie Robison joins the show to discuss the dueling CEO blogs, including the things Amodei and Altman agree on and the things they don’t. She also talks us through some of the big model launches left to come this year, and what it means that the endless game of LLM oneupsmanship might soon be ending.

After that, Will Poor tells us the story of ShakeAlert, an app and platform designed to alert millions of people when an earthquake is coming. If you’ve ever read that famous New Yorker article, you know why Will’s nervous about earthquakes. It turns out we have some ways to help people — though there are some pretty surprising challenges in the way.

Finally, Allison Johnson joins Will to answer a question from the Vergecast Hotline (866-VERGE11, or email vergecast@theverge.com!) about the Camera Control button on the iPhone 16. Apple had a lot to say about how fast it is… but we had to find out for ourselves.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, beginning with AI:

Sam Altman: The Intelligence Age
Dario Amodei: Machines of Loving Grace
Anthropic’s CEO thinks AI will lead to a utopia — he just needs a few billion dollars first
OpenAI plans Orion AI model release for December

And on ShakeAlert:

From The New Yorker: The Really Big One

ShakeAlert
MyShake for iOS and Android

From Apple: How to turn on emergency and government alerts on the iPhone

Ready.gov’s earthquake advice

And on the Camera Control:

Apple iPhone 16 and 16 Plus review: all caught up
Apple iPhone 16 Pro review: small camera update, big difference

Read More 

Image: Mr.Nelson design for The Verge / Getty Images

Trump has promised to roll back Biden’s EV policies on ‘day one.’ Has there ever been a presidential election so totally obsessed with the American auto industry?
Sure, past campaigns have made glancing reference to the storied auto sector, mostly as a stand-in for popular tropes like American ingenuity and hard work. But this election feels different. The combination of Michigan, the home of the Big Three automakers (Ford, GM, and Stellantis), as a crucial swing state and the historic shift toward electric vehicles, has put the industry in the red-hot center of an already unpredictable presidential race.
Joe Biden kicked things off early on by making EVs the centerpiece of his administration’s efforts to fight climate change. That included billions of dollars for new charging infrastructure, tax credits for buyers, and billions more for manufacturers looking to build new factories (or retrofit old ones). The president, a self-professed car guy, even got behind the wheel of an electric Ford truck to demonstrate his commitment to these cleaner, less-polluting vehicles. (“That sucker,” the president declared, “is quick.”)
Naturally, this all got distilled and distorted through the right-wing media woodchipper as a government mandate to purchase electric vehicles and a ban on our beloved gas cars. Former President Donald Trump and the Republican apparatus seized on what they saw as trepidation among consumers about EV range and high prices and turned that into a message of government overreach. After all, EVs could be cold and digital, while the pistons firing under the hoods of gas cars had all the patriotic fervor of a firework display.
Trump spent most of the year ridiculing EVs on the campaign trail, claiming they would “kill” the American auto industry and “assassinate” jobs. The United Auto Workers strike over the summer added fuel to the fire, with many workers expressing unease about the shift. Trump declared that the Biden administration “ordered a hit job on Michigan manufacturing” by encouraging the sale of electric cars. (Language that now seems weirdly prescient given the multiple recent attempts on his life.) And he’s promised to reverse Biden’s policies on “day one” if elected in November.
To be sure, the Democrats’ plan was a familiar neoliberal mash-up of tax credits and abatements aimed at getting people who are already well off to spend a little more on an expensive EV in the hopes that sales volume would eventually help cool prices. Republicans could have had a reasonable counter message about excessive spending to help the rich better afford cool cars but instead ended up settling on Trump’s fever dream distortions.
The swift politicization of EVs took many by surprise
The swift politicization of EVs took many by surprise, including the people in charge of making them: “I never thought the propulsion system on a vehicle would be [political],” General Motors CEO Mary Barra recently told CBS News Sunday Morning. Ford CEO Jim Farley penned a LinkedIn post about how much he loves EVs and his belief that they should have “nothing to do with politics.”
Of course, it’s naive to think that anything that happens in America in the 21st century can be completely divorced from politics. The type of car you buy has always been a signifier of certain core beliefs. Pickup trucks are Republican-coded, much in the same way the Toyota Prius is often associated with coastal liberals.
Politics has always been ingrained in the car business. The federal government regulates safety, while drivers are licensed by states. But more than that, the government uses its policy-making powers to steer consumers to certain desired outcomes, just as regulations force manufacturers to adopt preferred technologies. And these policies originate from certain beliefs, such as the certainty that climate change is a very real threat and tailpipe pollution is a major contributor.
Earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency adopted new rules aimed at slashing greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2032. EVs would need to account for over half of new vehicle sales for automakers to meet these strict mandates. Trump claims to believe that people should have the freedom to drive whatever car they want, regardless of the environmental impact. To him, rising sea levels imply more desirable “oceanfront property.”
But beliefs are malleable, and politics is fickle. Tesla owners who thought they were making an environmentally conscious choice are now stuck driving totems to Elon Musk’s quixotic turn to the right. And the Tesla CEO’s slavish support for Trump has helped to soften the former president’s stance on EVs. No longer are they stealthy job assassins — now, Trump lauds them as “incredible,” if not for everyone.
The Tesla CEO’s slavish support for Trump has helped to soften the former president’s stance on EVs
Polls show that support for EVs splits along party lines. Democrats continue to funnel billions into EV infrastructure, even as sales growth slows and manufacturers suddenly balk at the aggressive stance they themselves took when EVs seemed poised to take over the world. Plug-in hybrids are now the new fad. Trump says that, if elected, no state would be allowed to ban internal combustion engines.
Out on the campaign trail, Vice President Kamala Harris has kept EVs — and indeed the entire Biden climate legacy — at an arm’s length, instead talking about her support for fracking as she attempts to court the must-win state of Pennsylvania. Her shift to the center has left EVs in a bit of a chilly spot.
Harris has been tough to pin down on EVs. She knows that Biden’s embrace didn’t quite pay off for him politically. EVs poll poorly in battleground states, including Michigan. And now that Trump has Musk giddily hopping around onstage for him like a marionette, Trump’s free to ramp up his attacks, pouring money into ads that falsely claim that Harris wants to “end all gas cars.”
After weeks of dodging the issue, Harris addressed it head-on in a speech in Flint, Michigan: “Let us be clear,” she said, “contrary to what my opponent is suggesting, I will never tell you what kind of car you have to drive.”
Only 3 in 10 Americans said they would consider an EV for their next purchase, and support is dropping, according to the Pew Research Center. Pew cites a familiar set of concerns around charging, range anxiety, and prices. Another recent study says the number of Americans that actually believe EVs are better for the planet than gas-powered cars is also dropping. The US has spent billions of dollars to push EVs, and the needle is barely moving. In May 2024, EVs represented 6.8 percent of overall car sales in the US, down from 8.8 percent of total sales in 2023.
With growth flatlining, Biden’s emphasis on EVs as the key weapon against climate change is looking misplaced, especially when compared to the multi-decade investments that paved the way for China to claim the EV crown. China has cracked the code on cheap EVs, with several models selling for $20,000 or less.
The only country producing EVs is our enemy in a new cold war
In the US, the average EV transaction is still north of $50,000. If Chinese EV makers like Geely and BYD are allowed to sell them in the US, industry soothsayers warn it could usher in the end of the Big Three. It’s a paradox: we need EVs to reduce emissions, and they need to be cheap so people can buy them, but the only country producing them is our enemy in a new cold war.
Neither Harris nor Trump seems to have much in the way of solutions to China except more tariffs and more protectionist trade policies. Americans need cheap EVs, and China has plenty to sell. But if there’s anything that Trump, Biden, and Harris can all agree on, it’s that you will never be allowed to buy one.
Weirdly, EVs have sucked up so much airtime, we really have no clue about either candidate’s position on the rest of transportation. If you search their policy platforms online, you won’t find any mention of important issues like infrastructure, aviation, public transit, or urban planning.
But since the past is prologue, we can make some educated guesses. Harris likely supports the Biden administration’s efforts to clean up the transportation network by investing in electrification, while also focusing on walkable cities and environmental justice initiatives. Meanwhile, Trump seems poised to eliminate funding for public transportation and would continue funding highway expansion projects, as outlined in the notorious Project 2025 document. But until we know the result of the election, we won’t know for sure.
What seems certain, though, is that whoever wins will have a huge impact on the next car you buy.

Image: Mr.Nelson design for The Verge / Getty Images

Trump has promised to roll back Biden’s EV policies on ‘day one.’

Has there ever been a presidential election so totally obsessed with the American auto industry?

Sure, past campaigns have made glancing reference to the storied auto sector, mostly as a stand-in for popular tropes like American ingenuity and hard work. But this election feels different. The combination of Michigan, the home of the Big Three automakers (Ford, GM, and Stellantis), as a crucial swing state and the historic shift toward electric vehicles, has put the industry in the red-hot center of an already unpredictable presidential race.

Joe Biden kicked things off early on by making EVs the centerpiece of his administration’s efforts to fight climate change. That included billions of dollars for new charging infrastructure, tax credits for buyers, and billions more for manufacturers looking to build new factories (or retrofit old ones). The president, a self-professed car guy, even got behind the wheel of an electric Ford truck to demonstrate his commitment to these cleaner, less-polluting vehicles. (“That sucker,” the president declared, “is quick.”)

Naturally, this all got distilled and distorted through the right-wing media woodchipper as a government mandate to purchase electric vehicles and a ban on our beloved gas cars. Former President Donald Trump and the Republican apparatus seized on what they saw as trepidation among consumers about EV range and high prices and turned that into a message of government overreach. After all, EVs could be cold and digital, while the pistons firing under the hoods of gas cars had all the patriotic fervor of a firework display.

Trump spent most of the year ridiculing EVs on the campaign trail, claiming they would “kill” the American auto industry and “assassinate” jobs. The United Auto Workers strike over the summer added fuel to the fire, with many workers expressing unease about the shift. Trump declared that the Biden administration “ordered a hit job on Michigan manufacturing” by encouraging the sale of electric cars. (Language that now seems weirdly prescient given the multiple recent attempts on his life.) And he’s promised to reverse Biden’s policies on “day one” if elected in November.

To be sure, the Democrats’ plan was a familiar neoliberal mash-up of tax credits and abatements aimed at getting people who are already well off to spend a little more on an expensive EV in the hopes that sales volume would eventually help cool prices. Republicans could have had a reasonable counter message about excessive spending to help the rich better afford cool cars but instead ended up settling on Trump’s fever dream distortions.

The swift politicization of EVs took many by surprise, including the people in charge of making them: “I never thought the propulsion system on a vehicle would be [political],” General Motors CEO Mary Barra recently told CBS News Sunday Morning. Ford CEO Jim Farley penned a LinkedIn post about how much he loves EVs and his belief that they should have “nothing to do with politics.”

Of course, it’s naive to think that anything that happens in America in the 21st century can be completely divorced from politics. The type of car you buy has always been a signifier of certain core beliefs. Pickup trucks are Republican-coded, much in the same way the Toyota Prius is often associated with coastal liberals.

Politics has always been ingrained in the car business. The federal government regulates safety, while drivers are licensed by states. But more than that, the government uses its policy-making powers to steer consumers to certain desired outcomes, just as regulations force manufacturers to adopt preferred technologies. And these policies originate from certain beliefs, such as the certainty that climate change is a very real threat and tailpipe pollution is a major contributor.

Earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency adopted new rules aimed at slashing greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2032. EVs would need to account for over half of new vehicle sales for automakers to meet these strict mandates. Trump claims to believe that people should have the freedom to drive whatever car they want, regardless of the environmental impact. To him, rising sea levels imply more desirable “oceanfront property.”

But beliefs are malleable, and politics is fickle. Tesla owners who thought they were making an environmentally conscious choice are now stuck driving totems to Elon Musk’s quixotic turn to the right. And the Tesla CEO’s slavish support for Trump has helped to soften the former president’s stance on EVs. No longer are they stealthy job assassins — now, Trump lauds them as “incredible,” if not for everyone.

Polls show that support for EVs splits along party lines. Democrats continue to funnel billions into EV infrastructure, even as sales growth slows and manufacturers suddenly balk at the aggressive stance they themselves took when EVs seemed poised to take over the world. Plug-in hybrids are now the new fad. Trump says that, if elected, no state would be allowed to ban internal combustion engines.

Out on the campaign trail, Vice President Kamala Harris has kept EVs — and indeed the entire Biden climate legacy — at an arm’s length, instead talking about her support for fracking as she attempts to court the must-win state of Pennsylvania. Her shift to the center has left EVs in a bit of a chilly spot.

Harris has been tough to pin down on EVs. She knows that Biden’s embrace didn’t quite pay off for him politically. EVs poll poorly in battleground states, including Michigan. And now that Trump has Musk giddily hopping around onstage for him like a marionette, Trump’s free to ramp up his attacks, pouring money into ads that falsely claim that Harris wants to “end all gas cars.”

After weeks of dodging the issue, Harris addressed it head-on in a speech in Flint, Michigan: “Let us be clear,” she said, “contrary to what my opponent is suggesting, I will never tell you what kind of car you have to drive.”

Only 3 in 10 Americans said they would consider an EV for their next purchase, and support is dropping, according to the Pew Research Center. Pew cites a familiar set of concerns around charging, range anxiety, and prices. Another recent study says the number of Americans that actually believe EVs are better for the planet than gas-powered cars is also dropping. The US has spent billions of dollars to push EVs, and the needle is barely moving. In May 2024, EVs represented 6.8 percent of overall car sales in the US, down from 8.8 percent of total sales in 2023.

With growth flatlining, Biden’s emphasis on EVs as the key weapon against climate change is looking misplaced, especially when compared to the multi-decade investments that paved the way for China to claim the EV crown. China has cracked the code on cheap EVs, with several models selling for $20,000 or less.

In the US, the average EV transaction is still north of $50,000. If Chinese EV makers like Geely and BYD are allowed to sell them in the US, industry soothsayers warn it could usher in the end of the Big Three. It’s a paradox: we need EVs to reduce emissions, and they need to be cheap so people can buy them, but the only country producing them is our enemy in a new cold war.

Neither Harris nor Trump seems to have much in the way of solutions to China except more tariffs and more protectionist trade policies. Americans need cheap EVs, and China has plenty to sell. But if there’s anything that Trump, Biden, and Harris can all agree on, it’s that you will never be allowed to buy one.

Weirdly, EVs have sucked up so much airtime, we really have no clue about either candidate’s position on the rest of transportation. If you search their policy platforms online, you won’t find any mention of important issues like infrastructure, aviation, public transit, or urban planning.

But since the past is prologue, we can make some educated guesses. Harris likely supports the Biden administration’s efforts to clean up the transportation network by investing in electrification, while also focusing on walkable cities and environmental justice initiatives. Meanwhile, Trump seems poised to eliminate funding for public transportation and would continue funding highway expansion projects, as outlined in the notorious Project 2025 document. But until we know the result of the election, we won’t know for sure.

What seems certain, though, is that whoever wins will have a huge impact on the next car you buy.

Read More 

This soundbar has a secret. | Image: Vizio

Is it just me, or is the karaoke machine trend trying to come back? There’s the Apple Music Sing feature, Ford’s in-car karaoke app, and Sansui’s cheap new OLED TV, just to name some examples. And now, Vizio’s getting in on the action with a new 2.1 stereo soundbar and subwoofer called the “MicMe” that comes with two wireless microphones and a dedicated karaoke app. It also has “six voice enhancements” (which, for our tone-challenged friends, include multiple pitch correction settings, according to details Vizio emailed to The Verge.)
The microphones have eight hours of battery life and a charging cradle you can set down next to your TV. They have built-in LEDs with nine ambient color options that, when in use, get brighter the louder you sing. You can adjust input volume, the LED lights, and vocal effects both on the mics and in the Vizio app, and when you finish singing and put the mics back in the cradle, the MicMe will automatically go back to using your TV audio.

Image: Vizio
Free to do it all my way, indeed.

The whole thing works with the MicMe Karaoke App, which is a free, ad-supported app with access to over 85,000 songs. But you don’t have to use that; it works fine with other karaoke apps as well as music from your TV or that is cast from another device. (Pro tip here: YouTube has countless karaoke versions of songs.)
As just a soundbar, the MicMe checks some solid boxes, with support for eARC, Dolby Atmos, and DTS:X audio, as well as a wireless subwoofer. The MicMe will be $349.99, and the company says it will be available online and at retailers like Walmart and Amazon, and ships in late November.

This soundbar has a secret. | Image: Vizio

Is it just me, or is the karaoke machine trend trying to come back? There’s the Apple Music Sing feature, Ford’s in-car karaoke app, and Sansui’s cheap new OLED TV, just to name some examples. And now, Vizio’s getting in on the action with a new 2.1 stereo soundbar and subwoofer called the “MicMe” that comes with two wireless microphones and a dedicated karaoke app. It also has “six voice enhancements” (which, for our tone-challenged friends, include multiple pitch correction settings, according to details Vizio emailed to The Verge.)

The microphones have eight hours of battery life and a charging cradle you can set down next to your TV. They have built-in LEDs with nine ambient color options that, when in use, get brighter the louder you sing. You can adjust input volume, the LED lights, and vocal effects both on the mics and in the Vizio app, and when you finish singing and put the mics back in the cradle, the MicMe will automatically go back to using your TV audio.

Image: Vizio
Free to do it all my way, indeed.

The whole thing works with the MicMe Karaoke App, which is a free, ad-supported app with access to over 85,000 songs. But you don’t have to use that; it works fine with other karaoke apps as well as music from your TV or that is cast from another device. (Pro tip here: YouTube has countless karaoke versions of songs.)

As just a soundbar, the MicMe checks some solid boxes, with support for eARC, Dolby Atmos, and DTS:X audio, as well as a wireless subwoofer. The MicMe will be $349.99, and the company says it will be available online and at retailers like Walmart and Amazon, and ships in late November.

Read More 

Photo by John Keeble/Getty Images

Lucid Motors revealed pricing and reservation details for its upcoming Gravity SUV, which is expected to go into production later this year.
To start out, Lucid will sell two trims of the Gravity: the Touring and Grand Touring. The Grand Touring will start at $94,900 and will be the first to go into production in late 2024. The Gravity Touring model, which starts at $79,900, won’t go into production until late 2025.
Lucid is opening orders for the Gravity on November 7th. Existing Lucid customers will be given priority for taking delivery. And all customers will be able to design, configure, and order their vehicle on Lucid’s website.
Lucid didn’t provide any details about delivery charges or incentives. The company has applied a $7,500 discount on its Air sedan to make up for the fact that its vehicles don’t qualify for the federal EV tax credit. (Lucid’s vehicles are too pricey for the credit, which only applies to sedans that cost less than $55,000 and SUVs and trucks priced under $80,000.)
Lucid has also slashed the price on the Air several times in recent years as it struggled to generate demand amid a broader slowdown in EV sales growth across multiple markets. The company reported record deliveries last quarter but has also repeatedly turned to its majority shareholder, The Saudi Public Investment Fund, for more cash.
When it was announced last year, Lucid said the SUV would get up to 440 miles of range, offer 800 horsepower, and accelerate 0–60 mph in under 3.5 seconds. The Gravity will also be the first vehicle from Lucid to come with a native NACS charging port that’s compatible with Tesla’s Supercharger network.

Photo by John Keeble/Getty Images

Lucid Motors revealed pricing and reservation details for its upcoming Gravity SUV, which is expected to go into production later this year.

To start out, Lucid will sell two trims of the Gravity: the Touring and Grand Touring. The Grand Touring will start at $94,900 and will be the first to go into production in late 2024. The Gravity Touring model, which starts at $79,900, won’t go into production until late 2025.

Lucid is opening orders for the Gravity on November 7th. Existing Lucid customers will be given priority for taking delivery. And all customers will be able to design, configure, and order their vehicle on Lucid’s website.

Lucid didn’t provide any details about delivery charges or incentives. The company has applied a $7,500 discount on its Air sedan to make up for the fact that its vehicles don’t qualify for the federal EV tax credit. (Lucid’s vehicles are too pricey for the credit, which only applies to sedans that cost less than $55,000 and SUVs and trucks priced under $80,000.)

Lucid has also slashed the price on the Air several times in recent years as it struggled to generate demand amid a broader slowdown in EV sales growth across multiple markets. The company reported record deliveries last quarter but has also repeatedly turned to its majority shareholder, The Saudi Public Investment Fund, for more cash.

When it was announced last year, Lucid said the SUV would get up to 440 miles of range, offer 800 horsepower, and accelerate 0–60 mph in under 3.5 seconds. The Gravity will also be the first vehicle from Lucid to come with a native NACS charging port that’s compatible with Tesla’s Supercharger network.

Read More 

Image: Mr.Nelson design for The Verge / Getty Images

Here’s why the embattled SEC chair is a hot-button presidential issue. It is my personal belief that no normal person should know the name of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s chair, and yet here I am, about to explain why he’s been an issue in the 2024 presidential election.
The man in question is Gary Gensler, an economist who formerly worked at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As SEC chair, he has been on the receiving end of death threats. Former President and current Republican nominee Donald Trump made a campaign promise to “fire Gary Gensler” to the raucous approval of a packed arena at this year’s Bitcoin Conference. Though blockchain enthusiasts have been the most vocal in their displeasure, the controversy around Gensler isn’t limited to them. The Economist has dubbed Gensler “the most controversial man in American finance”; House Democrats and Republicans have expressed “stern displeasure” on Gensler’s crypto approach.
You could say he is unpopular.
Many industries dislike their regulators. It is arguably the job of the SEC commissioner to be somewhat unpopular! And the cryptocurrency industry’s revulsion for Gensler is unsurprising after a series of SEC enforcements, including against major companies and exchanges. But Gensler himself became a contentious, oddly partisan issue on the level of presidential politics. And the story gets more complicated from there because this is not a cut-and-dried case of a regulator being persecuted by the industry for doing his job. Gensler is also unpopular among his own staff, though not for any reasons that will get thousands of people roaring inside a convention center.

It’s unusual for the SEC to be a hot-button issue — even during the 2008 financial crisis, the SEC chair wasn’t exactly a well-known figure. (The chair at the time was Christopher Cox. Yes, literally who.) But the SEC has become politically heated because Gensler wanted it to be, says Adam Pritchard, a professor of securities law at the University of Michigan. “He wanted to raise the profile of the agency,” says Pritchard, pointing to what he says is “an ambitious rulemaking agenda.”
Let’s review some very recent history: Gensler’s time at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the agency that regulates derivatives markets. Gensler was in charge of the CFTC in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, during which he successfully convinced Congress to include, as part of the Dodd-Frank Act, new rules involving swaps (a type of financial derivative that was implicated in the crisis) that put them under the purview of the CFTC. His approach at that agency was described using words such as “hard-charging” and “aggressive.”
Before Dodd-Frank, the CFTC’s oversight was just the $35 trillion futures market; after, it was responsible for the $400 trillion swaps market as well. But taking on new duties also meant a lot of new work. The CFTC had to write a lot of new rules, and real people had to clock in hours to make that happen. On top of that, his enforcement chief filed “a record number of cases” against Wall Street banks. As a result of the speed and confusion with which the CFTC was working, the staff had to issue “130 exemptions or no-action letters,” essentially saying no enforcement action should be taken despite the existence of a new rule.
He built up a reputation as a micromanager
Under Gensler’s leadership, the CFTC outspent its budget and sometimes had to put employees on unpaid leave. At the same time, he built up a reputation as a micromanager. Gensler “routinely demanded that staff work weekends and holidays,” according to the Partnership for Public Service, which named the CFTC as one of the worst places in government to work while Gensler was at the helm.
Gensler’s management style left much to be desired; it also left the CFTC with a considerable amount of unoccupied real estate. Office space at the CFTC surged by almost 75 percent during his tenure. “Gensler signed leases across the country, assuming he would be able to fill the offices with new staff,” noted Fortune. But the funding for that staff never came, and by 2016, a fifth of the agency’s headquarters in DC remained unoccupied — as did almost a third of the New York office.
The playbook Gensler has been using at the SEC looks similar. Here, too, he’s been known for his hard-driving ethos. His two highest-profile issues, environmental disclosures and crypto, have earned him enemies in the Republican Party.
Under the SEC’s new rules around environmental disclosures, companies are required to disclose risks related to climate change. (Those rules have been paused in the face of an onslaught of lawsuits — part of a larger-scale attack on the regulatory state via the courts.)
“I don’t imagine a lot of voters are up in arms about public companies being forced to disclose the impact their policies have on the environment,” says Marc Fagel, who spent more than a decade at the SEC and who is now a lecturer at Stanford Law School. But because Republicans have been complaining about “ESG,” and “woke Wall Street,” this otherwise anodyne set of rules is now part of the culture wars.
But it’s Gensler’s record on crypto that makes his haters really froth at the mouth.

The division between the CFTC and the SEC is peculiar; in most other countries, there’s just one financial regulator. That division is a crucial part of the crypto story; the industry’s preferred regulator is the CFTC. But in the absence of a congressional mandate, a turf war has ensued, with the SEC filing enforcement actions against Coinbase and Binance, two of the largest exchanges, in 2023, claiming the exchanges allowed users to trade unregistered securities.
The SEC under both Gensler and his predecessor had some significant wins; it litigated or settled almost 200 crypto cases since 2017, Gensler told Barron’s in May. In March, a judge found that the suit against Coinbase could go forward — saying the SEC had sufficiently shown “that Coinbase operates as an exchange, as a broker, and as a clearing agency under the federal securities laws, and, through its Staking Program, engages in the unregistered offer and sale of securities.”
Gensler has said outright that crypto is “rife with fraud, scams, bankruptcies and money laundering”
Meanwhile, Gensler has said outright that crypto is “rife with fraud, scams, bankruptcies and money laundering” — not in and of itself a controversial opinion but one that maybe comes off a touch more outspoken than the typical federal bureaucrat. Maybe to drive the point home, he’s taken a number of crypto companies to task with enforcement actions, which include but are not limited to lawsuits. This is a sore point for the crypto industry, which has complained that the SEC isn’t making rules, just punishing companies, and doing so without providing clear guidance about how to avoid punishment.
When the crypto exchange Coinbase requested that the SEC draft comprehensive rules for the crypto industry, the SEC rejected its petition. Coinbase then filed a legal challenge, saying the SEC’s denial was “arbitrary and capricious,” one of the legal standards for overturning an agency action.
Before I say more, let’s go over that again: one of the biggest crypto exchanges asked for more regulation, and then the regulatory agency in question — run by a man who says crypto is full of scams and frauds — said no.
That seems pretty absurd on the face of it. Keep in mind, however, that there’s some weird legal crossfire in the timeline. Coinbase’s suit against the SEC over rulemaking was happening at the same time as the SEC’s suit against Coinbase over unregistered securities. And on top of that, there’s an additional complication: regulation just isn’t what it used to be. “The conservative judiciary has limited rulemaking,” says Fagel, the former SEC staffer. (The Supreme Court kneecapped regulators earlier this summer as part of an ongoing trend toward disempowering federal agencies.) “Yes, the SEC could spend three years concocting an entire regulatory regime for crypto. There would be a lawsuit in an hour.”
“Yes, the SEC could spend three years concocting an entire regulatory regime for crypto. There would be a lawsuit in an hour.”
It might be more realistic to think of Coinbase’s suit as not asking for regulation per se, but as asking for regulation that Coinbase likes. Because if Coinbase doesn’t like said regulation, it’ll sue.
Meanwhile, the courts have tended to back the SEC when it sues or takes enforcement actions — as opposed to rulemaking or other agency decision-making — so, rationally speaking, it’s just good sense for the SEC to focus on doing the things that judges let them do.
Gensler’s approach would be defensible, except that the SEC hasn’t abandoned rulemaking. In just the first eight months of 2022, the SEC proposed more than twice as many new rules as in 2021, and more than had been proposed annually for the last five years, according to an SEC inspector general report.
“There’s no question that the rulemaking initiatives have come fast and furious since he took over at the SEC,” says Pritchard. That means that the number of challenges to the rules has also spiked. Crafting rules that will withstand challenges is time-intensive, creating a feedback loop of more work for the staff, Pritchard says.
This is the part that makes Gensler’s SEC start to look a lot like Gensler’s CFTC, and not in a good way.

As a result of the pace of rulemaking, attrition rates at the SEC were the highest in 10 years, the 2022 inspector general report said. Managers told the SEC inspector general that it had been harder to hire people with experience, so the agency was relying on temporary workers, “in some cases with little or no experience in rulemaking.”
According to the SEC union, staff have been leaving “at more than twice the rate prior to Gensler’s arrival, and the pace of departures is continuing to accelerate.” The people who were most likely to leave were the most experienced. The SEC staff has experienced benefit cuts, which the union chalks up to “a series of budget decisions made by Chair Gensler,” who chose to increase spending, betting that Congress would increase the SEC’s budget. “In effect, Chair Gensler wagered with your compensation and benefits, knowing that his staff would suffer the consequences if he lost the bet,” the union told its membership. (Congress did not increase the SEC’s budget, and Gensler did in fact lose this bet.)
The union has also decried Gensler’s “irrational hostility” to remote work, adding that “the union is being forced to litigate issues like this more frequently under Chair Gensler than under any previous SEC Chairman.”
Overwork and staff attrition have heavy consequences when you’re the literal government. In March 2024, SEC attorneys were sanctioned by a judge for “gross abuse of power” in a crypto case involving a company called Digital Licensing (or, more familiarly, Debt Box). Following the sanctions, the Salt Lake City offices of the SEC were closed because of “significant attrition” — and while the Debt Box fiasco wasn’t the only reason it closed, it did play a role. Attorney sanctions are relatively rare, and sanctions of government lawyers are even more so.
The SEC chair term lasts five years, meaning Gensler’s time is up in June 2026. But regardless of who is elected, Gensler’s tenure may not continue into the next administration. Gensler has said he would “absolutely” stay for a second term under Biden, when Biden was still the Democratic nominee. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign has targeted him specifically, with the former president saying he would “fire” Gensler. Vice President Kamala Harris’ donors have also been pushing to get rid of Gensler. Her exact stance on Gensler as a regulator isn’t clear, but Gensler is closely associated with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and the relationship between Warren and Harris has been tense.
Legally, the president can fire SEC chairs — but the chair then becomes a normal SEC commissioner. In that case, they can only be removed for cause, says Anne Joseph O’Connell, a law professor at Stanford Law School. (Typically, though, chairs resign when a new party is elected, while the regular commissioners carry on.) It’s unclear what would happen in the case of a Harris administration — intraparty transitions don’t happen very often.
Gensler is a symptom, not the disease
It’s funny. There’s reason to think that Gensler is, in fact, bad at his job. But when the crypto industry calls for Gensler to get fired, it’s probably not because it’s concerned about the work-life balance of the SEC staff. The same people who want Gensler’s head on a platter are the least likely people in America to find common cause with the SEC union. And given the polarization in American politics, when Gensler is demonized by the crypto industry (and lumped in with the actually effective Lina Khan by the business class), he comes out looking good to a certain set of half-informed liberals.
The real story here is the paralyzed regulatory state. The legislative chambers that could have increased the SEC’s budget and mitigated its problems of too much rulemaking with too little staff are gridlocked. (Maybe Gensler’s chaotic leadership would have rendered that a null effort, but it’s hard to say for sure.) As for the problems with what is sometimes termed “regulation by enforcement,” that’s exactly the incentive structure the right wing has set up by kneecapping agencies’ abilities to set rules. Gensler is a symptom, not the disease.
When the SEC makes rules, it gets tied up in court, and so even when the industry wants rules, it’s not going to get them. Strong regulation isn’t nearly as dangerous for corporations as unpredictability is. Go ahead and fire Gensler — who cares? The next SEC chair isn’t going to be able to set predictable guidelines, either.

Image: Mr.Nelson design for The Verge / Getty Images

Here’s why the embattled SEC chair is a hot-button presidential issue.

It is my personal belief that no normal person should know the name of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s chair, and yet here I am, about to explain why he’s been an issue in the 2024 presidential election.

The man in question is Gary Gensler, an economist who formerly worked at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As SEC chair, he has been on the receiving end of death threats. Former President and current Republican nominee Donald Trump made a campaign promise to “fire Gary Gensler” to the raucous approval of a packed arena at this year’s Bitcoin Conference. Though blockchain enthusiasts have been the most vocal in their displeasure, the controversy around Gensler isn’t limited to them. The Economist has dubbed Gensler “the most controversial man in American finance”; House Democrats and Republicans have expressed “stern displeasure” on Gensler’s crypto approach.

You could say he is unpopular.

Many industries dislike their regulators. It is arguably the job of the SEC commissioner to be somewhat unpopular! And the cryptocurrency industry’s revulsion for Gensler is unsurprising after a series of SEC enforcements, including against major companies and exchanges. But Gensler himself became a contentious, oddly partisan issue on the level of presidential politics. And the story gets more complicated from there because this is not a cut-and-dried case of a regulator being persecuted by the industry for doing his job. Gensler is also unpopular among his own staff, though not for any reasons that will get thousands of people roaring inside a convention center.

It’s unusual for the SEC to be a hot-button issue — even during the 2008 financial crisis, the SEC chair wasn’t exactly a well-known figure. (The chair at the time was Christopher Cox. Yes, literally who.) But the SEC has become politically heated because Gensler wanted it to be, says Adam Pritchard, a professor of securities law at the University of Michigan. “He wanted to raise the profile of the agency,” says Pritchard, pointing to what he says is “an ambitious rulemaking agenda.”

Let’s review some very recent history: Gensler’s time at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the agency that regulates derivatives markets. Gensler was in charge of the CFTC in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, during which he successfully convinced Congress to include, as part of the Dodd-Frank Act, new rules involving swaps (a type of financial derivative that was implicated in the crisis) that put them under the purview of the CFTC. His approach at that agency was described using words such as “hard-charging” and “aggressive.”

Before Dodd-Frank, the CFTC’s oversight was just the $35 trillion futures market; after, it was responsible for the $400 trillion swaps market as well. But taking on new duties also meant a lot of new work. The CFTC had to write a lot of new rules, and real people had to clock in hours to make that happen. On top of that, his enforcement chief filed “a record number of cases” against Wall Street banks. As a result of the speed and confusion with which the CFTC was working, the staff had to issue “130 exemptions or no-action letters,” essentially saying no enforcement action should be taken despite the existence of a new rule.

Under Gensler’s leadership, the CFTC outspent its budget and sometimes had to put employees on unpaid leave. At the same time, he built up a reputation as a micromanager. Gensler “routinely demanded that staff work weekends and holidays,” according to the Partnership for Public Service, which named the CFTC as one of the worst places in government to work while Gensler was at the helm.

Gensler’s management style left much to be desired; it also left the CFTC with a considerable amount of unoccupied real estate. Office space at the CFTC surged by almost 75 percent during his tenure. “Gensler signed leases across the country, assuming he would be able to fill the offices with new staff,” noted Fortune. But the funding for that staff never came, and by 2016, a fifth of the agency’s headquarters in DC remained unoccupied — as did almost a third of the New York office.

The playbook Gensler has been using at the SEC looks similar. Here, too, he’s been known for his hard-driving ethos. His two highest-profile issues, environmental disclosures and crypto, have earned him enemies in the Republican Party.

Under the SEC’s new rules around environmental disclosures, companies are required to disclose risks related to climate change. (Those rules have been paused in the face of an onslaught of lawsuits — part of a larger-scale attack on the regulatory state via the courts.)

“I don’t imagine a lot of voters are up in arms about public companies being forced to disclose the impact their policies have on the environment,” says Marc Fagel, who spent more than a decade at the SEC and who is now a lecturer at Stanford Law School. But because Republicans have been complaining about “ESG,” and “woke Wall Street,” this otherwise anodyne set of rules is now part of the culture wars.

But it’s Gensler’s record on crypto that makes his haters really froth at the mouth.

The division between the CFTC and the SEC is peculiar; in most other countries, there’s just one financial regulator. That division is a crucial part of the crypto story; the industry’s preferred regulator is the CFTC. But in the absence of a congressional mandate, a turf war has ensued, with the SEC filing enforcement actions against Coinbase and Binance, two of the largest exchanges, in 2023, claiming the exchanges allowed users to trade unregistered securities.

The SEC under both Gensler and his predecessor had some significant wins; it litigated or settled almost 200 crypto cases since 2017, Gensler told Barron’s in May. In March, a judge found that the suit against Coinbase could go forward — saying the SEC had sufficiently shown “that Coinbase operates as an exchange, as a broker, and as a clearing agency under the federal securities laws, and, through its Staking Program, engages in the unregistered offer and sale of securities.”

Meanwhile, Gensler has said outright that crypto is “rife with fraud, scams, bankruptcies and money laundering” — not in and of itself a controversial opinion but one that maybe comes off a touch more outspoken than the typical federal bureaucrat. Maybe to drive the point home, he’s taken a number of crypto companies to task with enforcement actions, which include but are not limited to lawsuits. This is a sore point for the crypto industry, which has complained that the SEC isn’t making rules, just punishing companies, and doing so without providing clear guidance about how to avoid punishment.

When the crypto exchange Coinbase requested that the SEC draft comprehensive rules for the crypto industry, the SEC rejected its petition. Coinbase then filed a legal challenge, saying the SEC’s denial was “arbitrary and capricious,” one of the legal standards for overturning an agency action.

Before I say more, let’s go over that again: one of the biggest crypto exchanges asked for more regulation, and then the regulatory agency in question — run by a man who says crypto is full of scams and frauds — said no.

That seems pretty absurd on the face of it. Keep in mind, however, that there’s some weird legal crossfire in the timeline. Coinbase’s suit against the SEC over rulemaking was happening at the same time as the SEC’s suit against Coinbase over unregistered securities. And on top of that, there’s an additional complication: regulation just isn’t what it used to be. “The conservative judiciary has limited rulemaking,” says Fagel, the former SEC staffer. (The Supreme Court kneecapped regulators earlier this summer as part of an ongoing trend toward disempowering federal agencies.) “Yes, the SEC could spend three years concocting an entire regulatory regime for crypto. There would be a lawsuit in an hour.”

It might be more realistic to think of Coinbase’s suit as not asking for regulation per se, but as asking for regulation that Coinbase likes. Because if Coinbase doesn’t like said regulation, it’ll sue.

Meanwhile, the courts have tended to back the SEC when it sues or takes enforcement actions — as opposed to rulemaking or other agency decision-making — so, rationally speaking, it’s just good sense for the SEC to focus on doing the things that judges let them do.

Gensler’s approach would be defensible, except that the SEC hasn’t abandoned rulemaking. In just the first eight months of 2022, the SEC proposed more than twice as many new rules as in 2021, and more than had been proposed annually for the last five years, according to an SEC inspector general report.

“There’s no question that the rulemaking initiatives have come fast and furious since he took over at the SEC,” says Pritchard. That means that the number of challenges to the rules has also spiked. Crafting rules that will withstand challenges is time-intensive, creating a feedback loop of more work for the staff, Pritchard says.

This is the part that makes Gensler’s SEC start to look a lot like Gensler’s CFTC, and not in a good way.

As a result of the pace of rulemaking, attrition rates at the SEC were the highest in 10 years, the 2022 inspector general report said. Managers told the SEC inspector general that it had been harder to hire people with experience, so the agency was relying on temporary workers, “in some cases with little or no experience in rulemaking.”

According to the SEC union, staff have been leaving “at more than twice the rate prior to Gensler’s arrival, and the pace of departures is continuing to accelerate.” The people who were most likely to leave were the most experienced. The SEC staff has experienced benefit cuts, which the union chalks up to “a series of budget decisions made by Chair Gensler,” who chose to increase spending, betting that Congress would increase the SEC’s budget. “In effect, Chair Gensler wagered with your compensation and benefits, knowing that his staff would suffer the consequences if he lost the bet,” the union told its membership. (Congress did not increase the SEC’s budget, and Gensler did in fact lose this bet.)

The union has also decried Gensler’s “irrational hostility” to remote work, adding that “the union is being forced to litigate issues like this more frequently under Chair Gensler than under any previous SEC Chairman.”

Overwork and staff attrition have heavy consequences when you’re the literal government. In March 2024, SEC attorneys were sanctioned by a judge for “gross abuse of power” in a crypto case involving a company called Digital Licensing (or, more familiarly, Debt Box). Following the sanctions, the Salt Lake City offices of the SEC were closed because of “significant attrition” — and while the Debt Box fiasco wasn’t the only reason it closed, it did play a role. Attorney sanctions are relatively rare, and sanctions of government lawyers are even more so.

The SEC chair term lasts five years, meaning Gensler’s time is up in June 2026. But regardless of who is elected, Gensler’s tenure may not continue into the next administration. Gensler has said he would “absolutely” stay for a second term under Biden, when Biden was still the Democratic nominee. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign has targeted him specifically, with the former president saying he would “fire” Gensler. Vice President Kamala Harris’ donors have also been pushing to get rid of Gensler. Her exact stance on Gensler as a regulator isn’t clear, but Gensler is closely associated with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and the relationship between Warren and Harris has been tense.

Legally, the president can fire SEC chairs — but the chair then becomes a normal SEC commissioner. In that case, they can only be removed for cause, says Anne Joseph O’Connell, a law professor at Stanford Law School. (Typically, though, chairs resign when a new party is elected, while the regular commissioners carry on.) It’s unclear what would happen in the case of a Harris administration — intraparty transitions don’t happen very often.

It’s funny. There’s reason to think that Gensler is, in fact, bad at his job. But when the crypto industry calls for Gensler to get fired, it’s probably not because it’s concerned about the work-life balance of the SEC staff. The same people who want Gensler’s head on a platter are the least likely people in America to find common cause with the SEC union. And given the polarization in American politics, when Gensler is demonized by the crypto industry (and lumped in with the actually effective Lina Khan by the business class), he comes out looking good to a certain set of half-informed liberals.

The real story here is the paralyzed regulatory state. The legislative chambers that could have increased the SEC’s budget and mitigated its problems of too much rulemaking with too little staff are gridlocked. (Maybe Gensler’s chaotic leadership would have rendered that a null effort, but it’s hard to say for sure.) As for the problems with what is sometimes termed “regulation by enforcement,” that’s exactly the incentive structure the right wing has set up by kneecapping agencies’ abilities to set rules. Gensler is a symptom, not the disease.

When the SEC makes rules, it gets tied up in court, and so even when the industry wants rules, it’s not going to get them. Strong regulation isn’t nearly as dangerous for corporations as unpredictability is. Go ahead and fire Gensler — who cares? The next SEC chair isn’t going to be able to set predictable guidelines, either.

Read More 

Image: Mr.Nelson design for The Verge / Getty Images

Conservative courts are strangling the functions of government. Another round of Trump judges will finish us. Women have died from abortion bans; the full death toll will not become clear for many years to come.
This was a direct and foreseeable consequence of the election of former President Donald Trump in 2016, who oversaw the installation of three right-wing Supreme Court justices during his four years in office. The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the age of 87 should not have come as a shock, but denial can be a hell of a drug. A persistent 5–4 conservative majority tipped over into a 6–3 supermajority.
This is the simplest, clearest case for why you should vote. A president can set a national agenda by speaking directly to the country, and as the de facto leader of their political party, they have traditionally had a heavy influence on national policy and lawmaking. But these are largely powers that exist because of tradition, creative politicking, and the public imagination. The power to nominate federal judges, on the other hand, is a power that is explicitly enumerated in the US Constitution.
Sitting Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who is presently 76, is old as shit
And the clock is ticking. Justice Antonin Scalia died at the age of 79. Former Chief Justice William Rehnquist died at 80. Justice Stephen Breyer retired at 84 and Justice Anthony Kennedy at 82. Sitting Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who is presently 76 years old, is old as shit. (The covid-19 epidemic, among other factors, has dropped average life expectancy in the United States to 76.4 years.) A vote for president becomes a vote for the composition of the Supreme Court. The composition of the Supreme Court, in turn, determines whether your student loans will be forgiven, whether your ISP can be held to net neutrality, and whether the president is a king unbound by the rule of law.
Yet, in a sense, none of this matters very much. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was 6–3. Even if Ginsburg had not been replaced by a Trump appointee, a 5–4 Supreme Court majority could have toppled Roe v. Wade. And the problem is much bigger than just the Supreme Court. The federal courts are not just nine famous people in robes — there are hundreds of appeals court and district court judges. They oversee trials, dismiss cases, unseal documents, and block laws and regulations. They can send people to prison. They can break up tech companies.
At the present rate, the current Supreme Court supermajority is many decades away from coming into alignment with the American people’s actual beliefs and values. Still, there is a ridiculously high potential for chaotic outcomes when it comes to such a small pool of people. A rogue Boeing plane door or superyacht catastrophe could immediately change the balance of power within SCOTUS.
But there is no freak accident that will fix America’s very big systemic judicial problem. During his four years in office, Trump appointed 174 district court judges and 54 appeals court judges. (Former President Barack Obama appointed only 55 appeals court judges in twice the amount of time.)
The Trump judges have blocked mask mandates, student loan forgiveness, climate regulations, and the Federal Trade Commission’s ban on noncompete agreements. The Biden administration made a lot of promises — and while Joe Biden is no FDR, his administration did actually execute on many of those promises, only to be blocked by judges. (Emboldened by this trend, the telecoms have most recently challenged the FTC’s immensely popular “click to cancel” rule in court.) Even before the Supreme Court’s shameless ruling in Trump v. US, the Trump judges have flouted judicial dignity and common sense by meddling in cases against Trump himself.
You think the Supreme Court is fucked? The entire court system is fucked.

The massive influx of Trump judges into the system was not an accident of timing. During Obama’s second term, the nation glimpsed some of this machinery in action when then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to move forward with Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court, ensuring that the seat was later filled by Trump’s appointee, Neil Gorsuch. His reasoning — that Scalia’s vacant seat should be taken by a similarly conservative justice — was not applied when he filled Ginsburg’s vacant seat with the anti-abortion Catholic conservative Amy Coney Barrett.
This was not a one-time trick. It was a strategy executed en masse across the entire federal judiciary. Republicans intentionally dragged their feet on Obama appointments and then began to approve judicial nominees at a breakneck pace when Trump entered office. “When we depart this chamber today, there will not be a single circuit court vacancy for the first time in at least 40 years,” McConnell said smugly in 2020.
The Trump judges are younger. Compared to the rest of the federal judiciary at large, they skew white, they skew male, and they skew unqualified. They comprise about a third of the appeals courts, and they have tenure for life. Their bullshit will plague us for much of our lives.
Insofar as national policy exists, it is whatever squeaks past the notice of the Trump judges
Legal observers understood at the time the enormity and lasting impact of what was happening, but few clocked that the problem was about to become exacerbated by a recursive power grab. Earlier this summer, a SCOTUS majority stacked with Trump judges overturned Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, expanding the power of the federal judiciary more than ever. This, in combination with its ruling in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency the previous year (expanding the “major questions” doctrine), gutted the power of the administrative state. Agency rulings — on carbon emissions, consumer protections, net neutrality — were now subject to second-guessing by any of the hundreds of jackasses in random middle-of-fucking-nowhere district courts, plopped in those seats by Trump between 2017 and 2020. Insofar as national policy exists, it is whatever squeaks past the notice of the Trump judges.
Biden’s most positive legacy may be that his administration aggressively filled the vacancies on the federal bench where it could. Aging liberal judges — including Breyer — who were holding out on retirement during the Trump administration stepped down in the last four years, timing their departures as though scared straight by the ramifications of Ginsburg’s death during the Trump administration. The judges know, too, that the judiciary has become a partisan instrument tuned to the outcomes of the presidential election.
There are, of course, proposals to pack the Supreme Court or to impose judicial term limits. The political feasibility of these options is nonzero. But they are completely dependent on electoral victories for politicians who themselves have not publicly committed to fixing the judge problem.

What this all means for you, as a voter in 2024, depends mostly on your innate temperament. Some see these facts and conclude that voting has a real impact. Regardless of what promises are made, the mere fact that the candidate has aligned themselves with a left- or right-leaning national apparatus will have a direct effect on how America is governed. A vote is not an impotent and meaningless non-choice between two figureheads who promise all kinds of things that may or may not happen; a vote does, in fact, convert to political voltage. For the optimist, this assurance is enough.
And others — like myself — see this as a vast and intractable problem that will never be solved in our lifetimes. The Republican Party has been captured by a pack of religious zealots and head-measuring weirdos that can’t be trusted to appoint a normal-brained judge. And every judicial appointee by a Democratic president from here on out is just bailing water out of the sinking ship. The judges have deemed themselves the arbiters of agency regulation, they have made themselves the referees in disputed elections, and they continue to blow up what voting rights were established by the Constitution.
Is American democracy cooked? Even for the chronic pessimist, there’s value in voting. Political action is not limited to the presidential election, and neither is voting mutually exclusive of anything else. Every four years, you are offered the opportunity to weigh in on a court system that has been vandalized intentionally, maliciously, and gleefully. A vote can be a hopeful affirmation, an act of desperation, an expression of pure spite. A ballot is one way to say, I dissent.

Image: Mr.Nelson design for The Verge / Getty Images

Conservative courts are strangling the functions of government. Another round of Trump judges will finish us.

Women have died from abortion bans; the full death toll will not become clear for many years to come.

This was a direct and foreseeable consequence of the election of former President Donald Trump in 2016, who oversaw the installation of three right-wing Supreme Court justices during his four years in office. The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the age of 87 should not have come as a shock, but denial can be a hell of a drug. A persistent 5–4 conservative majority tipped over into a 6–3 supermajority.

This is the simplest, clearest case for why you should vote. A president can set a national agenda by speaking directly to the country, and as the de facto leader of their political party, they have traditionally had a heavy influence on national policy and lawmaking. But these are largely powers that exist because of tradition, creative politicking, and the public imagination. The power to nominate federal judges, on the other hand, is a power that is explicitly enumerated in the US Constitution.

And the clock is ticking. Justice Antonin Scalia died at the age of 79. Former Chief Justice William Rehnquist died at 80. Justice Stephen Breyer retired at 84 and Justice Anthony Kennedy at 82. Sitting Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who is presently 76 years old, is old as shit. (The covid-19 epidemic, among other factors, has dropped average life expectancy in the United States to 76.4 years.) A vote for president becomes a vote for the composition of the Supreme Court. The composition of the Supreme Court, in turn, determines whether your student loans will be forgiven, whether your ISP can be held to net neutrality, and whether the president is a king unbound by the rule of law.

Yet, in a sense, none of this matters very much. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was 6–3. Even if Ginsburg had not been replaced by a Trump appointee, a 5–4 Supreme Court majority could have toppled Roe v. Wade. And the problem is much bigger than just the Supreme Court. The federal courts are not just nine famous people in robes — there are hundreds of appeals court and district court judges. They oversee trials, dismiss cases, unseal documents, and block laws and regulations. They can send people to prison. They can break up tech companies.

At the present rate, the current Supreme Court supermajority is many decades away from coming into alignment with the American people’s actual beliefs and values. Still, there is a ridiculously high potential for chaotic outcomes when it comes to such a small pool of people. A rogue Boeing plane door or superyacht catastrophe could immediately change the balance of power within SCOTUS.

But there is no freak accident that will fix America’s very big systemic judicial problem. During his four years in office, Trump appointed 174 district court judges and 54 appeals court judges. (Former President Barack Obama appointed only 55 appeals court judges in twice the amount of time.)

The Trump judges have blocked mask mandates, student loan forgiveness, climate regulations, and the Federal Trade Commission’s ban on noncompete agreements. The Biden administration made a lot of promises — and while Joe Biden is no FDR, his administration did actually execute on many of those promises, only to be blocked by judges. (Emboldened by this trend, the telecoms have most recently challenged the FTC’s immensely popular “click to cancel” rule in court.) Even before the Supreme Court’s shameless ruling in Trump v. US, the Trump judges have flouted judicial dignity and common sense by meddling in cases against Trump himself.

You think the Supreme Court is fucked? The entire court system is fucked.

The massive influx of Trump judges into the system was not an accident of timing. During Obama’s second term, the nation glimpsed some of this machinery in action when then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to move forward with Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court, ensuring that the seat was later filled by Trump’s appointee, Neil Gorsuch. His reasoning — that Scalia’s vacant seat should be taken by a similarly conservative justice — was not applied when he filled Ginsburg’s vacant seat with the anti-abortion Catholic conservative Amy Coney Barrett.

This was not a one-time trick. It was a strategy executed en masse across the entire federal judiciary. Republicans intentionally dragged their feet on Obama appointments and then began to approve judicial nominees at a breakneck pace when Trump entered office. “When we depart this chamber today, there will not be a single circuit court vacancy for the first time in at least 40 years,” McConnell said smugly in 2020.

The Trump judges are younger. Compared to the rest of the federal judiciary at large, they skew white, they skew male, and they skew unqualified. They comprise about a third of the appeals courts, and they have tenure for life. Their bullshit will plague us for much of our lives.

Legal observers understood at the time the enormity and lasting impact of what was happening, but few clocked that the problem was about to become exacerbated by a recursive power grab. Earlier this summer, a SCOTUS majority stacked with Trump judges overturned Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, expanding the power of the federal judiciary more than ever. This, in combination with its ruling in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency the previous year (expanding the “major questions” doctrine), gutted the power of the administrative state. Agency rulings — on carbon emissions, consumer protections, net neutrality — were now subject to second-guessing by any of the hundreds of jackasses in random middle-of-fucking-nowhere district courts, plopped in those seats by Trump between 2017 and 2020. Insofar as national policy exists, it is whatever squeaks past the notice of the Trump judges.

Biden’s most positive legacy may be that his administration aggressively filled the vacancies on the federal bench where it could. Aging liberal judges — including Breyer — who were holding out on retirement during the Trump administration stepped down in the last four years, timing their departures as though scared straight by the ramifications of Ginsburg’s death during the Trump administration. The judges know, too, that the judiciary has become a partisan instrument tuned to the outcomes of the presidential election.

There are, of course, proposals to pack the Supreme Court or to impose judicial term limits. The political feasibility of these options is nonzero. But they are completely dependent on electoral victories for politicians who themselves have not publicly committed to fixing the judge problem.

What this all means for you, as a voter in 2024, depends mostly on your innate temperament. Some see these facts and conclude that voting has a real impact. Regardless of what promises are made, the mere fact that the candidate has aligned themselves with a left- or right-leaning national apparatus will have a direct effect on how America is governed. A vote is not an impotent and meaningless non-choice between two figureheads who promise all kinds of things that may or may not happen; a vote does, in fact, convert to political voltage. For the optimist, this assurance is enough.

And others — like myself — see this as a vast and intractable problem that will never be solved in our lifetimes. The Republican Party has been captured by a pack of religious zealots and head-measuring weirdos that can’t be trusted to appoint a normal-brained judge. And every judicial appointee by a Democratic president from here on out is just bailing water out of the sinking ship. The judges have deemed themselves the arbiters of agency regulation, they have made themselves the referees in disputed elections, and they continue to blow up what voting rights were established by the Constitution.

Is American democracy cooked? Even for the chronic pessimist, there’s value in voting. Political action is not limited to the presidential election, and neither is voting mutually exclusive of anything else. Every four years, you are offered the opportunity to weigh in on a court system that has been vandalized intentionally, maliciously, and gleefully. A vote can be a hopeful affirmation, an act of desperation, an expression of pure spite. A ballot is one way to say, I dissent.

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Illustration: The Verge

Amazon has spoiled Apple’s week of Mac announcements by sharing details of the new Mac Mini a bit early. The listing has been pulled but MacRumors managed to grab a few screenshots first.
The one tiny image of the new silver Mac Mini shows what appear to be a headphone jack and two front-facing USB-C ports, presumably with at least Thunderbolt 4 support. It’s available with a base or Pro version of the new M4 chipset, with up to 14 CPU cores, 20 GPU cores, 64GB of memory, and 8TB of storage. The backside ports will remain a mystery for now.
The M4 will be a significant jump from the M2 found in current Mac Minis, last refreshed in January 2023. That boost in power should help with current and future Apple Intelligence processing, jumping from 15.8 TOPS to 38 TOPS according to previous reporting by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

Image: MacRumors
Amazon’s pulled Mac Mini comparison chart.

Gurman also notes that the new smaller Mini approaches the size of an Apple TV streamer. And judging by the side-by-side with the Mac Studio, it certainly looks small which should make it a very compelling Mac in terms of size and power.
The Mac Mini is rumored to be getting an official announcement later today with full details and pricing so stay tuned.

Illustration: The Verge

Amazon has spoiled Apple’s week of Mac announcements by sharing details of the new Mac Mini a bit early. The listing has been pulled but MacRumors managed to grab a few screenshots first.

The one tiny image of the new silver Mac Mini shows what appear to be a headphone jack and two front-facing USB-C ports, presumably with at least Thunderbolt 4 support. It’s available with a base or Pro version of the new M4 chipset, with up to 14 CPU cores, 20 GPU cores, 64GB of memory, and 8TB of storage. The backside ports will remain a mystery for now.

The M4 will be a significant jump from the M2 found in current Mac Minis, last refreshed in January 2023. That boost in power should help with current and future Apple Intelligence processing, jumping from 15.8 TOPS to 38 TOPS according to previous reporting by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

Image: MacRumors
Amazon’s pulled Mac Mini comparison chart.

Gurman also notes that the new smaller Mini approaches the size of an Apple TV streamer. And judging by the side-by-side with the Mac Studio, it certainly looks small which should make it a very compelling Mac in terms of size and power.

The Mac Mini is rumored to be getting an official announcement later today with full details and pricing so stay tuned.

Read More 

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Google is expanding “Help me write” to Gmail on the web, allowing users to whip up or tweak emails using Gemini AI. Just like on mobile, users will see a prompt to use the feature when opening a blank draft in Gmail.
Google’s “Help me write” feature is only available to users who subscribe to Google One AI Premium or have the Gemini add-on for Workspace. In addition to generating an email draft, “Help me write” can also provide suggestions on how to formalize, elaborate, or shorten a message.

GIF: Google

Google is also adding a shortcut for the “polish” option available within its “Help me write” toolset, which will appear on drafts with over 12 words. For Gmail on the web, users can click the shortcut or type Ctrl + H to quickly refine an email.
On mobile, the option will replace the existing “Refine my draft” shortcut. Instead of swiping to see options to polish, formalize, elaborate, or shorten an email, the app will automatically refine the message when the “polish” shortcut is swiped. Users can then tweak the message further with Google’s other AI editing tools.
Google will gradually roll out “Help me write” on the web, along with its new “polish” shortcut starting today.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Google is expanding “Help me write” to Gmail on the web, allowing users to whip up or tweak emails using Gemini AI. Just like on mobile, users will see a prompt to use the feature when opening a blank draft in Gmail.

Google’s “Help me write” feature is only available to users who subscribe to Google One AI Premium or have the Gemini add-on for Workspace. In addition to generating an email draft, “Help me write” can also provide suggestions on how to formalize, elaborate, or shorten a message.

GIF: Google

Google is also adding a shortcut for the “polish” option available within its “Help me write” toolset, which will appear on drafts with over 12 words. For Gmail on the web, users can click the shortcut or type Ctrl + H to quickly refine an email.

On mobile, the option will replace the existing “Refine my draft” shortcut. Instead of swiping to see options to polish, formalize, elaborate, or shorten an email, the app will automatically refine the message when the “polish” shortcut is swiped. Users can then tweak the message further with Google’s other AI editing tools.

Google will gradually roll out “Help me write” on the web, along with its new “polish” shortcut starting today.

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“We’re not competitor obsessed, we’re customer obsessed. We start with what the customer needs and we work backwards,” Jeff Bezos, previously. | Laura Normand / The Verge

The fallout from the non-endorsement of Kamala Harris at The Washington Post is here: more than 200,000 canceled subscriptions, NPR reports. This is about 8 percent of the paid subscriber base, and the number of cancellations is still growing.
To put that in perspective, in an Oct. 15th story about Post CEO Will Lewis’s strategy to get more paying subscribers, The New York Times reported that the Post had added 4,000 subscribers since the beginning of 2024 through September. Like, I am actually flabbergasted: that’s fifty times as many cancellations in one weekend as The Post earned in the better part of a year.
“This is obviously an effort by Jeff Bezos to curry favor with Donald Trump in the anticipation of his possible victory.”
Now, there have been multiple reports at this point — from NPR, The Columbia Journalism Review, and The Washington Post itself — that the call to stop endorsing candidates came from Jeff Bezos himself. The same day as Lewis’s bizarre announcement of The Post’s non-endorsement, executives from Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin, met with presidential candidate Donald Trump.
I suppose I should mention the various government contracts Bezos’s other businesses have — among them, Amazon’s $10 billion NSA contract and Blue Origin’s $3.4 billion NASA contract. Trump has previously targeted Bezos for The Washington Post’s reporting. A columnist who quit the Post over the decision, Robert Kagan, told CNN, “This is obviously an effort by Jeff Bezos to curry favor with Donald Trump in the anticipation of his possible victory.” Kagan pointed to the business contracts as motivation.
Lewis would like us to leave poor Bezos alone. Bezos “was not sent, did not read and did not opine on any draft,” the CEO told CNN in the kind of statement that we in the business know as a non-denial denial. That is — it is a carefully-worded recitation of things Bezos did not do. It doesn’t deny that Bezos made the call for no endorsement. And today, The New York Times’ Ben Mullin reported that Bezos had expressed reservations about a presidential endorsement as early as September.
Bezos made his bones at Amazon by relentlessly focusing on customer satisfaction. Over and over, he told people to focus on making customers happy. Here’s a fun quote from his 2016 letter to shareholders:
There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of day one vitality.
That’s probably good advice for running a business, and it appears to be advice nether Lewis nor Bezos himself took. By spiking a presidential endorsement, Bezos has created the appearance of a conflict of interest — and in journalism, that is as bad as an actual conflict of interest because now you’ve lost the trust of your audience.
(Lewis, though is no stranger to journalism, since he does have experience as an editor. However, some of that experience is being investigated in the Sunday Times phone hacking scandal, so maybe he’s not the best person to consult on these matters.)
The blowback is bigger than The Post
Still, if there is one thing Bezos is known for, it’s his cutthroat approach to capitalism. And here, he has failed at that too. The customers have been speaking very clearly: NPR reports that three of the top 10 stories on the Post’s site Sunday were from staffers pissed off about the killed endorsement. The most-read was by the paper’s beloved humorist Alexandra Petri: “It has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to endorse Harris for president.” When I checked The Post’s site again today, the top two stories were about the controversy.
The blowback is bigger than The Post. One thing our tech overlords have been very unhappy about lately has been the government’s renewed approach to antitrust under Joe Biden. What the Post scandal highlights — besides Will Lewis’s incompetence — is exactly how many businesses Bezos owns, and how conflicts of interest could arise. He has skillfully drawn attention from normal citizens to overreaches of power in business. There is, of course, a solution: breaking up businesses that have gotten too big.
Well, I guess that’s a lesson for us all. This what happens when you focus on yourself and not on the customers. Not only do they leave you in droves, they may actually revile you enough to be politically dangerous.

“We’re not competitor obsessed, we’re customer obsessed. We start with what the customer needs and we work backwards,” Jeff Bezos, previously. | Laura Normand / The Verge

The fallout from the non-endorsement of Kamala Harris at The Washington Post is here: more than 200,000 canceled subscriptions, NPR reports. This is about 8 percent of the paid subscriber base, and the number of cancellations is still growing.

To put that in perspective, in an Oct. 15th story about Post CEO Will Lewis’s strategy to get more paying subscribers, The New York Times reported that the Post had added 4,000 subscribers since the beginning of 2024 through September. Like, I am actually flabbergasted: that’s fifty times as many cancellations in one weekend as The Post earned in the better part of a year.

Now, there have been multiple reports at this point — from NPR, The Columbia Journalism Review, and The Washington Post itself — that the call to stop endorsing candidates came from Jeff Bezos himself. The same day as Lewis’s bizarre announcement of The Post’s non-endorsement, executives from Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin, met with presidential candidate Donald Trump.

I suppose I should mention the various government contracts Bezos’s other businesses have — among them, Amazon’s $10 billion NSA contract and Blue Origin’s $3.4 billion NASA contract. Trump has previously targeted Bezos for The Washington Post’s reporting. A columnist who quit the Post over the decision, Robert Kagan, told CNN, “This is obviously an effort by Jeff Bezos to curry favor with Donald Trump in the anticipation of his possible victory.” Kagan pointed to the business contracts as motivation.

Lewis would like us to leave poor Bezos alone. Bezos “was not sent, did not read and did not opine on any draft,” the CEO told CNN in the kind of statement that we in the business know as a non-denial denial. That is — it is a carefully-worded recitation of things Bezos did not do. It doesn’t deny that Bezos made the call for no endorsement. And today, The New York Times’ Ben Mullin reported that Bezos had expressed reservations about a presidential endorsement as early as September.

Bezos made his bones at Amazon by relentlessly focusing on customer satisfaction. Over and over, he told people to focus on making customers happy. Here’s a fun quote from his 2016 letter to shareholders:

There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of day one vitality.

That’s probably good advice for running a business, and it appears to be advice nether Lewis nor Bezos himself took. By spiking a presidential endorsement, Bezos has created the appearance of a conflict of interest — and in journalism, that is as bad as an actual conflict of interest because now you’ve lost the trust of your audience.

(Lewis, though is no stranger to journalism, since he does have experience as an editor. However, some of that experience is being investigated in the Sunday Times phone hacking scandal, so maybe he’s not the best person to consult on these matters.)

Still, if there is one thing Bezos is known for, it’s his cutthroat approach to capitalism. And here, he has failed at that too. The customers have been speaking very clearly: NPR reports that three of the top 10 stories on the Post’s site Sunday were from staffers pissed off about the killed endorsement. The most-read was by the paper’s beloved humorist Alexandra Petri: “It has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to endorse Harris for president.” When I checked The Post’s site again today, the top two stories were about the controversy.

The blowback is bigger than The Post. One thing our tech overlords have been very unhappy about lately has been the government’s renewed approach to antitrust under Joe Biden. What the Post scandal highlights — besides Will Lewis’s incompetence — is exactly how many businesses Bezos owns, and how conflicts of interest could arise. He has skillfully drawn attention from normal citizens to overreaches of power in business. There is, of course, a solution: breaking up businesses that have gotten too big.

Well, I guess that’s a lesson for us all. This what happens when you focus on yourself and not on the customers. Not only do they leave you in droves, they may actually revile you enough to be politically dangerous.

Read More