Politics, you will notice, has gotten extremely weird.To some degree, of course, this is Donald Trump’s fault. No other president has seen the first part of their term defined by a fight over whether the federal government can send people living in the US to a prison in El Salvador with no due process. No other modern president has decided to ignore decades of settled economic and political wisdom and institute the biggest tariffs since the Hoover administration. No other president has waged war against the entire foundation of American science. Some weirdness is also the fault of Covid. The pandemic introduced a slew of policies that proved divisive, from mask mandates to vaccine mandates to funding for “gain of function” research to school closures. None of these were polarizing topics in 2019 because they either had never happened before or were too obscure for most people to care. And though we’re a few years past the worst days of the pandemic, the appointment of anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health and human services secretary shows just how central many of these topics remain.It’s this context that has made Congress’s debate over a multitrillion-dollar reconciliation bill so fascinating. The bill’s contents are still evolving, but the broad outlines are simple: trillions in tax cuts, tilted to the wealthy; hundreds of billions in spending cuts, particularly to programs for the poor like Medicaid and food stamps; over a hundred billion dollars in increased spending for defense.I know of no better summary of its effects than the above chart from the Urban Institute, which shows that it would make poor Americans earning less than $10,000 dramatically worse off (reducing their income by 14.9 percent) while affluent households earning over $200,000 would thrive.So, all in all, a terrible bill. But whatever else that proposal is, it’s startlingly normal for Republican politics. It represents ideas that have defined the Republican party and its economic and budgetary priorities since 1980, and which the party has strongly held to even in the face of Trump’s total takeover. The Republican party stands for lower taxes, especially on the rich; lower spending on programs for the poor; and big spending on defense. That’s what Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan, and other figures who defined the party have all stood for, for nearly half a century now.The extreme weirdness of national politics has led to a temptation to see a new Republican party just over the horizon, defined by rejecting its tax-cutting and program-slashing tradition. This is stoked by strategic leaks that Trump might be open to a higher tax rate on the richest Americans; by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) condemning Medicaid cuts; by party figures like Vice President JD Vance suggesting a break from the party’s hawkish foreign policy.But the composition of the reconciliation bill suggests that when it comes to bread-and-butter economic issues, this is mostly a mirage. The essential Republican message may become blurred around the edges, the way that George W. Bush messed with it by expanding Medicare or his father did by accepting a small tax hike. But the deviations are swamped by the continuity. It’s not, in the ludicrous phrasing of Steve Bannon, a “workers’ party.”Congressional Republicans, led by Speaker Mike Johnson, have brought back normal politics, and for them that means one thing: redistributing income upward.The rise and persistence of Normal RepublicanismThis essential pattern of Republicans standing for across-the-board tax cuts and cuts to safety net programs has not always been the norm. Nothing in politics is truly permanent. As late as Richard Nixon, Republican presidents would propose ideas like a guaranteed minimum income and universal health coverage while actually raising taxes on the rich.The ground shifted in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when a small group of policy entrepreneurs in Washington centered around Congress member Jack Kemp (R-NY) began promoting across-the-board cuts to individual income tax rates as a solution to stagflation (the combination of slow growth and high inflation then characterizing the economy). In her history of this moment, Starving the Beast, sociologist Monica Prasad notes that major business lobbies at the time opposed this move. Their priority was corporate rate cuts and a balanced budget, and they saw individual cuts as a threat to both.Kemp and his allies, including soon-to-be-President Reagan, overcame corporate skepticism for one simple reason: The cuts were popular, and the public mood was becoming strongly anti-tax. At this point in time, the thresholds for tax rates were not indexed for inflation, which meant that more and more middle-class people were being pushed into higher and higher tax brackets every year without actually becoming richer as inflation worsened. These pressures had forced even Democrat Jimmy Carter to sign tax cuts in 1978, and they only built as inflation rose still further.Timeline of major Republican tax billsTax Reform Act of 1969 — signed by Richard Nixon, cracked down on foundations, extended a temporary across-the-board income tax hike to fund the war in Vietnam, and created the Alternative Minimum Tax, meant to target high-earners claiming many deductions and credits. On net, substantially raised taxes on the rich while cutting them for the poor.Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 — signed by Ronald Reagan, across-the-board cut in tax rates for individuals, with top rate falling from 70 percent to 50 percent. Tax thresholds now indexed for inflation. Businesses allowed to deduct expenses at an accelerated pace.Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 — also signed by Reagan, undid most of the 1981 cuts to corporate taxes, but crucially kept the cuts on individuals in place.Tax Reform Act of 1986 — bipartisan legislation signed by Reagan that eliminated many deductions and credits and simplified the individual income tax to only two brackets (15 percent and 28 percent).Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 — signed by George H.W. Bush, added a 31 percent bracket on the rich to raise revenue on top of the 1986 law. Bill Clinton would add 36 percent and 39.6 percent rates in 1993.Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 — signed by Bill Clinton but championed by Republicans in Congress, created a $500 child tax credit and cut the capital gains rate from 28 percent to 20 percent.Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 — signed by George W. Bush, slashed individual rates across the board, with the top rate falling from 39.6 percent to 35 percent, and gradually eliminated the estate tax. Initially set to expire in 2010. Extended temporarily by Barack Obama in 2010 as part of an economic stimulus deal, and then in 2012 permanently, but only for couples earning under $450,000.Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 — signed by George W. Bush, cut taxes on dividend and interest income, and limited the Alternative Minimum Tax’s effects. Set to expire in 2010, like the 2001 cuts; largely expired under the 2012 Obama deal.Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 — signed by Donald Trump, cut individual rates with the top rate falling from 39.6 percent to 37 percent; doubled the standard deduction and consolidated personal and dependent exemptions into a larger child tax credit; dramatically cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. While some cuts, like the corporate rate cut, were permanent, most of the bill is set to expire at the end of 2025.At the same time, Reagan and his team in the early 1980s were convinced that the US needed a major military buildout to counteract what they claimed had been a Soviet buildout in the 1970s. That led to a big increase in defense spending, from 6.6 percent of GDP in 1981 to 7.6 percent in 1985; at today’s size of the US economy, an equivalent increase would be about $290 billion more per year.To pay for at least some of this, Reagan’s first reconciliation bill included sweeping cuts to safety net programs, notably including Medicaid, food stamps, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). This, too, fit well with Reagan’s image. He had campaigned hard against establishing Medicare in the 1960s, and denunciations of “welfare queens” had been a prominent theme in his ultimately failed 1976 campaign for the presidency. This wasn’t the most popular part of the Reagan brand (he denounced “welfare queens” while trying to win the Republican primary, not the general), but it reflected both his genuine beliefs and the twin pressures of the tax cuts and defense buildout on the budget.This combination of policies was a profound break from the Nixon/Gerald Ford years, when tax cuts were not seriously considered, the priority with the Soviets was detente and arms control, and safety net programs were largely protected. And, sure enough, some Republicans continued to push back against the new regime. Sen. Bob Dole (R-KS) successfully fought to limit food stamps cuts; Congressional Republicans worked with Democrats to expand Medicaid throughout the 1980s over Reagan’s objections; most infamously, George H.W. Bush signed a bill adding a new 31 percent tax bracket for rich Americans in 1990, violating his pledge not to raise taxes.But for the most part, the pattern established by Reagan has persisted ever since, and deviations — like Bush’s tax hike, which contributed to his loss in 1992 — are remembered more as cautionary tales than examples to emulate.Look at the Contract With America, the Republicans’ platform during their successful 1994 bid to retake the House for the first time in over 40 years. It included tax cuts (like introducing a child tax credit and lower capital gains rates) and cuts to welfare and other safety net programs. While Bill Clinton was able to tamp down these demands somewhat, all became law in one form or another.A few years later, George W. Bush began his first term with sweeping across-the-board tax cuts, and his second with a failed effort to slash Social Security spending in favor of individual accounts. In the Obama years, Congressional Republicans, led by Paul Ryan, coalesced around plans for yet more across-the-board tax cuts and sweeping cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and other safety net programs. Under Trump, Ryan was able to pass the former, though his attempts at the latter through Obamacare repeal failed.Occasionally, a Republican politician will gesture at trying to break with this orthodoxy, and is invariably greeted with intrigued attention from the press. With George W. Bush in 2000, it was called “compassionate conservatism.” With Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty in 2005, it was “Sam’s Club Republicanism.” With then-Sen. Marco Rubio and his allies in the press circa 2014, it was “reform conservatism.” These days the preferred term for Sen. Josh Hawley and Vice President JD Vance seems to be “national conservative,” which, like the Sam’s Club and Reformocons before, purports to reject the tax-cutting orthodoxy of past Republicans in favor of a more communitarian vision — very little of which, of course, appears to have made its way into the budget bill. All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.A very Normal Republican budgetBut through each of these much-hyped fads, Normal Republicanism on the budget has survived more or less unchanged. The legacy of compassionate conservatism is a prescription drug benefit in Medicare administered by private insurers; the legacy of reform conservatism is mostly increasing the child tax credit from $1,000 to $2,000 in 2017. These are slight ripples in a pattern that has been remarkably persistent.The 2025 reconciliation package is a perfect illustration of these dynamics. Per a helpful tally by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the centerpiece of the legislation is the extension and expansion of Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The cuts here will cost over $4.1 trillion over a decade. Remarkably, some of the cuts aren’t even made permanent, but temporarily extended again, to artificially make the cost look lower than it is; if they’re extended still further, the total cost of the TCJA extensions would be more like $4.8 trillion.Deficits would surge dramatically due to the reconciliation bill. Committee for a Responsible Federal BudgetThese are tax cuts overwhelmingly tilted at the top. $1.4 trillion goes to repealing the Alternative Minimum Tax, which exists to prevent high-earners from taking excessive deductions; $2.2 trillion goes to cutting rates, including the top rate, which disproportionately helps the rich. The pass-through deduction, which arbitrarily lets some business owners exclude 20 percent of their profit from taxation, is extended and also expanded to 23 percent for no apparent reason, for a mere $820 billion. The Tax Policy Center has estimated that extending the TCJA increases incomes for the top 1 percent by an average of 3.7 percent, which swamps the 0.6 percent increase that the poorest fifth of Americans would get.On top of this, the House Ways and Means committee has thrown a potpourri of assorted other tax cuts: through 2028, for instance, tips, overtime income, and car loan interests would be tax-free, and senior citizens would get bigger standard deductions. The spending spree isn’t limited to taxes, either. There’s $144 billion from the Armed Services Committee, focused on shipbuilding ($32 billion) and “air superiority and missile defense” ($30 billion), and $67 billion for border security, including about $50 billion for Trump’s long-promised wall.The gross cost of all these giveaways hits around $5 trillion, before even considering the possibility that giveaways like the tips and overtime tax cuts are made permanent. But the net cost of the package, and impact on the defiict is “only” about $3.3 trillion, per the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. What makes up the difference? $698 billion comes from cuts to Medicaid; including other cuts to Affordable Care Act subsidies, the bill will deprive about 10 million people of health insurance. $559 billion comes from undoing most of the Inflation Reduction Act’s credits for clean energy and electric vehicles. $350 billion comes from cuts to education, heavily focused on student loan programs and subsidies meant to make them more affordable for borrowers. $267 billion comes from food stamps, slashing the program by about 30 percent overall.There’s a lot to say about this set of priorities. The Medicaid and food stamp cuts target the most vulnerable Americans and, combined with the tax cuts for the wealthy, amount to extreme upward redistribution. The Inflation Reduction Act cuts will likely substantially increase energy prices for most Americans, while substantially increasing emissions. I know of no serious economist who thinks that many of the most expensive provisions in the bill, like deductibility of overtime income or the pass-through business deduction, are effective ways to boost economic growth.But, at a moment where so many assumptions about politics have been overturned, the plan is not surprising. This is not a radically different Republican party newly attuned to the interests of the working class. It’s not a party whose tax-cutting passions have been tempered now that their president is imposing new taxes left and right on foreign imports in the form of tariffs (and which will be borne disproportionately by lower-income Americans). It’s not a party reflecting the fact that Medicaid recipients narrowly voted for Trump over Kamala Harris in 2024.It’s just the normal Reagan-Gingrich-Bush-Ryan Republican party, same as it’s ever been.Why, then, are people so eager to hear that the Republican party has changed? Part of it might be the simple fact that voters have had trouble accepting that a political party could actually be like this. When Priorities USA, a Democratic super-PAC in the 2012 election, told a focus group that Mitt Romney wanted to slash Medicare while cutting taxes on the rich, “the respondents simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing,” per reporter Robert Draper. It does sound vaguely ridiculous: It defies common sense that cutting taxes on the wealthy and funding it with spending cuts on programs for poor and working people would ever be a compelling political message, perhaps outside the extreme inflationary environment of the 1970s that birthed Reagan’s presidency.But ridiculous or not, that’s the world we have. The Republican Party’s budgetary views simply have not changed. They want to blow up the deficit with massive tax cuts tilted toward the rich and pay for a fraction of the cost by slashing programs for the poor. It’s really that simple. It may not be exciting or brand new. But it’s normal Republican policymaking, and it’s back with a vengeance.See More:

We're glad to see everyone enjoying Apocalypse Rising! It's been three weeks since release and this marks our first major balance pass! We are also releasing the modding SDK so users can look into our tools for custom projects! Posted by FRAYDO on May 16th, 2025 We are glad to see everyone playing and enjoying Apocalypse Rising so far! It has been three week since release and this update marks our first major balance pass. The initial feedback has reported that the "Allies are overpowered", and we aim to address that notion with this major patch. This post will include patches 0.9.0.1 through 0.9.0.5 in descending order to describe everything that has been adjusted since our release. At the bottom of this post, after all of the patch notes, we are also including information on the release of our Modding SDK! Patches 0.9.0.3 - 0.9.0.5 There are three patches here because we ran internal testing before settling on the final build (0.9.0.5) Based on game experience and player feedback, it was identified that the Allies were winning the majority of the games. This patch brings the Soviets up to compensate whilst also nerfing some key Allied units. Soviet will now have more of a chance in the face of the Allied teamwork machine. Bug Fixes Fixed several crashes reported by players via crash dumps (thank you!) Fixed Nvidia App "game filters" crashing the game Keyboard keys no longer get stuck when the window loses focus (e.g. Alt+Tab would leave Alt stuck) Less hitching when units spawn Fixed an issue relating to Chrono Miner Objective Markers Performance has been improved by optimizing some game objects General Changes Team remixing/rebalancing logic was re-implemented to improve team variety for players from match to match Players can no longer refill when in combat. Players can now set max FPS to any value instead of an arbitrary selection Bots can path their way out of buildings now (mostly) Mesh optimizations have been applied to the War Factories and Refineries. The legacy "Battlefield Key Success Tips" document has been removed from the game. Several PT icons have been updated Reinforcement Bays are no longer targetable by enemies. Kill messages: Grand Cannon kill strings no longer fill the feed on FreezingStraits. Added crushed kill string. Revolver kill string has been added to the nagant. Shotgun kill string has been added to the shotguns. Map Changes Fort Bradley: Fixed a bunch of buildings, improving performance and removing ngons Adjusted some of the building roofs to prevent degenerate gameplay FreezingStraits: Added visible boundary stripes. The hills behind the bases are now considered out of bounds. Removed a chunk of terrain sticking into the Radar Tower basement. LittleBigLake: Fixed a floating rock on the cliff behind the Allied base. SnowBound: The cliff to the northwest of the Allied base is now considered out-of-bounds. Fixed a couple texture seams at the main road north of the Allied base. Updated the screenshot on loading screen. Updated the overhead map. Dune Patrol: Adjusted out of bounds area to prevent degenerate gameplay General Balance Changes The targeting ranges of several weapons were increased by 3m in order to for units to be able to target enemies a little way before they are actually in range. Lock-on untrack time increased: 1.25s -> 1.75s Prevented some map objects from being locked onto (i.e. Bridge repair Huts) Deployed Infantry Damage Resistance Reduced: 50%->40% Damage from Explosions now affects Mines, C4 and Dynamite Infantry that are crushed by vehicles now register on the kill feed Proximity Mines are now placed at the player's feet. This is in order to prevent mines from being placed on walls and in other weird places. All thrown cooldown-based weapons now autoswap back to the unit's Primary after being used. i.e. After using Molotovs, the Conscript will switch back to it's PPSH automatically Dogs can now reload their bite and bark weapons whilst sprinting. Allies Guardian GI Secondary Fire now shoots a missile that does not lock-on Rocketeer Jetpack Cooldown increased 1s->2s Projectile Damage Reduced: 25->20 Projectile Explosion Damage Outer Radius Increased: 3m->3.25m Projectile Explosion Damage Inner Radius Increased: 1.5m->2m Sniper Projectile Range Decreased: 350m -> 220m Corrected Damage Falloff Range (Within the last 50m of range, the damage falls off by around half) Navy SEAL Projectile Warhead changed: Bullet -> Bullet Anti Infantry This change nerfs the MP5N vs armoured targets Primary Projectile Damage: 15->14 Primary Projectile Spray angle Increased: 0.24°->0.75° Secondary Projectile Damage: 15->14 Secondary Projectile Burst Delay time: 0.12s->0.15s Secondary Projectile Spray angle Increased: 0.1°->0.5° C4 Inventory Count Reduced: 2->1 C4 Explosion Damage Increased: 60->90 Tanya Projectile Damage Increased: 20->22 Projectile Rate of Fire Increased: 6->12 Weapon now fires in 2 round bursts Weapon Clip Sized Increased 18->36 Tanya is supposed to be holding two pistols, so this new clip size aims to reflect that C4 Range: 5m->10m IFV Guardian GI Range Decreased: 120->115 Seal Damage Increased 12->14 Rate of Fire Increased 14->16 Range Increased 95m->115m Sniper Changed Warhead form Bullet_AV to Bullet_AI Projectile Damage: 102 -> 100 Projectile Range: 300 -> 275 Corrected Damage Falloff Range (Within the last 50m of range, the damage falls off by around half) Mirage Tank Range Decreased: 115->110 Prism Tank Projectile Range Increased 145m->150m Tank Destroyer Projectile Range Decreased: 135m->120m Cost Increased: 900->1000 Howitzer Adjusted the model so that it looks less like the Tank Destroyer Harrier Projectile Range Decreased: 130m->120m Black Eagle Projectile Velocity Decreased: 120->100 Projectile Range Decreased: 130m->120m Soviets Crazy Ivan Grenade Launcher Explosion Damage Increased: 50->75 Large Dynamite Inventory Count Reduced: 2->1 Large Dynamite Explosion Damage Increased: 60->90 Terrorist Self Explosion Damage Inner Radius Increased: 4m->6m Weapons are now hidden when not being held. Boris Airtsrike Timer Reduced: 15s->12s Terror Drone The physics have been altered for better handling and cliff climbing performance Jump Height Increased: 12->15 Flak Track Has a new model! Weapon Reload Time: 1.5s ->1.25s Primary Projectile Damage Decreased 33->30 Secondary Projectile Velocity Increased: 400->500 V3 Rocket Launcher Projectile Velocity Decreased: 112->90 Projectile Gravity Increased: 7.0->3.75 Projectile Extension Adjusted Explosion Damage Inner Radius Increased: 10m->12m ***TOTAL RANGE IS AROUND 230m*** Tesla Tank: Weapon handling adjusted to reduce the arc of fire overall Demo Truck Cost Reduced: 1500->1400 Explosion Damage Increased: 400->500 Radiation Radius Increased: 24m->30m Apocalypse Tank Cannon Velocity Increased 250m/s->275m/s Missile Range Increased 135m->140m Missile Lock-on Time Decreased: 1.25->2 Missile Turn Rate increased: 350°/s->420°/s Siege Chopper Model updated with Rotor Blur Cameras re-worked Physics altered to make the controls more responsive Projectile Explosion Damage Outer Radius Increased: 1.5m->2.5m Projectile Explosion Damage Inner Radius Increased: 1m->1.85m Kirov Airship The Kirov now takes half as much damage from all non-AA weapons Points Given on Death: 200 -> 175 MG Damage Increased: 10->11 MG Spray Decreased: 1°->0.9° Bomb Impact Damage Increased: 110->125 Explosion Damage Increased: 100->110 Patch 0.9.0.2 This patch introduced more fixes and altered the balance of some of the most egregious units ingame. Bug Fixes Fixed a crash when spotting a disguised Mirage Tank as an Attack Dog, Tentatively fixed an exploit where GIs and GGIs could become invincible after using a parachute General Changes Added Siege Chopper Weapon Strings, Removed a Projectile Blocker from the doors of the Allied Power Plant Elm and Aca trees now have less upper branch projectile collision Fixed Allied Supply Truck and Siege Chopper entry/exit zones Fixed Shotgun Scaling Terror Drones and Robot Tanks now tell the pilot that the vehicle will be killed if they leave it Added a missing texture fron the loading screen AI turrets on the Battle Fortress and War Miner will now search for targets Terror Drone now has an attack sound Desolator Weapons no longer leave black marks everywhere New Soviet Technician PT Icon Re-ordered the infantry purchase list When using Artillery Auto-Aim feature when out of range, the auto aim will now adopt the max weapon elevation Updated the Credits Map Changes Little Big Lake: Fixed a hole in the ground by the Allied base. Adjusted pathfinding for Harvesters. Dune Patrol: Removed out-of-bounds lines in the small infantry tunnel next to the Soviet base. Snowbound: Added more ground clutter New terrain textures Added some rocks Fort Bradley: Fixed a bunch of NGons on the Urban Buildings Balance Changes The Attack Dog's Bark can now pierce through multiple targets Engineer + IFV Repair Reduced: 0.65 -> 0.6 Technician + IFV Repair Reduced: 0.32 -> 0.3 Technician IFv Self Healing Halved Deployed Infantry now take 50% less incoming damage from all sources (was inconsistent beforehand) AA Flak Damage vs Helicopters Increased Sniper IFV Laser now uses the correct range Patch 0.9.0.1 Released shortly after the game launched, this patch contained key fixes to the game. Bug Fixes Fixed a Server Crash that was sometimes occurring when a player added a vehicle to the queue and then left the server Siege Chopper can no longer deploy in mid-air Siege Chopper animation has been fixed Fixed an issue with Fort Bradley where Allies were getting 500 free points at the start of the match Fixed some graphical issues with Fort Bradley General Changes Added Siege Cameras to the V3 Launcher and Howitzer Added Encyclopaedia entries for the weapons and infantry Ricardo Engineer credit to Scorched Earth! Check out his RA2 and Apocalypse Rising videos on his YouTube channel! Youtube.com Over the course of these past few weeks, we have heard several requests from our players to release the tools for the game so they can make mods, dive into unit statistics, and translate the game into various languages. We are proud to announce we've made the modding SDK available here: Gitlab.com Whenever we release we will aim to update the tools to match the latest public version, much like we do with the server (also found here: Gitlab.com). If you're looking for tutorials and documentation, we have a wealth of info in our Tutorials forum but also on Tacitus, which is our documentation resource. Links below the image. Tacitus: Documentation Tutorials: W3D Tutorials Over time we will aim to add more to these tools, like pieces of example content and maps for you guy to dissect. In the meantime though, we can't wait to see what you'll all end up making and if you need any help creating things, please feel free to reach out to us over Discord! Found here: Discord.gg Keep 'Em Coming! That's all for now. Please feel free to leave your feedback and report bugs in our Discord and on our forums. We've got eyes on both platforms, so we'll make sure that every point gets a fair shake. Thanks again for supporting the game and our community! - The W3D Hub Team

The Czech Factory Where Oskar Schindler Saved 1,200 Jews Is Now a Museum in Their Honor Under the stewardship of the Jewish family that owned the factory before World War II, the museum is reclaiming the dilapidated site and its dark history The Museum of Survivors is dedicated to the testimonies of the 1,200 Eastern European Jews who lived through the Holocaust with the help of German industrialist Oskar Schindler. The Arks Foundation The former textile factory where German industrialist Oskar Schindler employed and protected 1,200 Jews during the last years of World War II opened this past weekend as a museum dedicated to the stories and memories of survivors of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. Located in the Czech town of Brnenec, nearly 100 miles southeast of Prague, the Museum of Survivors held its grand opening on May 10, just after the 80th anniversary of World War II’s end in Europe on May 8, 1945. Nearly a century before the factory came under Schindler’s ownership in the 1940s, it was a thriving textile mill owned by the Löw-Beers, a Jewish family from the region. As the Nazis encroached on Czechoslovakia in 1938, the Löw-Beers fled. The Nazis seized the factory, converting it into a munitions plant and later a branch of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. Daniel Löw-Beer, the grandson of the factory’s last Jewish owner, set up the Arks Foundation in 2019 and spearheaded the effort to purchase the building and turn it into a site of memory. Making a Museum Watch on “We had to flee for our lives, lost a bit of our history, so putting a little bit of history back to a place and hopefully bringing out as well the history of Oskar Schindler and the village is what we’re doing today,” Löw-Beer tells the Associated Press’ Karel Janicek. At the opening weekend, Löw-Beer was joined by hundreds of guests, including descendants of Jews whom Schindler is credited with saving. “This is a place for education, to learn about our parents and how they lived,” Hadassa Bau, the daughter of survivor Joseph Bau, tells TVP World’s Alex Webber. While Schindler was born in Svitavy, a town just north of Brnenec, he spent much of the war running an enamel factory in Krakow, Poland, which employed Polish Jews who lived in the Krakow Ghetto and were later imprisoned in the Krakow-Plaszow concentration camp. As the Soviet Red Army collapsed the Nazi’s Eastern Front in 1944, Schindler’s clout as a member of the Nazi Party and an agent of the Abwehr, the German military-intelligence service, allowed him to shift his operations—along with a list of 1,000 Jewish prisoners he employed—to Brnenec. His list of names likely saved those Jews from mass murder at Auschwitz-Birkenau. After the Soviets liberated Brnenec, the Jewish survivors presented Schindler with a golden ring created out of melted-down gold from their teeth. It bore an inscription paraphrased from the Talmud: “Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.” Schindler’s actions earned him Yad Vashem’s Righteous Among the Nations medal and formed the basis of Thomas Keneally’s 1982 historical novel Schindler’s Ark, which in turn inspired Steven Spielberg’s 1993 movie Schindler’s List. Before it was purchased by Daniel Löw-Beer and his Arks Foundation in 2019, the factory had fallen into disrepair after decades of neglect. The Arks Foundation Margaret Keneally, the author’s daughter, was in attendance at the recent ceremony, and on behalf of her father, she delivered three documents for inclusion in the museum’s collections: original transcripts of interviews her father conducted with survivors; documents relating to the trial and execution of Krakow-Plaszow commandant Amon Göth; and portions of the original, hand-typed manuscript of her father’s book. “Part of the story he told will be here, and this place is an important part of continuing to tell that story,” she said, per Radio Prague International’s Danny Bate and Barbora Soukupová. Despite the ceremony, the Museum of Survivors is still a work in progress, and it doesn’t yet have regular visitation hours. Awaiting renovation are key sites like Schindler’s office; the barracks where SS troops lived; and the so-called Schindler’s Ark building, where the Jewish prisoners worked and lived, per the AP. For now, a transparent glass wall separates the ruins from the completed portions of the museum—a thin barrier that invites viewer’s contemplation about the ruins of history and the promises of the future. “It’s a universal place of survivors,” Löw-Beer tells the AP. “We want those stories to be told and people to make their own opinions.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

"Artificial intelligence, if we're being frank, is a con: a bill of goods you are being sold to line someone's pockets."That is the heart of the argument that linguist Emily Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna make in their new book The AI Con. It's a useful guide for anyone whose life has intersected with technologies sold as artificial intelligence and anyone who's questioned their real usefulness, which is most of us. Bender is a professor at the University of Washington who was named one of Time magazine's most influential people in artificial intelligence, and Hanna is the director of research at the nonprofit Distributed AI Research Institute and a former member of the ethical AI team at Google.The explosion of ChatGPT in late 2022 kicked off a new hype cycle in AI. Hype, as the authors define it, is the "aggrandizement" of technology that you are convinced you need to buy or invest in "lest you miss out on entertainment or pleasure, monetary reward, return on investment, or market share." But it's not the first time, nor likely the last, that scholars, government leaders and regular people have been intrigued and worried by the idea of machine learning and AI.Bender and Hanna trace the roots of machine learning back to the 1950s, to when mathematician John McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence. It was in an era when the United States was looking to fund projects that would help the country gain any kind of edge on the Soviets militarily, ideologically and technologically. "It didn't spring whole cloth out of Zeus's head or anything. This has a longer history," Hanna said in an interview with CNET. "It's certainly not the first hype cycle with, quote, unquote, AI."Today's hype cycle is propelled by the billions of dollars of venture capital investment into startups like OpenAI and the tech giants like Meta, Google and Microsoft pouring billions of dollars into AI research and development. The result is clear, with all the newest phones, laptops and software updates drenched in AI-washing. And there are no signs that AI research and development will slow down, thanks in part to a growing motivation to beat China in AI development. Not the first hype cycle indeed.Of course, generative AI in 2025 is much more advanced than the Eliza psychotherapy chatbot that first enraptured scientists in the 1970s. Today's business leaders and workers are inundated with hype, with a heavy dose of FOMO and seemingly complex but often misused jargon. Listening to tech leaders and AI enthusiasts, it might seem like AI will take your job to save your company money. But the authors argue that neither is wholly likely, which is one reason why it's important to recognize and break through the hype.So how do we recognize AI hype? These are a few telltale signs, according to Bender and Hanna, that we share below. The authors outline more questions to ask and strategies for AI hype busting in their book, which is out now in the US.Watch out for language that humanizes AIAnthropomorphizing, or the process of giving an inanimate object human-like characteristics or qualities, is a big part of building AI hype. An example of this kind of language can be found when AI companies say their chatbots can now "see" and "think."These can be useful comparisons when trying to describe the ability of new object-identifying AI programs or deep-reasoning AI models, but they can also be misleading. AI chatbots aren't capable of seeing of thinking because they don't have brains. Even the idea of neural nets, Hanna noted in our interview and in the book, is based on human understanding of neurons from the 1950s, not actually how neurons work, but it can fool us into believing there's a brain behind the machine.That belief is something we're predisposed to because of how we as humans process language. We're conditioned to imagine that there is a mind behind the text we see, even when we know it's generated by AI, Bender said. "We interpret language by developing a model in our minds of who the speaker was," Bender added.In these models, we use our knowledge of the person speaking to create meaning, not just using the meaning of the words they say. "So when we encounter synthetic text extruded from something like ChatGPT, we're going to do the same thing," Bender said. "And it is very hard to remind ourselves that the mind isn't there. It's just a construct that we have produced."The authors argue that part of why AI companies try to convince us their products are human-like is that this sets the foreground for them to convince us that AI can replace humans, whether it's at work or as creators. It's compelling for us to believe that AI could be the silver bullet fix to complicated problems in critical industries like health care and government services.But more often than not, the authors argue, AI isn't bring used to fix anything. AI is sold with the goal of efficiency, but AI services end up replacing qualified workers with black box machines that need copious amounts of babysitting from underpaid contract or gig workers. As Hanna put it in our interview, "AI is not going to take your job, but it will make your job shittier."Be dubious of the phrase 'super intelligence'If a human can't do something, you should be wary of claims that an AI can do it. "Superhuman intelligence, or super intelligence, is a very dangerous turn of phrase, insofar as it thinks that some technology is going to make humans superfluous," Hanna said. In "certain domains, like pattern matching at scale, computers are quite good at that. But if there's an idea that there's going to be a superhuman poem, or a superhuman notion of research or doing science, that is clear hype." Bender added, "And we don't talk about airplanes as superhuman flyers or rulers as superhuman measurers, it seems to be only in this AI space that that comes up."The idea of AI "super intelligence" comes up often when people talk about artificial general intelligence. Many CEOs struggle to define what exactly AGI is, but it's essentially AI's most advanced form, potentially capable of making decisions and handling complex tasks. There's still no evidence we're anywhere near a future enabled by AGI, but it's a popular buzzword.Many of these future-looking statements from AI leaders borrow tropes from science fiction. Both boosters and doomers — how Bender and Hanna describe AI enthusiasts and those worried about the potential for harm — rely on sci-fi scenarios. The boosters imagine an AI-powered futuristic society. The doomers bemoan a future where AI robots take over the world and wipe out humanity.The connecting thread, according to the authors, is an unshakable belief that AI is smarter than humans and inevitable. "One of the things that we see a lot in the discourse is this idea that the future is fixed, and it's just a question of how fast we get there," Bender said. "And then there's this claim that this particular technology is a step on that path, and it's all marketing. It is helpful to be able to see behind it."Part of why AI is so popular is that an autonomous functional AI assistant would mean AI companies are fulfilling their promises of world-changing innovation to their investors. Planning for that future — whether it's a utopia or dystopia — keeps investors looking forward as the companies burn through billions of dollars and admit they'll miss their carbon emission goals. For better or worse, life is not science fiction. Whenever you see someone claiming their AI product is straight out of a movie, it's a good sign to approach with skepticism. Ask what goes in and how outputs are evaluatedOne of the easiest ways to see through AI marketing fluff is to look and see whether the company is disclosing how it operates. Many AI companies won't tell you what content is used to train their models. But they usually disclose what the company does with your data and sometimes brag about how their models stack up against competitors. That's where you should start looking, typically in their privacy policies.One of the top complaints and concerns from creators is how AI models are trained. There are many lawsuits over alleged copyright infringement, and there are a lot of concerns over bias in AI chatbots and their capacity for harm. "If you wanted to create a system that is designed to move things forward rather than reproduce the oppressions of the past, you would have to start by curating your data," Bender said. Instead, AI companies are grabbing "everything that wasn't nailed down on the internet," Hanna said.If you're hearing about an AI product for the first time, one thing in particular to look out for is any kind of statistic that highlights its effectiveness. Like many other researchers, Bender and Hanna have called out that a finding with no citation is a red flag. "Anytime someone is selling you something but not giving you access to how it was evaluated, you are on thin ice," Bender said.It can be frustrating and disappointing when AI companies don't disclose certain information about how their AI products work and how they were developed. But recognizing those holes in their sales pitch can help deflate hype, even though it would be better to have the information. For more, check out our full ChatGPT glossary and how to turn off Apple Intelligence.