Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

Neoconomics

FLIGHT IS A PRIVILEGE, NOT A RIGHT:

Air Traffic Control Privatization Is Long Overdue (Chris Edwards, 12/03/25, NH JHournal)

Canada’s ATC is an excellent model of reform. The country privatized its system in 1996, establishing it as a self-funded nonprofit corporation. “Nav Canada” has become a leader in ATC innovation and has won international awards for its top-class performance. That success has drawn the attention of Congress, and in 2016, the House Transportation Committee passed an FAA restructuring bill based on the Canadian nonprofit model.

Congress should revive this reform plan, which the first Trump administration supported. The advantage would be not just avoiding political disruptions but also fixing years of labor and technology mismanagement by the FAA and Congress.

As one example, shortages of air traffic controllers have been causing flight delays for years. The FAA has not had the hiring flexibility to solve the problem that a private ATC system would. Also, the FAA is micromanaged by Congress, which nixed the creation of an additional training academy for controllers.

As for technology, the FAA has struggled with its “NextGen” modernization effort, according to a recent report by the agency’s inspector general. After two decades, the multi-billion dollar upgrade has achieved only 16 percent of its intended benefits, and “many key programs and capabilities are over budget and delayed until 2030 or beyond.”

Robotics/AI

IT’LL NEVER FLY, ORVILLE:

As the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season ends, the future of forecasting is AI (Greg Allen, 11/29/25, NPR: Weekend Edition)

A week before the hurricane made landfall, however, forecast models disagreed on where it would go. One model that got it right — accurately predicting Melissa’s path and its category 5 intensity — was a new one: Google’s DeepMind AI-based hurricane model.

James Franklin, a former branch chief at the National Hurricane Center, analyzed how the forecast models performed this year, and says Google’s DeepMind outshone them all. “The model performed very, very well, which was very impressive,” he says. “It was the best guidance we saw this year.”

Health

THE FUTURE ALWAYS HAPPENS FASTER THAN YOU EXPECT:

How to Print a Human: We desperately need new organs, and we’re running out of ways to get them (Mary Roach November 28, 2025, Nautilus)

I ask Feinberg when he thinks medical science will arrive at the point of implanting entire functional bioprinted organs in patients. If we use the analogy of airplane flight, he puts things somewhere around the Wright brothers stage. “Of course, we don’t want a plane that goes 30 feet down the field. We want a plane that can fly around all day.”

And how far off is that? A decade plus, Feinberg says.

For medical science, that’s actually a brisk turnaround. (In an earlier phone conversation, Feinberg equated “a decade or two” with “pretty quickly.”) He adds that he thought it could easily happen far sooner. “Because we keep coming up with new things.” Just 20 years ago, he points out, there was no gene editing, no CRISPR. “Plus AI is going to accelerate, and that’s going to change what’s possible.”

I pose the same question now to Jaci Bliley, a senior post-doctoral fellow in the lab. Bliley has just joined us in the microscope room. Two to three decades is her estimate. Like Feinberg, she says she’s surprised at how fast things are moving. She offers the example of some stand-alone beating heart ventricles, little tubular constructs that she printed as part of her Ph.D. research. “That was 2019,” she says. “Now we’re putting them into mice and they’re surviving. After six months they’re still alive and beating.”

Russia

THANKS, VLAD!:

Why Russia has come to the table (Peter Caddick-Adams, 11/28/25, Englesberg Ideas)

Russia’s economy is imploding. Largely due to sanctions caused by the Ukraine War, this year the Economics Ministry posted a record mid-year budget deficit of 3.7 trillion roubles ($45.8 billion) and the Central Bank expects the full-year deficit to reach $55 billion, or 2 per cent of GDP. This is almost certainly the reason peace proposals with Ukraine have surfaced again. […]

Traditionally, the Kremlin has leant heavily on oil and gas exports to generate cash; in 2024, earnings from these exports contributed around 30 per cent of total federal budget revenue. However, from an average price listing of $71.10 per barrel of Urals crude in November 2022, due to sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil, reliance on its aging and inefficient ‘shadow tanker’ shipping fleet, and a G7-imposed price cap, after three years, traders report the price of Russian oil has slid to $36.61 per barrel, with other OPEC producers replacing the Urals output. As key export buyers, notably China and India, were threatening to search elsewhere for suppliers, by November 2025 Russian sellers had been obliged to discount their black stuff to an average of $23.52 a barrel.

Thus, the Kremlin has turned to selling assets it cannot replace.

Ukraine needs to increase its demands, starting with regime change.

Deflation

…AND CHEAPER…:

Your Fridge Is Bigger and Cheaper Today, Thanks to Global Trade and Innovation (Jeremy Horpedahl, 11/26/25, Cato)

In 1984, the average hourly earnings for production and nonsupervisory workers (representing about 80 percent of the private workforce) stood at roughly $8.32. Acquiring the Kenmore would thus require approximately 163 hours of labor, equivalent to more than three full workweeks.

By contrast, a comparable 2024 model from a major retailer like Home Depot—matching size and features—retailed for $998 in nominal terms in 2024, when I last checked it, a direct reduction without inflation adjustment. With average hourly earnings in 2024 at about $29.85 for the same worker category, the labor investment drops to around 33 hours. In relative terms, refrigerators have become nearly five times more affordable, reflecting efficiencies from global supply chains, automation, and competition.

Interestingly, that fridge has increased in price sharply since 2024, almost certainly in part because of trade policy, and is currently listed at $1,658—even so, it is still much cheaper when measured in time prices, requiring just 53 hours of labor, compared with 163 hours in 1984 (and you can probably find a Black Friday deal on it too).

Latin America

DEFLATION WORKS:

How Milei made austerity popular (Julieta Casas, 11/20/25, Englesberg Ideas)

How has Milei managed to maintain popular support? A comparison with the country’s past austerity administrations suggests two possible reasons. First, while the president’s ‘chainsaw’ economic policies have cut into the real incomes of broad segments of the population and led to a stagnation of economic growth, they did so early on in his administration. After a harsh initial shock, the mid-term elections coincided with a rebound of the economy, potentially aiding the president’s electoral support. What’s more, a drastic reduction of inflation has worked to his advantage.

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