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Barcelona launches new civic ordinance with more prohibitions and fines of up to 3,000 euros

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  • Civic Ordinance Update: Barcelona has introduced a new municipal ordinance on coexistence that tightens sanctions and expands the definition of uncivil behavior to reinforce respect for public space.
  • Increased Penalties: The updated regulations, replacing those from 2006, allow for fines up to €3,000 in the most serious instances.
  • Mayor's Justification: Mayor Jaume Collboni stated the update aims to combat new problems and restore civic responsibility, asserting only those disrespecting the city need worry.
  • Sexual Conduct Sanctions: New regulations introduce fines up to €600 for public indecency, public masturbation, or degrading verbal expressions.
  • Alcohol-Related Offenses: Organizing or participating in "ethyl routes" can result in fines up to €3,000, while public alcohol consumption fines can reach €1,500 if minors are present or in restricted nighttime areas.
  • Public Cleanliness Rules: Dog owners face fines up to €300 if they fail to dilute animal urine with water, and littering can incur sanctions up to €750.
  • Severe Public Urination Penalties: Urinating or performing physiological functions in public streets, especially narrow ones, nightlife zones, or near public restrooms, can lead to fines up to €750.
  • Payment Facilitation: The police force is equipped with dataphones for immediate sanction payment, and the city council is working to enable payment via Bizum, aiming to increase deterrence and collection efficiency.

Barcelona's new municipal ordinance on coexistence, known as the Civic Ordinance, introduces more prohibitions, toughens the sanctions regime, and expands the definition of uncivil behavior with the aim of reinforcing respect for public space. The regulations update those in force since 2006 and include fines that can reach €3,000 in the most serious cases.

Mayor Jaume Collboni has defended the update, stating that it aims to address new problems and restore civic responsibility. " Only those scoundrels who disrespect the city and break the rules" should be concerned about its enforcement, he affirmed this Monday at a press conference alongside the head of the Guardia Urbana (municipal police), Pedro Velázquez; the third deputy mayor for Security, Albert Batlle; and the commissioner for Coexistence, Montserrat Surroca.

According to the mayor, the ordinance constitutes “a major city agreement” that aims to update behaviors and increase penalties. “It's about restoring civic awareness, respect for the rules, and keeping in mind that living in a society and in a city offers many rights and advantages, but also obligations, commitments, and rules,” he emphasized.

The Barcelona City Police have already begun operations in key locations across all districts, particularly in nightlife areas, to enforce regulations on the ground. The city council stated that the goal is to "restore the excellence of public spaces" as part of its "360-degree security" strategy, which integrates cleanliness, community relations, and safety.

Sanctions

La nueva normativa incorpora medidas en ámbitos diversos como el consumo de alcohol, la protección de la dignidad sexual o las actividades incívicas organizadas. Algunas conductas que hasta ahora no estaban reguladas de manera específica pasan a ser sancionables.

Entre ellas, el exhibicionismo, la masturbación en público o las expresiones verbales degradantes podrán castigarse con multas de hasta 600 euros. También se prevén sanciones de hasta 300 euros por exhibir elementos sexuales en despedidas de soltero si se desoyen las advertencias policiales.

En el ámbito de las celebraciones, se consolida la prohibición de las llamadas “rutas etílicas”. Organizar o participar en estas actividades podrá suponer multas de hasta 3.000 euros. Además, el consumo de alcohol en la vía pública se endurece: los botellones, que ya se sancionaban con entre 100 y 600 euros, podrán alcanzar los 1.500 euros si se realizan en presencia de menores o en espacios con restricciones acústicas en horario nocturno.

La ordenanza también introduce sanciones para quienes intenten captar clientes para locales de consumo de productos cannábicos ilegales, una práctica que hasta ahora carecía de regulación específica.

Limpieza

Otra de las novedades afecta a la limpieza del espacio público. Los propietarios de perros podrán ser multados con hasta 300 euros si no diluyen con agua la orina de los animales. Asimismo, ensuciar la vía pública con vasos, envoltorios, chicles u otros residuos podrá comportar sanciones de hasta 750 euros.

Orinar o realizar necesidades fisiológicas en la calle también se penaliza con mayor severidad. En calles estrechas, zonas de ocio nocturno o áreas con lavabos públicos disponibles, la multa podrá alcanzar los 750 euros.

La normativa endurece igualmente las sanciones contra las pintadas y grafitis. No solo se castigará su realización en espacios no autorizados, sino también la promoción de estas prácticas, con multas de 600 euros, además de la obligación de asumir los costes de limpieza y reparación de los daños.

La ordenanza, publicada ya en el Boletín de la Provincia de Barcelona, introduce cambios en los plazos de pago. Si la sanción se abona en los dos primeros días hábiles tras su notificación, se aplicará una reducción máxima del 50%. En un segundo plazo, la rebaja será del 40%.

En paralelo, el Ayuntamiento mantiene el pago en cajeros de entidades bancarias, pero refuerza el cobro inmediato. Los agentes disponen de datáfonos para abonar las sanciones en el momento y el consistorio trabaja para habilitar el pago por Bizum. Según Velázquez, este sistema busca aumentar el carácter disuasorio y facilitar el cobro, especialmente en el caso de personas no residentes.

Balance

The head of the Barcelona Municipal Police explained that 114,528 complaints related to antisocial behavior were registered in 2025, meaning that "one in four incidents" handled by the 112 emergency services were related to such conduct. In total, the force responded to 422,798 incidents, 5.2% more than the previous year, of which 34,089 involved neighborhood disputes.

The municipal information campaign about the ordinance, which began weeks ago, will continue indefinitely with the aim of disseminating the new developments and promoting compliance.

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bogorad
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Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
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Peter Steinberger Chose OpenAI. The Code Was Never the Point.

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  • Strategic Acquisition: OpenAI secured Peter Steinberger, creator of the OpenClaw framework, following a competitive bidding process involving Meta and multi-billion dollar valuation offers.
  • Market Traction: The acquisition was driven by OpenClaw's rapid adoption, including 196,000 GitHub stars and 2 million weekly visitors, rather than the technical quality of its 300,000-line codebase.
  • Security Vulnerabilities: OpenClaw has been linked to significant security failures, including the leak of 1.5 million API keys and the distribution of malware via its skills marketplace, ClawHub.
  • Economic Independence: Steinberger, having previously sold a company for over $100 million, operated OpenClaw at a personal loss of $10,000 to $20,000 monthly before joining OpenAI.
  • Industry Disruption: The popularity of local AI agents through OpenClaw significantly impacted hardware markets, causing six-week delays for high-memory Apple Mac configurations.
  • Philosophical Divergence: Despite joining OpenAI, Steinberger publicly rejects the pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) in favor of specialized, collaborative agent systems.
  • Pragmatic Distribution: Steinberger prioritized OpenAI's massive distribution network and 300 million weekly users over Meta's personal engagement and direct feedback from Mark Zuckerberg.
  • Competitive Shift: Although Anthropic’s models originally powered OpenClaw, the project’s migration to OpenAI aligns the most prominent agent brand with a primary competitor.

Mark Zuckerberg needed ten minutes. He was finishing code.

Peter Steinberger had called him on WhatsApp without scheduling anything. "I don't like calendar entries," he told Lex Fridman last week. "Let's just call now." Zuckerberg asked for a brief pause, then picked up. The first ten minutes devolved into an argument about whether Claude Code or Codex was the better programming tool. The CEO of a trillion-dollar company squabbling with a solo developer from Vienna over IDE preferences.

That was two weeks ago. Zuckerberg ran OpenClaw on his own machine afterward. Gave feedback that was blunt and specific, calling features "great" or "shit" in real time. Used it until it broke, then sent notes on what to fix. Steinberger called it "the biggest compliment" because "it shows they actually care about it."

On Sunday, Steinberger announced he's joining OpenAI. Not Meta. Sam Altman posted within hours that Steinberger would "drive the next generation of personal agents." Greg Brockman and Fidji Simo both posted within the hour. Three executives in a coordinated burst of enthusiasm that OpenAI hasn't shown for a hire since the $6.4 billion Jony Ive acquisition last year.

Every outlet is covering this as a talent acquisition win. The framing is wrong. OpenAI already employs thousands of good engineers. What it couldn't build internally is proof that ordinary people will hand an AI agent full access to their digital lives without hesitation.

What $10,000 a month buys at the negotiating table

The Breakdown

• OpenAI hired OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger; both Meta and OpenAI reportedly made offers valued in the billions

• OpenClaw's 300,000+ line codebase was never the prize; 196,000 GitHub stars and 2 million weekly visitors were

• Steinberger publicly rejects AGI but chose OpenAI's distribution over Meta's personal attention from Zuckerberg

• Anthropic's models powered OpenClaw, but the framework's creator now works for the competition

Steinberger has been losing money on OpenClaw since November. Ten to twenty thousand dollars a month, by his own count. He routes sponsorship revenue to the developers who maintain his dependencies rather than keeping it. The project hit 196,000 GitHub stars and pulled 2 million visitors in a single week while its creator subsidized everything from savings.

He didn't need their money. He spent 13 years building PSPDFKit into a PDF tools company worth over $100 million before selling to Insight Partners. Three years of what he described as soul-searching followed. Therapy. Ayahuasca. Forty-three failed projects. Then OpenClaw caught fire.

His negotiating edge came from something no check could replicate. Both Meta and OpenAI made concrete offers, reportedly valued in the billions. VCs lined up. Steinberger told Fridman he doesn't care. "I don't give a fuck" were his exact words. When you've already sold a company and your next project goes viral by accident, the dynamics flip completely. He wasn't selling. They were auditioning.

The code nobody wanted

If you think these companies wanted OpenClaw's codebase, look at the inventory. Somewhere north of 300,000 lines of code, nobody is sure exactly how many. Unaudited. Developer Gavriel Cohen evaluated it for NanoClaw, found it too bloated for any security team to review properly, and rebuilt the core logic in roughly 500 lines of TypeScript. His team audited the entire replacement system in an afternoon.

The security record is just as ugly. Moltbook leaked 1.5 million API keys to the open internet. ClawHub, OpenClaw's skills marketplace, hosted 335 packages distributing Atomic Stealer malware to Mac users. Three days after Moltbook launched, RentAHuman.ai went live, a marketplace where OpenClaw agents hire real humans for physical tasks. Forty thousand people signed up to take orders from bots. Payment in stablecoins.

No serious engineer looks at that inventory and says ship it. What Meta and OpenAI wanted is the adoption graph. Six hundred contributors. Ten thousand commits. All in under three months. The WhatsApp integration dropped an AI agent into a messaging app 3 billion people carry in their pockets. OpenClaw became the first consumer brand in AI agents without spending a dollar on marketing.

OpenClaw's momentum even bent hardware markets. Tom's Hardware reported that Mac delivery times for high-memory configurations stretched to six weeks, driven partly by users buying machines to run local AI agents. Apple CEO Tim Cook acknowledged the company was chasing memory supply. One solo developer's weekend project created enough demand to disrupt Apple's supply chain.

You can rewrite 400,000 lines of messy code in a quarter. You cannot fabricate that kind of pull. That distinction, according to the bidding behavior of two of the most powerful companies in technology, is worth billions.

Specialized intelligence inside the AGI machine

The deal gets uncomfortable when you look at what Steinberger actually believes.

He told a Y Combinator podcast this month that AGI is the wrong goal. "What can one human being actually achieve? Do you think one human being could make an iPhone or one human being could go to space?" he said. "As a group we specialize, as a larger society we specialize even more." His vision runs on specialized agents collaborating. Not one god model that handles everything.

OpenAI's entire corporate identity rests on achieving artificial general intelligence. The name says it. So does the $500 billion valuation. Steinberger just joined a company whose stated mission he publicly rejects.

Ignore the ideology for a second. The logistics explain everything. Steinberger does not want to run a company. Thirteen years of it was enough. He wants to build agents everyone can use. That means compute, APIs, and 300 million people already opening ChatGPT every week. This is pragmatism dressed as alignment.

Meta offered something different. More personal, in fact. Zuckerberg's hands-on engagement impressed Steinberger. Steinberger recounted it on Fridman's show, acting out the reactions. "Mark basically, 'Oh, this is great. Oh, this is shit. Oh, it needs to change this.'" He noted the contrast with OpenAI. "I didn't get the same on the OpenAI side."

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He chose OpenAI anyway. Zuckerberg codes, gives real feedback, and clearly cares. None of that ships a product to hundreds of millions of users. For a builder who wants reach without management overhead, that settled it.

Chrome won. Chromium exists.

Steinberger drew the comparison himself. OpenClaw would follow the Chrome and Chromium model. A foundation to hold the open-source project. A corporate partner to build the commercial version. "I think this is too important to just give to a company and make it theirs," he told Fridman.

He's describing a pattern with a known ending.

Google open-sourced Chromium. Chrome is what everyone downloads. Android AOSP is open. Google's Android with Play Services runs the planet. MySQL went to Oracle. The community forked it into MariaDB. MariaDB survives. MySQL still owns the market.

Every foundation arrangement in tech follows the same gravitational pull. The corporate version gets full-time engineers, marketing, distribution, and the daily attention of the person who created the project. The open-source twin gets volunteers and good intentions. Gravity always wins.

Altman committed in public. "OpenClaw will live in a foundation as an open source project that OpenAI will continue to support." Those words are sincere until they collide with product timelines. When OpenAI ships a consumer agent built on Steinberger's ideas, using OpenAI's models, and that product competes with what the foundation maintains, the foundation will not get the best features first. OpenAI has shareholders. Shareholders beat charters every time.

Steinberger is too experienced to miss this. Thirteen years running a company taught him what public commitments look like right before they erode. The foundation language gives both sides something comfortable to say in public. It hands the community a story to hold onto. And it gives OpenAI a grace period before anyone asks which version is getting Steinberger's best hours.

Anthropic built the runway. OpenAI caught the flight.

Nobody is talking about who this hurts most.

OpenClaw launched on Claude. Steinberger called himself "the biggest unpaid Codex advertisement show," but the framework's recommended setup pointed users to "Anthropic Pro/Max plus Opus 4.5 for long-context strength and better prompt-injection resistance." Thousands of OpenClaw users routed heavy agent workloads through Anthropic's $20 consumer subscriptions.

Then Anthropic pushed back. Steinberger said in a recent interview that Anthropic "doesn't like it anymore." He recommended API keys instead. The economics made sense from Anthropic's side. A subscription designed for individual chat sessions was never priced for autonomous agents burning through tokens at 3 AM while their owner slept in the next room.

But the result is a category disaster. Anthropic's models powered the most visible agent framework in history. Its subscriptions funded the consumer proof of concept. And now the creator of that framework works for a competitor. He announced the move on a weekend while Anthropic's $380 billion valuation round closed the same week.

OpenClaw users will keep running Claude. The models are good. But the face of the agent movement now works at a rival lab, and every keynote, podcast, and product launch will carry OpenAI's logo behind him.

Anthropic's discomfort won't be loud. It will be the quiet kind. The kind where you helped prove that agent interfaces matter more than models, then watched someone gift-wrap that proof for the competition. At $380 billion, Anthropic can absorb the sting. What it cannot do is un-train a community that learned to think of AI agents through OpenClaw's interface, an interface now housed inside OpenAI's strategy.

The gravity starts now

Zuckerberg is still coding at Meta. He'll build agents regardless. Google has the largest mobile distribution surface on earth through Android and has done nothing visible with consumer agents. Apple has iMessage, Siri, and 1.5 billion active devices. Silence.

The foundation will publish its charter. Volunteers will submit pull requests. Steinberger will show up at community events and champion the open-source spirit he clearly values. He means it. That sincerity is real.

And slowly, because this is how gravity works in tech, the best ideas and the best engineering hours will flow toward OpenAI's agent products. Steinberger spends his days there now. So will his attention. So will the features that matter.

Chrome won. Chromium exists. The claw is the law, until corporate gravity says otherwise.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Why did Steinberger choose OpenAI over Meta?

A: Despite Zuckerberg's hands-on engagement, Steinberger chose OpenAI for its distribution infrastructure. OpenAI has 300 million weekly ChatGPT users and can ship agent products at scale. Steinberger wanted reach without management overhead.

Q: What happens to OpenClaw as an open-source project?

A: Steinberger and Altman committed to a foundation model where OpenClaw remains open-source while OpenAI builds a commercial version. The pattern mirrors Chrome and Chromium, where the corporate version historically absorbs the best features and talent.

Q: How much was the Steinberger acquisition reportedly worth?

A: Both Meta and OpenAI made offers reportedly valued in the billions. VCs also lined up with proposals. Steinberger, who previously sold PSPDFKit for over $100 million, said he did not care about the money.

Q: What security issues has OpenClaw faced?

A: Moltbook leaked 1.5 million API keys. ClawHub hosted 335 packages distributing Atomic Stealer malware to Mac users. RentAHuman.ai launched days later, letting AI agents hire humans for physical tasks with stablecoin payment.

Q: How does the Steinberger hire affect Anthropic?

A: OpenClaw launched on Claude and recommended Anthropic subscriptions for agent workloads. Thousands of users routed heavy tasks through Anthropic's $20 plans. The framework's creator now works at a rival lab during Anthropic's $380 billion valuation round.

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bogorad
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Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
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Sales-Tax Escalator // The one tax that has never provoked a significant revolt keeps climbing higher.

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  • Border shopping: New Hampshire markets itself as tax-free, drawing shoppers from Massachusetts and surrounding states despite Maine and Massachusetts raising their sales-tax rates post-Recession.
  • Cost-of-living focus: Sales taxes have risen steadily for a century while few politicians target them, making general and selective levies the largest revenue source for state and local governments.
  • Historical growth: Sales taxes began during the Depression, with California’s rate climbing from 2.5 percent to more than 7 percent today once local levies are included.
  • Local levies: Cities like New York and counties in California add local sales taxes, pushing combined rates as high as 9.25 percent for shoppers.
  • Wayfair impact: The 2018 ruling expanded sales-tax collection to online sales, creating thousands of new tax jurisdictions and additional compliance costs for businesses.
  • Base narrowing: Approximately 60 percent of sales go untaxed, services are mostly exempt, and a patchwork of selective exemptions and enterprise zones complicates compliance.
  • New local taxes: Sales-tax increases now fund homeless services, transit, and affordable housing even as ridership and results remain weak, and state efforts rarely shrink overall rates.

New Hampshire’s state lines are dotted with shopping malls. The Pheasant Lane Mall’s parking lot is largely located in Massachusetts, though the mall itself sits within the Live Free or Die State. Stores cluster on the east side of the Connecticut River in New Hampshire, though the main interstate, I-91, runs along the west side of the river in Vermont. To shoppers, the reason is obvious: New Hampshire has no sales tax. As the owner of the state-line-adjacent Mall at Rockingham Park notes, you can “Shop TAX FREE all year long” at the stores “conveniently located just over the Massachusetts border.” The Pheasant Lane Mall even removed a cornerstone that would have extended a few feet over the border, avoiding contact with the state once known as “Taxachusetts.”

In recent years, consumers have had even more incentive to cross state lines in search of lower taxes. During the Great Recession in 2009, Massachusetts raised its sales tax from 5 percent to 6.25 percent; Maine followed in 2013, increasing its rate from 5 percent to 5.5 percent. Post-Covid inflation has driven up the price of goods—along with the amount of sales tax owed—even as incomes have lagged.

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Since the pandemic, the cost of living has become the defining issue in American politics. Yet as inflation surged, few politicians targeted one of the most direct and controllable costs they impose on everyday purchases: the sales tax. Unlike property and income taxes, which have periodically provoked revolts, sales taxes have rarely faced organized political opposition. That helps explain why they are the one major tax category whose rates have risen almost continuously over the past century. Taken together, general sales taxes and selective sales taxes—special levies on goods such as cigarettes or rental cars—now constitute the largest source of revenue raised by state and local governments. Politicians truly concerned about the cost of living could start by reducing the one charge that most directly increases it.

States began imposing general sales taxes during the Great Depression. Cratering property-tax revenues led Mississippi to levy the first one in 1930. By 1950, 28 states had them, mostly taxing sales at about 2 percent. In the coming decades, all except five states would impose them (Vermont was the last to adopt one, in 1969), and the rate kept ratcheting upward. California’s sales-tax path is instructive: the tax started during the Depression at 2.5 percent, hit 4 percent in the 1960s, and had climbed to over 6 percent by the early 2000s. When combined with a mandatory sales tax collected by local governments, the rate is 7.25 percent.

Since getting authority from the states to enact their own sales taxes, localities’ rates have followed a similar upward path. In 1935, New York became the first city to authorize a general sales tax. Its one-cent, or 1 percent, rate had jumped to 3 percent by the early 1950s and now stands at 4.5 percent, plus a small extra sales tax for transit. When combined with the state rates, the city takes nearly 9 percent from shoppers. Thirty-eight states now allow local governments to impose their own sales taxes. In California, cities and counties can levy local sales taxes on top of state-mandated ones, which can push the combined state and local rate as high as 9.25 percent.

Sales-tax revenues exploded after the Supreme Court’s 2018 South Dakota v. Wayfair decision, which allowed state and local governments to charge sales taxes for online purchases. Internet retailers now must contend with more than 12,000 separate state and local sales-tax jurisdictions. The decision also spawned a host of new companies that help businesses navigate the tax maze, for fees that can range up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. (See “The Tax Nexus Cometh,” Spring 2023.) All states with sales taxes have expanded them to include online or “remote” sales, bringing in tens of billions in extra revenue by 2021.

In that year, states and local governments collected nearly $700 billion in sales taxes. Most of these were general sales taxes, covering all types of products. But just over $200 billion flowed from “selective” sales taxes, especially on alcohol, cigarettes, and gasoline. Coinciding with the inflation spike in 2021, sales taxes began climbing even more rapidly, with state sales-tax revenues surging 10 percent. In 2022, the increase was 14 percent. By 2023, even as inflation eroded the real value of state corporate and personal income-tax receipts, real sales-tax revenues kept climbing. Inflation made sales taxes a highly effective revenue tool—but it also made consumers more determined to avoid them.

As many Massachusetts residents will remind you, anyone buying goods in New Hampshire is technically required to pay a “use” tax to their home state. Almost no one does. Years ago, Massachusetts sued Town Fair Tire, a New Hampshire retailer just across the border, in an effort to obtain records on its clearly out-of-state customers. In response, New Hampshire passed a law, sponsored by then-state and now-U.S. senator Maggie Hassan, making it illegal for stores to share customer information with other states’ tax authorities. Town Fair Tire and its customers remained inviolate.

Today, only Delaware, Alaska, Montana, Oregon, and New Hampshire lack a general sales tax—and they’re not shy about advertising it. Drivers into Delaware were once greeted with the sign “Home of Tax-Free Shopping,” printed in bigger and bolder letters than Delaware’s previous claim to fame of being “The First State.” Following Wayfair, many people posted online threads asking how to get a shipping address in one of the tax-free states. One company offers a service for businesses to route products through Oregon or Delaware to avoid intermediate sales taxes—those charged when a firm buys goods before using them in manufacturing or resale. The company Global Shopaholics provides customers with a Delaware shipping address, allowing buyers from other countries to send their purchases there first before the goods get forwarded abroad tax-free. Other states’ tax authorities lament such arrangements, but they mostly reflect the widening gap between taxed and tax-free states.

Though economists generally tout the sales tax as an efficient way to raise revenue, with fewer distortions and loopholes than income taxes, the tax has become more riddled with exceptions and special rates over time. Currently, about 60 percent of all sales go untaxed, meaning that the remaining goods must bear a much higher rate. The reason: sales taxes mainly apply to physical goods, such as cars or electronics, but generally ignore services, such as haircuts or dental care, which constitute a growing share of the U.S. economy.

States often offer one-off exemptions to benefit certain groups. Many states provide exemptions for the necessities of clothing, food, and prescription drugs, for example, but others give a pass to flags, newspapers, feminine hygiene products, and renewable energy products. Deciding whether a good falls into a state’s exemption can require firms to exercise Talmudic intricacy. Wisconsin once issued guidance explaining which types of ice cream cake were taxable. The inclusion of utensils, or even a layer of fudge, could transform the dessert from a nontaxable food item into a taxable indulgence.

States have also used sales-tax exemptions to favor specific areas. Rather than competing with neighboring Delaware by cutting its general tax rate, New Jersey in 1983 created special Urban Enterprise Zones, allowing businesses in designated “underprivileged” areas to collect only half the state sales tax. In practice, the policy mainly benefits large retailers that draw customers from elsewhere in the state. Trenton’s enterprise zone became the surprising home to one of the largest Steinway piano dealers in the U.S., whose chief estimated that 80 percent of customers came from out of town.

For years, economists and policy experts, such as those at the Tax Foundation, have urged governments to “broaden the base and lower the rate,” meaning that they should tax more kinds of sales, especially services, while reducing overall rates. A rare success came in Washington, D.C., which in 2014 expanded its sales tax to cover services such as yoga studios and gyms and used the new revenue to cut income taxes and other levies. This proposal garnered support from an unusually broad coalition, ranging from the left-leaning Citizens for Tax Justice to Grover Norquist’s conservative Americans for Tax Reform.

More often, states have expanded the range of taxable services without lowering rates. Though the Wayfair ruling primarily addressed whether online retailers must collect sales tax, it also cleared the way for taxing all online transactions. Since then, many states have enacted taxes on digital downloads, streaming services, software subscriptions, and video games. States and cities have broadened selective sales taxes—imposing higher, separate rates on prepared meals, vending-machine sales, hotel stays, rental cars, cell phones, and live entertainment.

The purpose of the sales tax is to raise revenue from personal consumption—people spending money for their own enjoyment. Yet transactions between businesses often get taxed as well. Though states have tried to limit intermediate taxes—companies paying taxes on sales to each other—one state-commissioned estimate found that over 40 percent of total sales taxes came from business-to-business sales. Beyond distorting business decisions—since firms pay tax when they buy a product but not when they produce it themselves—these taxes can “pyramid,” with the same item taxed multiple times at different stages of production. The added costs are ultimately wrapped into the final price, even if the shopper never sees them on the receipt.

Progressives have long railed against sales taxes as regressive, disproportionately burdening the poor; but in recent years, they’ve readily supported higher local sales taxes—so long as the revenue funds their political priorities.

Sales taxes have become a popular way to pay for homeless services and subsidized housing, for instance. In 2024, Los Angeles County approved a half-cent sales tax for homeless housing and services, which was expected to generate over $1 billion annually—with no sunset date, as is typical for local tax measures. The fact that L.A. had already enacted a quarter-cent sales tax for the same purpose just seven years earlier—and that it produced no visible improvement—did little to dissuade local politicians or the county’s notably progressive voters. Politicians and voters ignored how previous sales-tax revenues were spent on apartments that averaged $600,000 per unit and whose construction was rife with corruption, as shown by the indictment of a city councilman who accepted bribes from prospective developers of homeless housing. Denver adopted a sales tax for homeless initiatives in 2020; the city failed to pass another such measure last year only because voters instead approved a sales tax to subsidize health care.

Many jurisdictions now ask voters to approve separate sales taxes to fund transit. Just before Los Angeles passed its first sales tax for homelessness, the county enacted a half-cent sales tax for transportation and transit. Since then, transit use has fallen by about one-fourth. In 2020, Seattle likewise raised its sales tax to support transit projects. That didn’t stop transit ridership from dropping by one-fourth from pre-pandemic levels.

After the pandemic period’s steep drop in ridership, many transit agencies, heedless of the strain on inflation-burdened consumers, sought more revenue rather than cut services to reflect diminished demand. In 2024, Columbus, Ohio, and Nashville, Tennessee, authorized half-cent tax increases to fund their transit systems. Mecklenburg County, the home of Charlotte, North Carolina, passed a one-cent tax hike for transit in November 2025.

While voters must approve most of these local sales taxes, government agencies try to obfuscate where the money is going. Los Angeles said that the first goal of its sales tax for transportation was to “improve freeway traffic flow” and that another objective was to “repave local streets, repair potholes, synchronize signals.” But buried deep in the spending plan, the government acknowledged that only 17 percent of the funds were going to roads; the rest went to transit and more niche travel modes like bicycle paths. Other governments have tried to remove voters entirely from tax decisions. In 2020, Washington State gave local governments the power to impose a sales tax for affordable housing without submitting the proposal for voter approval.

The enduring mystery of the sales tax is why it never seems to go down. Other levies face frequent taxpayer revolts, but the hit to consumers from a penny sales tax is apparently abstract enough that most don’t notice it. Louisiana made one of the rare sales-tax reductions in recent years, in 2018, reducing its top rate by over half a cent. But this year, it returned to its previous rate of 5 cents as part of a general tax reform.

Even when politicians talk about the cost of living, the sales tax rarely comes up. Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral election in New York largely by promising to bring living costs under control, and other progressive city politicians have followed his lead. Yet none has suggested cutting the 8.875 percent surcharge that government adds to purchases. Instead, progressives in New York, like their counterparts nationwide, have pushed for new consumer taxes to fund their priorities, even while touting their affordability agendas.

The steady rise of sales taxes, along with their growing complexity, adds to the burden on businesses and consumers already strained by inflation. Politicians could act to ease that burden. It remains striking how few seem interested in doing so.

This article is part of “An Affordability Agenda,” a symposium that appears in City Journal’s Winter 2026 issue.

Judge Glock is director of research and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Photo: Few politicians have targeted levies on consumer purchases as a way of reducing prices. (Lindsey Nicholson/UCG/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)

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The AI Safety Alarm Bells, Anthropic’s AI Philosopher | Technology for Feb. 15 - WSJ

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  • Software Pricing Shift: A prediction suggests software billing may move toward a pay-per-outcome model, where payment is contingent on an AI agent achieving a specific objective.
  • AI Insider Concerns: Individuals inside AI companies are issuing numerous warnings regarding the accelerating sophistication and potential real-world harms of artificial intelligence.
  • Specific AI Dangers: Warnings mentioned include autonomous cyberattacks, mass unemployment due to disruption, and the replacement of human relationships by AI.
  • Researcher Departures: An Anthropic researcher resigned, citing that the “world is in peril” from AI, among other threats.
  • OpenAI Staff Discontent: Some OpenAI staffers expressed concerns over plans to introduce erotica and the potential for manipulation arising from ad integration.
  • Accelerated Advancement: The urgency surrounding AI warnings is attributed to the rapid advancement of AI capabilities surpassing the expectations of seasoned researchers.
  • Existential Threat Concern: An OpenAI staffer voiced feeling an "existential threat" from AI, questioning what work will remain for humans when AI becomes highly proficient.
  • Columnist Topics: Featured columns cover privacy issues with home security cameras, investment focus on AI infrastructure providers, and the billionaire competition in space exploration.

By

Georgia Wells

Feb. 15, 2026 10:59 am ET


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Sierra Co-founder and CEO Bret Taylor discusses the future of software billing, predicting a move away from monthly licenses to a model where companies only pay when an AI agent successfully completes a job or closes a sale. Photo: WSJ Leadership Institute

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Tech insiders are sounding an alarm.

The accelerating sophistication of artificial intelligence is driving a wave of warnings that AI can create real-world harms, including autonomous cyberattacks, mass unemployment, unrelenting market disruption and the replacement of human relationships.


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A researcher at Anthropic this week said he is leaving the company, writing in a letter to colleagues that the “world is in peril” from AI, among other dangers. Inside OpenAI, some staffers have voiced concerns about the company’s plan to roll out erotica. Another OpenAI researcher said she was quitting OpenAI, citing its plan to introduce ads and her fear that the company would face huge incentives to manipulate users.

Artificial intelligence joins a long list of industries that have prompted dire insider warnings. But the sirens about AI are occurring earlier in the industry’s development, and in a greater volume, relative to other technological revolutions.

Some of the urgency can be traced to the rapid advancement of AI capabilities, which has surprised some of the most seasoned researchers and coders.

“Today I finally feel the existential threat that AI is posing,” OpenAI staffer Hieu Pham wrote on X Wednesday. “When AI becomes overly good and disrupts everything, what will be left for humans to do?”

—Georgia is a tech reporter based in San Francisco.


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Most Americans experience passionate love only twice in a lifetime, study finds

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  • Survey Scope: A large-scale survey analyzed data from over 10,000 single adults in the U.S.
  • Average Frequency: Respondents reported experiencing passionate love an average of 2.05 times during their lives.
  • Research Model: The study utilized a model defining love as comprising passion, intimacy, and commitment.
  • Age Correlation: Older adults reported slightly more instances of passionate love, likely due to increased exposure time.
  • Gender Difference: Heterosexual men reported slightly more experiences of passionate love than heterosexual women.
  • Sexual Orientation: Sexual orientation did not create a statistically significant difference in the reported frequency of passionate love.
  • Non-Experience Rate: Approximately 14 percent of participants stated they had never experienced passionate love.
  • Study Leadership: Research was led by Amanda N. Gesselman of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University.

Most adults in the United States experience the intense rush of passionate love only about twice throughout their lives, according to a recent large-scale survey. The study, published in the journal Interpersona, suggests that while this emotional state is a staple of human romance, it remains a relatively rare occurrence for many individuals. The findings provide a new lens through which to view the frequency of deep romantic attachment across the entire adult lifespan.

The framework for this research relies on a classic model where love consists of three parts: passion, intimacy, and commitment. Passion is described as the physical attraction and intense longing that often defines the start of a romantic connection. Amanda N. Gesselman, a researcher at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, led the team of scientists who conducted this work.

The research team set out to quantify how often this specific type of love happens because earlier theories suggest passion is high at the start of a relationship but fades as couples become more comfortable. As a relationship matures, it often shifts toward companionate love, which is defined by deep affection and entwined lives rather than obsessive longing. Because this intense feeling is often fleeting, it might happen several times as people move through different stages of life.

The researchers wanted to see if social factors like age, gender, or sexual orientation influenced how often someone falls in love. Some earlier studies on university students suggested that most young people fall in love at least once by the end of high school. However, very little data existed regarding how these experiences accumulate for adults as they reach middle age or later life.

To find these answers, the team analyzed data from more than 10,000 single adults in the U.S. between the ages of 18 and 99. Participants were recruited to match the general demographic makeup of the country based on census data. This large group allowed the researchers to look at a wide variety of life histories and romantic backgrounds.

Participants were asked to provide a specific number representing how many times they had ever been passionately in love during their lives. On average, the respondents reported experiencing this intense feeling 2.05 times. This number suggests that for the average person, passionate love is a rare event that happens only a few times in a century of living.

A specific portion of the group, about 14 percent, stated they had never felt passionate love at all. About 28 percent had felt it once, while 30 percent reported two experiences. Another 17 percent had three experiences, and about 11 percent reported four or more. These figures show that while the experience is common, it is certainly not a daily or even a yearly occurrence for most.

The study also looked at how these numbers varied based on the specific characteristics of the participants. Age showed a small link to the number of experiences, meaning older adults reported slightly more instances than younger ones. This result is likely because older people have had more years and more opportunities to encounter potential partners.

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The increase with age was quite small, which suggests that people do not necessarily keep falling in love at a high rate as they get older. One reason for this might be biological, as the brain systems involved in reward and excitement are often most active during late adolescence and early adulthood. As people transition into mature adulthood, their responsibilities and self-reflection might change how they perceive or pursue new romantic passion.

Gender differences were present in the data, with men reporting slightly more experiences than women. This difference was specifically found among heterosexual participants, where heterosexual men reported more instances of passionate love than heterosexual women. This finding aligns with some previous research suggesting that men may be socialized to fall in love or express those feelings earlier in a relationship.

Among gay, lesbian, and bisexual participants, the number of experiences did not differ by gender. The researchers did not find that sexual orientation on its own created any differences in how many times a person fell in love. For example, the difference between heterosexual and bisexual participants was not statistically significant.

The researchers believe these results have important applications for how people view their own romantic lives. Many people feel pressure from movies, songs, and social media to constantly chase a state of high passion. Knowing that the average person only feels this a couple of times may help people feel more normal if they are not currently in a state of intense romance.

In a clinical or counseling setting, these findings could help people who feel they are behind in their romantic development. If someone has never been passionately in love, they are part of a group that includes more than one in ten adults. Seeing this as a common variation in human experience rather than a problem can reduce feelings of shame.

The researchers also noted that people might use a process called retrospective cognitive discounting. This happens when a person looks back at their past and views old relationships through a different lens based on their current feelings. An older person might look back at a past “crush” and decide it was not true passionate love, which would lower their total count.

This type of self-reflection might help people stay resilient after a breakup. By reinterpreting a past relationship as something other than passionate love, they might remain more open to finding a new connection in the future. This mental flexibility is part of how humans navigate the ups and downs of their romantic histories.

There are some limitations to the study that should be considered. Because the researchers only surveyed single people, the results might be different if they had included people who are currently married or in long-term partnerships. People who are in stable relationships might have different ways of remembering their past experiences compared to those who are currently unattached.

The study also relied on people remembering their entire lives accurately, which can be a challenge for older participants. Future research could follow the same group of people over many years to see how their feelings change as they happen. This would remove the need for participants to rely solely on their memories of the distant past.

The participants were all located in the United States, so these findings might not apply to people in other cultures. Different societies have different rules about how people meet, how they express emotion, and what they consider to be love. A global study would be needed to see if the “twice in a lifetime” average holds true in other parts of the world.

Additionally, the survey did not provide a specific definition of passionate love for the participants. Each person might have used their own personal standard for what counts as being passionately in love. Using a more standardized definition in future studies could help ensure that everyone is answering the question in the same way.

The researchers also mentioned that they did not account for individual personality traits or attachment styles. Some people are naturally more prone to falling in love quickly, while others are more cautious or reserved. These internal traits likely play a role in how many times someone experiences passion throughout their life.

Finally, the study did not include a large enough number of people with diverse gender identities beyond the categories of men and women. Expanding the research to include more gender-diverse individuals would provide a more complete picture of the human experience. Despite these gaps, the current study provides a foundation for understanding the frequency of one of life’s most intense emotions.

The study, “Twice in a lifetime: quantifying passionate love in U.S. single adults,” was authored by Amanda N. Gesselman, Margaret Bennett-Brown, Jessica T. Campbell, Malia Piazza, Zoe Moscovici, Ellen M. Kaufman, Melissa Blundell Osorio, Olivia R. Adams, Simon Dubé, Jessica J. Hille, Lee Y. S. Weeks, and Justin R. Garcia.

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Einstein wasn't a "lone genius" after all - Big Think

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  • FALSE_NARRATIVE: The "lone genius" trope simplifies complex scientific breakthroughs by portraying individuals like Einstein as isolated outsiders rather than participants in an academic community.
  • ACADEMIC_ESTABLISHMENT: Einstein was a product of formal elite training at ETH Zürich, where he earned a teaching diploma and later a PhD from the University of Zürich.
  • COLLECTIVE_EFFORT: Professional breakthroughs in 1905, including special relativity and E = mc², built upon established work by predecessors like Planck, Lorentz, and Poincaré.
  • EXISTING_ANOMALIES: Significant evidence for physics beyond Newtonian mechanics, such as Mercury's orbital precession and radioactivity, was well-documented by the scientific community before Einstein's involvement.
  • NETWORKING_UTILITY: Personal and professional connections, such as classmate Marcel Grossman, were essential for Einstein to secure employment and access advanced mathematical concepts.
  • MATHEMATICAL_FOUNDATIONS: The development of general relativity relied on the prior invention of absolute differential calculus and Riemannian geometry by mathematicians like Christoffel, Ricci, and Levi-Civita.
  • PARALLEL_DISCOVERY: Major theoretical advances were often reached independently by multiple researchers, such as David Hilbert nearly arriving at the field equations for gravitation simultaneously with Einstein.
  • LABOR_REQUIREMENT: Meaningful scientific progress is a result of rigorous expertise and hard work rather than spontaneous inspiration or solitary imagination.

Perhaps the most commonly told myth in all of science is that of the lone genius. The blueprint for it goes something like this. Once upon a time in history, someone with a towering intellect but no formal training wades into a field that’s new to them for the first time. Upon considering the field’s issues, they immediately see things that no one else has ever seen before. With just a little bit of hard work, they find solutions to puzzles that have stymied all of the greatest minds in the field that approached those problems previously. They wind up revolutionizing their field, and the world is never the same. It leaves one with a strong take-home message: that if you were that inexperienced person with a similarly towering intellect, and you had the good fortune of coming into a field just as that legend did, then you too could make those great breakthroughs that the world’s greatest professionals are all currently missing.

That’s the myth we frequently tell ourselves about Albert Einstein. That he, an outcast and a dropout, taught himself everything he needed to know on his own about physics and astrophysics. Just through his own, private, hard work, he revolutionized our understanding of reality in a number of profound ways. In the early days, his work — inspired by his thoughts about light — gave us the photoelectric effect, special relativity, and E = mc², among other advances. Later on, his work, also in isolation, gave us general relativity, arguably his greatest achievement and possibly the greatest of all achievements in the 20th century. All by his lonesome, Einstein single-handedly dragged the field out of Newtonian stagnation and into the 20th, and now the 21st, centuries.

That story isn’t just a complete fabrication, it couldn’t be further from the truth. Here’s what really happened.

Einstein

This 1934 photograph shows Einstein in front of a blackboard, deriving special relativity for a group of students and onlookers. Although special relativity is now taken for granted, it was revolutionary when Einstein first put it forth, and it doesn’t even describe his most famous equation, which is E = mc², or his most famous advance, which is our current theory of gravitation: general relativity.

Credit: public domain

There are components of that myth that are true, of course. It’s true that back in 1905, Einstein published a series of papers that would go on to revolutionize a number of areas of physics. 1905 is often referred to as Einstein’s “miracle year” because of those publications, which gave us:

  • the photoelectric effect,
  • special relativity,
  • Brownian motion,
  • and the infamous mass-energy equivalence of E = mc².

But those substantial advances could hardly have been said to have occurred in a vacuum, or that Einstein in some way was an outsider to the field of physics.

Quite to the contrary, Einstein himself, although German-born, moved to Switzerland specifically to study physics and mathematics. At the age of 17, he enrolled in the mathematics and physics teaching diploma program in Zürich, where he graduated in 1900. That might not sound impressive, but today that University is known as ETH Zürich, and has had a total of 22 Nobel Laureates come through it: Einstein included.

Yes, it’s true that he went to work at the Swiss patent office, but that wasn’t the only thing he was doing; he was concurrently continuing his studies in Zürich at the same time. This is little different than various work-study jobs, or part-time jobs, that college students often take on to help finance their education in more modern times. Moreover, it was his friend and classmate, Marcel Grossman, whose connections (through his father) got Einstein the job. (Grossman didn’t need that job, as he had secured teaching positions to finance his graduate education.)

Additionally, Einstein wasn’t identifying problems that had gone unnoticed by others. Instead, there were well-known pieces of evidence that had been discussed — for decades, at that point — as being evidence for physics beyond what the ideas of Newton could hope to explain.

Schematic illustration of nuclear beta decay in a massive atomic nucleus. Only if the (missing) neutrino energy and momentum is included can these quantities be conserved. The transition from a neutron to a proton (and an electron and an antielectron neutrino) is energetically favorable, with the additional mass getting converted into the kinetic energy of the decay products. The inverse reaction, of a proton, electron, and an antineutrino all combining to create a neutron, never occurs in nature.

Credit: Inductiveload/Wikimedia Commons

Newton’s Universe, for one thing, was deterministic. If you could take any system of particles and write down their positions, momenta, and masses, you could calculate how each and every one of them would evolve with time. With infinite calculational power, you could compute this to arbitrary precision at each and every moment in time. Maxwell’s equations brought electromagnetism into the same realm as Newtonian gravity and Newtonian mechanics. Those were the foundational pillars of physics at the time of Einstein’s birth.

But puzzles arose, and were well-known for those final few decades of the 1800s.

  • Radioactivity had been discovered, and the time at which any atom would decay was known to be random and indeterminate by any means other than experimental; only by watching an individual radioactive atom could you know when it would decay.
  • The law of mass conservation was violated for certain radioactive decays; the mass of the initial atomic nucleus was greater than the mass of all of the particles produced in a radioactive beta decay, showing that mass was lost, not conserved, in these reactions.
  • It was known that objects did not obey Newton’s laws of motion when they moved close to the speed of light: time dilation and length contraction had already been discovered and described.
  • And the null results of the Michelson-Morley experiment had been robustly determined, disproving the original notion of the luminiferous aether.

Perhaps most importantly, Mercury’s orbit almost, but not exactly, matched the predictions of Newtonian gravity. When the precession of Mercury’s orbit was calculated in detail — accounting for the gravitation of the planets and moons (532″ per century) as well as the periodic change in Earth’s equinoxes (5025″ per century) — it came up short of observations (5600″ per century) by a tiny but significant amount: 43 arc-seconds per century. That less-than-1% difference was small, sure, but profound.

What was causing it?

The hypothetical location of the planet Vulcan, presumed to be responsible for the observed precession of Mercury in the 1800s. Exhaustive searches were performed for a planet that could have accounted for the anomalous motions of Mercury in the context of Newtonian gravity, but no such planet exists, falsifying the prediction of an interior planet in our Solar System, general relativity, a different theory of gravity, instead explains this otherwise anomalous precession.

Credit: Szczureq/Wikimedia Commons

Einstein didn’t know, either, when he began his physics career in the early 1900s. In fact, this was a problem he thought about quite often, but made no progress on it initially. However, there were areas where he did make progress, with his first series of papers in 1905 making quite a splash.

But was that the result of several “bolts of inspiration” that struck him while pondering questions on his own? No. Einstein, despite what you might have been taught, had been working and studying continuously since his graduation. His patent office work largely consisted of examining electrical and electro-mechanical devices, including the transmission of electric signals and synchronization devices: work requiring him to engage his knowledge of theoretical physics, light waves, Newtonian mechanics, and electromagnetism. He studied physics independently with a group of physics and mathematics friends, including with special focuses on the works of Ernst Mach and Henri Poincaré. And, owing to his formal graduate studies, he was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Zürich for his dissertation, A new determination of molecular dimensions, with Professor Alfred Kleiner.

It wasn’t his dissertation that turned heads in 1905, however, it was his separate papers on the topics of:

  • discovering the Brownian motion of particles under a microscope,
  • the derivation of E = mc_²_ and mass-energy equivalence,
  • the discovery of the photoelectric effect, and
  • the derivation of special relativity.

Yes, these discoveries were no doubt momentous, with Einstein approaching these problems in extremely creative and imaginative ways as well.

But these advances didn’t occur in a vacuum. Quite to the contrary, Einstein benefitted from friends, colleagues, teachers and mentors, the collaborative efforts of his first wife (whose contributions will likely never be fully known), and the input of many others during this time. His papers didn’t come out of nowhere, but rather built upon earlier ideas of Planck, Lorentz, FitzGerald, Thomson, Heaviside, Hasenöhrl, and Poincaré. In fact, Poincaré had independently derived E = mc² back in 1900; it’s possible that Einstein read that very paper as part of his study group, alongside Conrad Habicht and Maurice Solovine.

A “light clock” will appear to run differently for observers moving at different relative speeds, but this is due to the constancy of the speed of light. Einstein’s law of special relativity governs how these time and distance transformations take place between different observers. However, each individual observer will see time pass at the same rate as long as they remain in their own reference frame: one second-per-second, even though when they bring their clocks together after the experiment, they’ll find that they no longer agree.

Credit: John D. Norton/University of Pittsburgh

But what about general relativity? Einstein, according to the legendary stories you might have heard about him, was simply thinking about physics — as he often did — when inspiration struck him in what he would later refer to as “his happiest thought” of all-time. This occurred in 1907 or so, and over the next 8 years, Einstein developed general relativity, putting it out into the world in 1915. The rest was history.

Of course, Einstein really did think of “his happiest thought” during that time, and general relativity was the final theory that ultimately emerged from it. But to understand where Einstein came from, we have to start with what this “happiest thought” actually was. It was to consider what difference there would be between the following two instances:

  1. an observer who was locked in a windowless room on the surface of the Earth, and experienced the force of gravity pulling everything down toward the center of the Earth,
  2. and an observer who was locked in a uniformly accelerating room in the vacuum of space.

For the observer inside the room in either scenario, Einstein reasoned, there was no way to tell the difference between the two cases. Everything inside would accelerate “downward” at 9.8 m/s2; the floor would push “upward” with a restoring, normal force to balance the downward pull; even light, if shone from one end of the room to the other, would travel in a curved path as dictated by either acceleration or gravitation. Known today as Einstein’s equivalence principle, it provided the conceptual link between motion, which was described by his (earlier, developed in 1905) theory of special relativity, and gravitation, which up until that point was a purely Newtonian phenomenon.

The identical behavior of a ball falling to the floor in an accelerated rocket (left) and on Earth (right) is a demonstration of Einstein’s equivalence principle. If inertial mass and gravitational mass are identical, there will be no difference between these two scenarios. This has been verified to better than ~1 part in one trillion for matter through torsion balance experiments, and was the thought (Einstein called it “his happiest thought”) that led Einstein to develop his general theory of relativity. Recently, the ALPHA-g experiment confirmed that this is true for antimatter as well.

Credit: Markus Poessel/Wikimedia commons; retouched by Pbroks13

But even to arrive at this thought, Einstein was not operating in a vacuum, all on his own, at all. Einstein’s former professor during his undergraduate days, Hermann Minkowski, became enamored with special relativity, and was shocked that the same Einstein he had taught had developed it. “For me it came as a tremendous surprise, for in his student days Einstein had been a real lazybones. He never bothered about mathematics at all,” Minkowski wrote. But upon learning of special relativity, it was that same Minkowski who developed the mathematical idea of — and foundation for — spacetime, all building upon Einstein’s work. By placing space and time on the same mathematical footing, he set the stage for the mathematical development of general relativity: the advance we remember him best for today.

Conceptually, Einstein’s “happiest thought” may have been preceded by some fascinating work by Henri Poincaré. Poincaré realized that Mercury’s orbit didn’t only require corrections for Earth’s precessing equinoxes and the gravitational influence of the other bodies in the Solar System, but also for the fact that, as the fastest planet, Mercury’s velocity with respect to the speed of light could not be neglected. With the advent of special relativity, he realized that Mercury would experience dilated time, and that there would be length contraction in the direction of its motion around the Sun. When he applied those two effects of special relativity to the orbit of Mercury, Poincaré found that time dilation and length contraction accounted for about ~20% of the observed extra precession (of 43″ per century) just by including the relativistic effects of motion.

This illustration shows the precession of a planet’s orbit around the Sun. A very small amount of precession is due to general relativity in our Solar System; Mercury precesses by 43 arc-seconds per century, the greatest value of all our planets. Although the total rate of precession is 5600 arc-seconds per century, 5025 of them are due to the precession of the equinoxes and 532 are due to the effects of the other planets in our Solar System. Those final 43 arc-seconds per century cannot be explained without general relativity or some other alternative form of novel physics, beyond the predictions of Newtonian gravity.

Credit: WillowW/Wikimedia Commons

How, then, would it be possible to:

  • construct a physical theory that married gravitation to this new concept of spacetime,
  • explain the precession of Mercury’s orbit,
  • incorporate special relativity into the mix,
  • and still be able to reproduce all of the earlier centuries of success that Newtonian gravity produced?

The “how” of how to do it wasn’t the idea of Einstein at all, but rather that of his friend and former classmate, Marcel Grossman. While Einstein had the idea of the equivalence principle, it was Grossman — the most mathematically adept of all of Einstein’s friends and peers — who had the idea to describe the Universe with non-Euclidean geometry as the spacetime fabric, rather than the Euclidean geometry of Minkowski space.

This makes sense, as this type of mathematical ground was Grossman’s specialty. In particular, Grossman had become an expert in Riemannian geometry, where two parallel lines did not necessarily always remain parallel, but could converge and meet or diverge and get farther and farther apart, as dictated by the (possibly curved) underlying geometry. Differential geometry and tensor calculus were precisely the language required to describe the Universe that Einstein was trying to picture, and Grossman was the one who put it all together. From Einstein and Grossman working together, a key paper emerged in 1913: Outline of a Generalized Theory of Relativity and of a Theory of Gravitation. This was the first of two fundamental papers that would lead to the establishment of general relativity as humanity’s best theory of gravity.

Unlike the picture that Newton had of instantaneous forces along the line-of-sight connecting any two masses, Einstein conceived gravity as a warped spacetime fabric, where the individual particles moved through that curved space according to the predictions of general relativity. In Einstein’s picture, gravity is not instantaneous at all, but instead must propagate at a limited speed: the speed of gravity, which is identical to the speed of light. Unlike conventional waves, no medium at all is required for these waves to travel through.

Credit: LIGO scientific collaboration, T. Pyle, Caltech/MIT

But even this specialty was not unique to Grossman and, through him, Einstein. Many brilliant minds had been developing it for decades, dating back to before the birth of both Einstein and Grossman. Absolute differential calculus, as a field, had been introduced by Elwin Christoffel in 1869. Many issues remained unresolved throughout the 1800s with that branch of mathematics, which only achieved completion in 1900 with the work of Gregorio Ricci and Tullio Levi-Civita. (These last names — Christoffel, Ricci, and Levi-Civita — will be familiar to anyone who’s studied general relativity.) There were numerous mathematicians studying precisely this field at the time, and one of them, the legendary David Hilbert, almost arrived at the equations that would describe gravitation in the Universe before Einstein did. (Although Hilbert was almost certainly aware of Einstein’s contemporaneous work.)

In every physical theory where you have mechanical motion, there’s a quantity you can define — known as “the action” — that must be minimized in order to figure out what the path of that object will be. In Newtonian mechanics, it was Hamilton’s principle of least action that led to the equations of motion; in the context of a general theory of relativity, a new action principle would have to be discovered. That action principle was formulated independently by both Einstein and by Hilbert at around the same time, and is today known as the Einstein-Hilbert action. It’s this action principle, when correctly applied to the physics of the system, that leads to the modern Einstein field equations.

A mural of the Einstein field equations, with an illustration of light bending around the eclipsed Sun: the key observations that first validated general relativity four years after it was first theoretically put forth: back in 1919. The Einstein tensor is shown decomposed, at left, into the Ricci tensor and Ricci scalar, with the cosmological constant term added in after that. If that constant weren’t included, an expanding (or collapsing) Universe would have been an inevitable consequence.

Credit: Vysotsky / Wikimedia Commons

None of this, of course, diminishes the actual genius of Einstein, nor does it take credit away from him for the breakthroughs that he himself made. He fully deserves credit for developing and putting forth all of the ideas for which he is credited: Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect, E = mc_²_, and both special and general relativity. He really did make those advances, and his contributions were the primary ones in all of those instances. Rather, these stories are to better provide context as to how these great advances were made. Einstein was not, as the common narrative often goes, a lone genius who was working outside of the strict confines of academia, who was able to revolutionize the field precisely because he was an outsider, unconfined by the dogmatic and restrictive teachings of his day.

Rather, it was precisely because Einstein had the education and background that he did — his own unique toolkit, as it were — that he was able to approach this variety of problems in a self-consistent, non-contradictory way. It was because of his friends and collaborators that he was exposed to ideas that helped him to progress, rather than stagnate. And it was because of his willingness and even eagerness to rely on the input and expertise of others, and to take inspiration from them and incorporate it into his own work, that his excellent ideas, many of which were profound but that began as mere seeds, were able to sprout into the towering achievements we still acknowledge today.

An animated look at how spacetime responds as a mass moves through it helps showcase exactly how, qualitatively, it isn’t merely a sheet of fabric. Instead, all of 3D space itself gets curved by the presence and properties of the matter and energy within the Universe. Space doesn’t “change shape” instantaneously, everywhere, but is rather limited by the speed at which gravity can propagate through it: at the speed of light. The theory of general relativity is relativistically invariant, as are quantum field theories, which means that even though different observers don’t agree on what they measure, all of their measurements are consistent when transformed correctly.

Credit: LucasVB

Back in 2021, I wrote an essay entitled, What if Einstein never existed? At the end, I contrasted the narrative of the lone genius with the attempts made to solve many of the outstanding problems of their time by other, less heralded scientists, and discovered that most advances would have occurred even without the person who made the key breakthrough.

  • Georges Lemaître and Howard Robertson each put together the expanding Universe independently of (and prior to) Edwin Hubble doing so.
  • Sin-Itiro Tomonaga worked out quantum electrodynamics independently of both Julian Schwinger and Richard Feynman, who did it independently of one another. (All three were recognized with the Nobel Prize in physics for the achievement.)
  • Robert Brout and Alexei Starobinskii each published papers with key realizations concerning what we now know as cosmic inflation, as did Rocky Kolb and Stephen Wolfram, well before Alan Guth’s revolutionary paper that’s generally acknowledged as the birth of inflation.

What would the world have been like without Einstein? Would we have ever come upon general relativity without him? I think the answer, without any serious doubt, is yes. Many others, even at the time, were close behind him, with several prominent scientists and mathematicians pursuing the same ideas contemporaneously. In fact, if he hadn’t listened to input from the world-class minds around him, Einstein wouldn’t have had anywhere near the successes or the impact that he did. Although our culture loves soundbites, with perhaps the most famous from Einstein being, “imagination is more important than knowledge,” these sorts of advances absolutely require both. Regardless of the ratio of “inspiration” to “perspiration” required, there’s simply no way around the need, if you want to make a meaningful advance, for expertise and hard work.

This article was first published in April of 2022. It was updated in February of 2026.

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bogorad
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Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
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