The Stage Is Being Set for an American Nuclear Power Revolution | Deepfakes Are Evolving | Whatever Happened to ‘the Big One’?, and more

Homeland Security: Border Arrests Fell More Than 40% Since Biden’s Halt to Asylum Processing  (AP / VOA News)
Arrests for illegal border crossings have dropped more than 40% during the three weeks that asylum processing has been suspended, the Homeland Security Department said Wednesday.
The announcement comes just one day before President Joe Biden is set to debate former President and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump in what is expected to be a crucial moment in the election campaign.
Biden is considered especially vulnerable with voters when it comes to immigration. Trump has hammered him repeatedly on border security by painting a picture of the border as out of control and migrants as a threat to the nation’s security and economy.
Biden has both sought to crack down on new arrivals at the border and to offer new immigration pathways.
The restrictions he announced at the beginning of June cut off asylum access when arrivals at the border reached a certain number, infuriating immigration advocates who say the policy differs little from what Trump attempted. Then a few weeks later Biden announced a new program aimed at undocumented spouses of American citizens who had been in the country for a decade or more that could ultimately provide them a pathway to citizenship.

Whatever Happened to ‘the Big One’?  (Ross Andersen, The Atlantic)
The three words were spelled out in block letters on the evening news, right next to an anchorman’s gelled coif: the big one. A map of Southern California hovered just below, bull’s-eye’d with red, concentric circles. I’m pretty sure it was 1988. The region was awash in warnings about the great earthquake to come. They were like something out of the Book of Isaiah. They lent an apocalyptic crackle to the sunbaked days. My generation hit school age too late to take part in atomic-attack drills, and too early for those that mimic school shootings, but we learned to duck and cover just the same.
In 1989, we saw a vision of our future. An earthquake hit the Bay Area, and for more than a week, the whole state was immersed in the imagery of seismic catastrophe. A freeway overpass snapped in half. Some of San Francisco’s pastel Victorians toppled over. A fire broke out in the Marina. The World Series—an event of great import and inevitability in the mind of a child—was halted. “The big one is supposed to be worse,” we whispered to ourselves, and to one another. In the psychogeography of Southern California, it lay sleeping like a monster deep beneath the Earth’s surface. At any moment, probably soon, it would wake up.
It still hasn’t. The San Andreas Fault formed about 30 million years ago, when the Pacific plate—the planet’s largest—began grinding against the North American plate. Sometimes, the plates snag. Tension builds until they release with a lurch that sends energy in all directions. The section of the San Andreas that runs alongside Los Angeles hasn’t had a fearsome quake for more than three centuries. Paleoseismologists expect big ones to occur there every 150 to 200 years, Greg Beroza, a Stanford professor and a co-director of the Southern California Earthquake Center, told me: “We’re overdue.” Teams of scientists have been trying to improve on that chillingly vague forecast, he said, so that the quake’s arrival can be predicted days, weeks, or even months ahead of time—but there is no guarantee that they’ll succeed.

Deepfakes Are Evolving. This Company Wants to Catch Them All  (Will Kniht, Wired)
Some Fortune 500 companies have begun testing software that can spot a deepfake of a real person in a live video call, following a spate of scams involving fraudulent job seekers who take a signing bonus and run.
The detection technology comes courtesy of GetReal Labs, a new company founded by Hany Farid, a UC-Berkeley professor and renowned authority on deepfakes and image and video manipulation.
GetReal Labs has developed a suite of tools for spotting images, audio, and video that are generated or manipulated either with artificial intelligence or manual methods. The company’s software can analyze the face in a video call and spot clues that may indicate it has been artificially generated and swapped onto the body of a real person.

America’s $34.5-Trillion National Debt Is a Crisis in the Making  (William Ruger and Thomas Savidge, National Interest)
When the government sells debt, private investors purchasing government debt to cover deficits come at the cost of whatever other projects those investors might have otherwise financed. As economist James Buchanan put it, spending that is funded by debt is “in effect chopping up the apple trees for firewood, thereby reducing the yield of the orchard forever.” Plus, there are foreign policy implications of seeking foreign purchasers for our debt.
Debt-financed spending also shifts tax burdens from present to future generations. While bond investors trust that their loan will be paid back with interest, future generations will bear the cost of the unproductive government spending from today. This will be paid for either through tax increases or by paying the debt off with surprise inflation, harming the purchasing power of ordinary Americans.
As the debt comes due, Admiral Mullen’s warnings come to fruition. We end up with weaker private investment, resulting in weaker innovation and missed opportunities to harness those innovations for defense purposes. Meanwhile, Americans will see higher tax rates as well as a weaker dollar and quickly realize that it pays more not to work. The less people produce, the weaker our economic growth, and the poorer we all become.