When Beane expanded the plot of Rogers and Hammerstein's Cinderella to a full Broadway play, he actually added a communist revolution subplot. One of Cinderella's stepsisters ends up marrying the revolutionary.
It won’t exactly be the eighth wonder of the world, but it will be big — like, Guinness World Records big.
That’s what President Donald Trump promised last week when he unveiled plans to build a parking garage with space for 32,000 cars as part of his sweeping $22.5 billion renovation of Dulles International Airport.
“We’re building a massive … parking garage that will be right next to the terminal,” he said as he sat in front of a model of the new airport splayed across the top of the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. “It’ll be the largest garage in the world. Thirty-two thousand is big. It will be beautiful.”
The new parking deck got less attention than Trump’s announcement that the long-maligned mobile lounges that have shuttled passengers around Dulles since it opened in 1962 will be retired. But the detail does speak to many travelers’ annoyances with parking at Dulles, most of which is in satellite lots that require a shuttle to get to and from the main terminal.
Still, the big, beautiful deck-to-be stands as one of the Dulles renovation’s most surprising elements, since it would increase the airport’s parking capacity beyond what existing plans say is necessary, would add significant construction and airport operation challenges and would likely tower over the iconic terminal designed by Finnish architect Eero Saarinen.
Dulles currently has just over 22,000 parking spots for travelers, half of them in the distant economy lots. (This reporter almost lost track of their car in one of those lots.) While parking capacity fluctuates during the year (and can be viewed on a daily basis here), the Dulles Master Plan finalized by the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority in July 2025 predicted that the existing number of parking spots available at the airport would suffice until at least 2045.
The plan noted that parking demand can fluctuate based on a number of factors, including “rises in gasoline prices could result in the reduced use of private vehicles.” (Gas prices have risen in the U.S. due in part to the ongoing conflict in Iran.) Still, the authority has already started planning to increase capacity to more than 28,600 spots, most of which would come through the construction of a new parking deck in front of the main terminal building where a surface lot now exists. That three-story deck — to be built between 2031 and 2034 — would fit 6,400 cars.
During his presentation, Trump seemed to be unaware of those plans. “We have an empty site right directly across the street that nobody wanted to tinker with, which is crazy,” he said.
His proposed parking deck — which would go in that same location — would accommodate five times as many cars. But few details exist: The deck wasn’t included in any of the renderings of the new airport that were put out by MWAA and the U.S. Department of Transportation (in fact, the main rendering kept the existing surface lot), and neither agency responded to specific questions about it from NOTUS.
The proposal has drawn skeptical reactions from some parking experts, including Bill Boyle, who owns a parking company in D.C. and runs the Washington Parking Association, a trade group.
“I looked up the biggest terminal garages in the U.S.,” he told NOTUS. “One is in Seattle and has 13,000 spots, and the other is in Detroit and has 11,500. This would be two-and-half times bigger than those two. That creates all kinds of issues with throughput of vehicles, wayfinding, ventilation and fire safety. There’s no precedent for building a parking deck this big.”
The world’s biggest parking lot is outside the West Edmonton Mall in Canada; it fits 20,000 cars in surface lots.
Without specifics, it’s impossible to know the actual physical scale of the proposed parking deck. But if MWAA kept to Trump’s pledge that most of it would be above-ground — “People don’t like down underneath,” he said — it could reach up to 15 stories. That would make the parking deck taller than the main terminal, which tops out at 65 feet.
It would also likely block most views of the historic terminal itself for passengers arriving by Metro or car, a concern that MWAA was already aware of with its plan for a three-story parking deck in front of the terminal. The master plan says it would address viewshed concerns by raising Saarinen Circle — a traffic circle in front of the terminal — “approximately 11 to 15 feet” above where it is now.
Boyle also said that building a record-breaking parking deck while the airport remains in operation would be challenging. “When you build it you’ll have to have cranes, materials and hauling routes,” he said. “You’re building an enormous garage in a constrained space and doing it while everything is functioning around it, and I don’t see anyone addressing that problem.”
It’s also unclear what such a parking deck would cost. A February 2026 report from the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies estimated that each above-ground spot in a parking deck in and around Washington, D.C. can cost $29,000 to build. While that’s below the national average of $52,000, it would also mean that Trump’s proposed 32,000 parking spots could cost more than $900 million. (And that price tag would go up if any levels were underground; the UCLA report says that underground spots can cost $40,000 a piece to construct.)
Since November 2022, there has been an alternative for getting to and from Dulles: Metro. The Silver Line station Dulles sees anywhere from 1,300 to 4,300 entries per day, depending on the time of year.
“Why should we build the world’s largest parking garage in the world on an airport we just invested $6B to connect to Metro?” tweeted Virginia Democratic Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell.
But Trump has touted the proximity and convenience of his new parking deck. “People will literally be able to park their car and walk 15 yards and be in the terminal,” he said.
“It will be a parking garage the likes of which no one has even seen before!” offered one commenter on Reddit, in what could be seen as either a high compliment or a sarcastic criticism.
If this garage is paired with eliminating ALL of the public surface parking at Dulles, it might be a good deal. The surface lots take up about 150 acres. That extra land could be turned into an additional runway, parkland, or housing.
A recent Echelon Insights poll showed, among other things, that the idea of a free market economy polls substantially better than the idea of capitalism. The gap is present for all groups, but it’s especially pronounced among Democrats and especially especially among younger Democrats.
Poll results are, of course, highly influenced by the wording of questions.
Free market economy contains the word “free,” which is appealing, while all kinds of -isms sound a bit sketchy. I’ve been in dozens of conversations with very well-informed, very historically minded people in which they try to explain to me the difference between socialism and social democracy. And the two ideas poll quite differently! People who are really into drawing a fine-grained distinction between the two ideas get mad when I offer the opinion that the main practical distinction is that countries where people speak Germanic languages tend to have social democratic parties whereas those where people speak Romance languages have socialism.
Note, though, that in multilingual Switzerland, literally the exact same political party is called the Parti socialiste in French and the Sozialdemokratische Partei in German. English-speaking Americans have different reactions to these terms, but they mean the same thing.
By the same token, these results might just make you think that capitalism needs a rebrand.
In the Cold War era, American leaders used to talk about the free enterprise system rather than capitalism. But, piggybacking on what I said a couple of weeks ago about the need for capitalism’s would-be saviors to embrace dramatic land-use reform, arguably one reason that people react so differently to capitalism and free markets is that they really do emphasize different ideas.
Casual anti-capitalism is not a policy program
I hear a lot of what you might call casual anti-capitalism in sports and pop-culture media. Some of this is just that media professionals tend to be pretty left-wing, on average. But most of what I’m talking about isn’t serious commentary about specific economic policies.
Rather, I think these commentators are reacting negatively to greedy behavior that compromises other values.
If you’re annoyed that the new second-apron salary-cap rules in the N.B.A. are making it harder to keep your favorite team together, you might feel angry about capitalism — which is to say the owners colluding to suppress player salaries. Or if Disney keeps cynically churning out artistically inert live-action remakes of classic animated films, you might attribute that to “capitalism.”
People who work in creative fields live all the time with the tensions between commercial imperatives and other things that we care about. Journalism is at its best when it’s making good-faith efforts to tell true, important stories in a clear way and bring facts and analysis to light. But it’s also a business.
At one point in my career, an important aspect of the business of journalism was trying to write headlines that would go viral on Facebook. At another point, it was search engine optimization. This stuff was tedious. One thing I really appreciate about writing for you all on Substack is that with a loyal and engaged audience, I can focus much more on trying to be actually interesting rather than just copycatting. This sense of being yanked around and forced by the suits to do things you don’t want to do and that don’t reflect your values is annoying and you might shake your head ruefully at capitalism, the series of abstract forces that pushes us in these directions.
Similarly, whether we’re talking about negativity bias or any of the many other problems in the media, I think it’s underrated to an extent how much the audience is the problem.
I’m really frustrated by the high level of attention given to leftist insurgents running in safe seats relative to Josh Turek, Mary Peltola, and Roy Cooper who are doing the work of trying to win pivotal races in tough states. Some of this is bias or sloppy thinking by journalists and some of it reflects the (I think somewhat shortsighted) strategic choices of the moderate contenders.
But a lot of it is just capitalism — meaning objective economic incentives.
Writing about the Bernie faction’s long war on the Democratic Party establishment reliably drives engagement. Everyone sort of grudgingly acknowledging that Peltola is the best possible recruit in Alaska isn’t a moneymaker.
Existing in a capitalist structure rather than an idealized journalism-school seminar drives people away from perfect coverage and compromises people’s freedoms to do their work the way they think it should be done. The problem with trying to elevate this sort of casual anti-capitalism to a real political program is that obviously having everyone work for a state-owned movie studio would mean less artistic freedom, not more.
The Soviet Union did produce some great films. And I’m sure lots of Soviet journalists provided accurate, timely news about various events happening around the country that were a genuine service to their readers. But in practice, the alternative to a market system isn’t unrestricted freedom to do what you want unburdened by financial incentives; it’s that you’re subject to a comprehensive set of political incentives with limited options for exit.
In a free market, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to get the money to do exactly what you want (in fact, the odds are strongly against it), but at least nobody’s preventing you from trying.
As someone who is skeptical of excessive sentimentality about small business, one thing that is genuinely great about the small business paradigm is that you’re free of the pressure to maximize profits. You need to find willing customers. You need revenue that exceeds costs. But if you’re an independent restaurant owner who strongly believes a certain dish should be prepared a certain way, you can just do that. If you’re Olive Garden and your stock price dips, you’ll be targeted by activist investors who will force the company to improve its financial performance. Oftentimes the way to do this is to genuinely make the product better, which is why capitalism on average produces good economic results.
But the remorselessness of financial markets, shareholder value, and the profit motive have their downsides, and there’s a good reason that a large share of the population (including me, obviously) ends up running small firms.
And in general, the freer the market, the easier it is to escape that kind of remorseless financial logic.
Anyone can quickly and easily start a Substack — or a newsletter on a competing platform, or a video-native content-creator business — because for First Amendment reasons, there are essentially no barriers to entry into journalism.
When I was a young blogger, this struck a lot of journalists as intuitively wrong. Why should people trained in the canons of the profession need to compete on a level playing field with randos on the internet? Barbers do not face the same free-speech issues and, as a result, to cut someone’s hair you need to run a licensing gauntlet that involves (depending on where you work) 1,000 hours of training in New York and Texas, 1,500 in Georgia and Illinois, and a staggering 2,100 hours in Iowa.
Now obviously there are professions, such as airline pilots, where there’s a bona fide safety reason for licensing requirements. But I don’t think anyone believes that haircuts in Iowa are dramatically better than haircuts in New York or Texas.
These licensing rules are rent-seeking and protectionism for incumbents.
And of course, as I wrote on July 6, while the American housing market is extremely capitalistic in the sense that the key decision-makers are profit-seeking investors, it is very much not a free market. If you own a parcel of land and would like to build a mid-rise apartment on it, the odds are very high that this is illegal. And it will continue to be illegal no matter how many bona fide safety or environmental externality rules you comply with. It’s just normally the case in the United States of America that you cannot build a four-story, eight-unit building on a plot of land that you own and then rent it out to willing customers.
I can shave my own head, but I can’t pay you to shave my head unless you have a permit from the government.
Avarice and scarcity exist beyond policy
In many people’s minds, Oliver Stone’s satirical classic “Wall Street” summed up capitalism as well as anything else: “Greed is good.”
This is, I think, an over-read of Adam Smith’s point that “it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
There’s a difference between a healthy appreciation for how positive-sum economic exchanges allow us all to benefit from mutual pursuit of self-interest and the notion that we should valorize selfishness. For starters, a healthy market economy actually depends to a fair amount on people having integrity. I had some trouble with my old Prius recently that actually turned out to be more minor than I initially feared, and it was returned with minimal intervention and expense by the good people at Downeast Toyota in Brewer, who absolutely could have taken me for a ride if they felt like it.
To some extent, of course, reputational considerations militate in favor of the dealership behaving well.
But they could have gotten away with it without incurring any reputational damage in this case. My suspicion is that the people who work there, like most people, are both somewhat self-interested and also somewhat invested in their self-image as good people who behave in a morally correct manner. Promulgating the view that everyone should behave in a maximally avaricious way makes all of society work worse.
What I think is really important to understand here is that greed, cynicism, and exploitative behavior exist beyond questions of ownership structure.
We’re all counting on our police officers, politicians, teachers, generals, and bureaucrats to act with integrity and an eye toward the public interest rather than to behave in a narrowly greedy way. And we can all think of examples of people in public sector roles living up to the loftiest ideals of their professions and also of examples of them failing to do so. Many hospitals and the vast majority of universities have a nonprofit corporate structure, but that doesn’t prevent their administrators and other stakeholders from behaving in cynical and self-interested ways at times.
By the same token, a lot of what’s frustrating about “capitalism” is just actual scarcity — of homes, medical care, child care, or anything else. A system where there’s not enough hospital beds for the patients who would benefit from them is going to be unsatisfactory whether the scarce beds are rationed by price or by administrative fiat.
More often than not (though certainly not always), the solution to unsatisfactory scarcity is going to be freer markets. And oftentimes the reason for bad, scarcity-inducing regulatory policy is that people can be — and often are — avaricious and profit-minded in their political lobbying, just like in their business dealings.
The biggest problem with “capitalism” as an economic system is that it doesn’t channel resources to people when they actually need them — when they have young kids at home or when they fall sick or are disabled or elderly. We need a social safety net and the provision of public services. But this doesn’t mean imposing regulations that restrict the freedom of consenting adults to engage in voluntary market transactions.
A strong welfare state enhances the freedom provided by free markets, but regulatory burdens undermine the benefits of a market economy while leaving in place almost everything undesirable about capitalism.
When Trump and Netanyahu started this war, much of the attention in the business world was focused on the price of crude oil (Brent, WTI) and the derivative products (gasoline, diesel, fertilizer, plastics). When the Strait was closed and then reopened via the MOU, prices fluctuated accordingly, but what has been of most interest to me is that the market prices of those materials have not continued to rise as much as might be expected.
Everyone who tracks the news knows that the U.S. and other countries are tapping their "strategic petroleum reserves" stored underground (some small countries don't have such and are suffering disproportionately).
The second group of factors that mitigated price rises was increased use of alternative energy, restrictions on energy usage, increased production in non-Gulf nations etc.
But from near the beginning, I heard analysts on Bloomberg say that China was modifying its policy on oil. China apparently has immense reserves of stored oil, but were still net oil importers (see chart above for 2016-2026). After the war started, they have markedly decreased their importation of oil, apparently using some of their reserves and altering domestic policies toward conservation.
Why? In part, it's basic economic good sense when the Brent price goes from 50 to 90 to cut purchases. But this is a super-smart country with well-thought-out international policies. They also have a sort of alliance with Iran, which I believe was one of their sources for imported oil in recent years. By cutting their daily imports from 12 million to 7 million they buffer the world's loss of I think 5 million a day that was passing Hormuz.
Is it in their best interest (remembering that they think years/decades in advance, not election cycles) to keep the oil price rise modest so as not to harm the economies of the world they export to? Or do they want to keep the price down because a huge price rise might cause the U.S. to stop the war and they would rather the war go on longer so the U.S. depletes its own reserves and the continuation of the war leads to more and more destruction of the U.S. military capabilities? I suspect the latter, because I think there is way more erosion of U.S. capabilites in the Gulf than Washington has (or will) admit.
Also note that Iran wants to charge fees for transit of Hormuz and that those fees would be paid in Chinese yuan, not U.S. dollars. (a relevant WSJ article is behind a paywall) This was is weakening the U.S. military capabilities, depleting strategic petroleum reserves, ruining the U.S. diplomatic status around the world, and causing unhappiness and political dissent within the U.S. China has a lot of control over how this will unfold. Stay tuned.
A US government map of Africa mislabeled every country during a state department presentation at a global conference in Brazil this week, causing a stir among attenders who took screenshots and posted them online.
Reuters viewed a video of the presentation given at the Aids 2026 conference in Rio de Janeiro, which shows the errant map displayed halfway during a presentation about the state department’s new health agreements.
A Reuters analysis found the image of the map included in the presentation contained an artificial intelligence watermark that signals it was made with OpenAI tools. The company did not respond to a request for comment.
The state department said it took “full responsibility” for the confusion caused and that the map had been produced by a team member who hastily changed the slide deck before the event.
The map showed Nigeria, where the US currently has several hundred troops deployed, as landlocked in the Sahara desert. Mozambique, which is in south-eastern Africa, was relocated to the Horn of Africa, while Côte d’Ivoire in west Africa was placed on the other side of the continent.
Screenshots of the map first appeared in a Substack post by the Aids expert Emily Bass and were widely shared on LinkedIn, with one post garnering about 40,000 views.
“Whoever created and approved this slide did not know where countries in Africa are and did not care to check their work,” wrote Matt Petit, who focuses on AI and geopolitics at the Atlantic Council, in the post.
In a statement, the state department said: “We take full responsibility for the confusion and misrepresentation it caused for attendees, including our African partners.” The speaker at the conference was Jeff Graham, the top US health envoy who oversees the initiative known as the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, or Pepfar. He did not reply to requests for comment.
The state department said the discussions at the conference were “substantive and constructive” despite the map and that it remained committed to fighting Aids with real results. The Trump administration’s decision last year to pause funding pending a review disrupted aid programs worldwide but Pepfar’s core work such as the provision of life-saving drugs has largely resumed. The US is scaling back other areas of its spending including on prevention and surveillance, and plans to fully phase out the program in South Africa.
UPDATED, with response of Google Tonight I typed just one sentence into Google Earth and put refugees near the Mexican border. Then I planted a nuclear plant in Iran. Then I put a fatal crash on a street in Amsterdam. Google’s own satellite imagery underneath all three. What on earth is Google doing?
Google spent twenty years building the reference the world checks against.
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Today it added a button that makes things up. Google Earth on the web now has image generation built in, powered by Nano Banana 2. It went live today, worldwide, for everyone, with no waitlist and no application.
You open Google Earth. You zoom to any coordinates on the planet. You click create image. You type what you want to see. The model takes Google’s satellite, aerial and 3D imagery of that exact spot as its starting point and gives you back a photorealistic picture. If it isn’t quite right you refine it.
I added a hospital and a bomb crater in Gaza in seconds with Google Earth. I can’t believe I just typed this.
Google’s own description of the “fun feature” is that Nano Banana “creates concepts grounded in the real world.”
Grounded in the real world means the invented thing is welded to genuine coordinates, drawn on genuine imagery, often in the same colours and the same light and at the same angle as the picture beside it.
The forgery does not have to look convincing on its own. It inherits the credibility of the map it was born on.
The announcement of 487 words, written by Bryan Horowitz, Product Manager, Google Earth from just a few hours ago baffled me. His instruction to the planet is six words long:
type whatever you want to see
That is the gate. That is the whole gate.
Elsewhere in the same post he suggests it’s fun to let your imagination run wild.
The post opens by asking whether you have ever looked at an empty lot in your neighbourhood and imagined a community garden. It closes by telling you to pick a spot on the map and start bringing your ideas to life.
It is live in every country tonight. Free. No application.
Somebody is going to bring an idea to life before morning. It will not be a community garden, trust me.
This new feature will guaranteed lead to governments, factions fighting infowars, trolls etc.
A government official wants a strike to look bigger than it was. A faction wants a hospital to look flattened, or intact, depending which one is holding it this week. A troll wants forty thousand reposts before lunch.
This morning all three needed a screenshot, a second browser tab and a little patience. Tonight they need a sentence.
We take misinformation seriously - every image created with Nano Banana in Google Earth includes the SynthID digital watermark, so if someone is unsure about an image, they can ask the Gemini app or use Lens in Search to see if the image was Al-generated. In addition, we prevent image creation on harmful topics and are continually updating our protections.
One clause in there is checkable tonight, so I checked it. Google prevents image creation on harmful topics. Refugees at a border. A nuclear plant in Iran. A fatal crash on an Amsterdam street. A hospital with a bomb crater in Gaza.
Nothing was refused. No warning, no softened output, no suggestion to try a different prompt.
Now look at the rest of the answer. The watermark is Google’s. The app that reads the watermark is Google’s. The search that reads it is Google’s. Every road out of the problem runs back through the company that built it.
I understand that Google has Google products to run Google checks. Planet Earth is bigger than Google.
I put one of tonight’s clips on X and asked nobody to check it. Hive, one of the biggest names in AI detection outside Google, scanned the post on its own and published a verdict underneath.
It's a strange world.... the fake image is not seen as fake, but there is some fake sound in a clip that has no sound at all.
The video came out of Google’s model minutes earlier. The audio track is silence — I measured it. Minus 91 decibels, first frame to last.
The only thing Hive found suspicious was music that does not exist.
Hive has a defence and it is a fair one, so let me make it before they do. What I posted was a screen recording, and a recording of a screen is a real recording.
That defence is the problem, not the excuse.
Fakes do not travel as clean files with their credentials intact. They travel as screen recordings, re-encodes, screenshots of screenshots, filmed off somebody’s phone in a hurry. The one case where the detector has an excuse is the only case that ever happens.
Google’s answer works if the image reaches you through Google, unaltered, and you already suspected it.
That is not how any of this arrives.
There is another problem that Google doesn’t count. The official who now gets to look at a genuine photograph of a genuine atrocity and say: AI.
He doesn’t need the tool for that. He needs everyone to know the tool exists.
If you have never verified anything in your life, here is why a less playfull mapping app matters.
When a photograph turns up online claiming to show a bombed hospital, a refugee camp or a burning refinery, somebody has to decide whether it’s true before a newspaper prints it. What they have is a reference — a picture of that same place, taken from above or from the street, that everybody agrees is real.
They put the claim next to the reference and they look at the gap.
Google built that reference and it is not a small thing. Street View passed 10 million miles of road in 2019. It now holds more than 280 billion images across over 110 countries. Google Earth turned twenty this year. Between them they are a photographic record of the physical world, and — this is the part that matters — every frame of it is dated.
Dated is the whole trick. If you know when the picture was taken, you can prove when something appeared.
In July 2014 the Russian Ministry of Defence held a press conference and produced satellite images about the downing of MH17. Bellingcat compared them against the dated archive in Google Earth and found the landscape didn’t match the dates claimed. The MoD images were fabricated.
Bellingcat published the walkthrough under the headline Who to Trust, Google or the Russian MoD?
In 2015, that was a rhetorical question. Not anymore.
Volkel
There is a village in North Brabant, ninety minutes from my desk, called Volkel. It has an air base. That air base stores American B61 nuclear bombs, a fact the Dutch government has never confirmed, which became public through a leaked diplomatic cable and was later described by a former Dutch prime minister as absolutely pointless.
On Google’s maps, Volkel spent years as a rash of coloured pixels. So did the ammunition depot at Staphorst. So did a Patriot missile site in Limburg, and several royal palaces, because the Dutch approach to hiding a military installation was to paint a large abstract artwork on top of it. The photographer Mishka Henner collected them into a gallery and sold them as art, which tells you how well the hiding worked.
Tonight it is all in the open, and anyone who wants a missile site in Limburg can simply add one.
Now notice what that entire twenty-year argument assumed.
You only censor a map that works. Every blur, every polygon, every diplomatic request was an admission that Google Earth was accurate enough to be dangerous. Governments were not worried the map would lie. They were worried it would tell the truth.
Google’s position never wavered. It does not blur satellite imagery by choice. Sites come pre-obscured because a government or a supplier requires it as a condition of flying over.
So to take one real building out of Google Earth, you need a state.
To put a nuclear plant into Iran, I needed a sentence.
The asymmetry is not meant to be funny. For twenty years the danger was a map that revealed something true, and there was a procedure for that — a law, a ministry, a condition on the overflight permit. Tonight the danger is a map that shows something which was never there, and for that there is no procedure at all.
The cars nobody moved
Somebody already did the hard version of what I did tonight.
In February 2025 a Google Earth satellite pass photographed a parking lot at the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Manama, Bahrain. Ordinary cars, ordinary rows.
A year later those cars were on X, in a photograph of the same base supposedly flattened by an Iranian drone strike.
Same cars. Same rows. Same spaces, vehicle for vehicle.
Somebody generated a war zone and forgot to move the Toyotas.
The Tehran Times posted it as a before-and-after of a US radar site in Qatar. It was not Qatar. It was Bahrain. The “before” was a genuine Google Earth capture from 10 February 2025. The “after” was made with Google AI — AFP and BBC Verify both ran it through Google’s signature detector and got a hit. It passed 950,000 views before anyone counted the parking spaces.
Building it took six steps. Screenshot Earth. Open Gemini. Upload. Prompt. Download. Crop. Six chances to get bored, and one forger who got bored at the parking lot.
Tonight, Manama can be changed in seconds with Nano Banana.
How to fight this?
Upload a suspicious satellite image to Gemini, ad @verifyai and it will tell you if Google is behind the forgery.
Adjudicate off Google entirely. Sentinel-2 is free and refreshes every five or six days. Landsat, Planet, Airbus, Vantor. You want a sensor with an orbit, a collection time and a resolution you can check.
Take two collects. Todd Myers at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency said it before any of this existed: for every collect, you need a duplicate collect from different sources.
Check the orbit. If an image claims a specific satellite at a specific hour, the published orbital elements will tell you whether anything was up there. The most boring check in the toolkit, and the only one no model can fake, because it isn’t about the pixels.
Disclosure
I build ImageWhisperer. Google technology is part of it, not the whole of it. No single score is ever the finding.
Digital Digging with Henk van Ess is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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