Lula and Bolsonaro Deadlocked as Brazil Heads to Polls

Three new polls show President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and right-wing challenger Flávio Bolsonaro locked in a statistical dead heat as Brazilians vote on Sunday. The tie caps a bruising campaign fought over living costs, corruption and the Bolsonaro

• Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent waved off the climb in US yields and talk of an AI bubble, calling the rise in benchmark rates consistent with global trends even as some measures sit at two-decade highs. Tech traders took the cue: QQQ advanced 1% and Nvidia gained 1.3%, extending a 3.9% run over the week. Bloomberg →
• AI dealmaking powered Hong Kong's summer share sales to a record, with bankers skipping the seasonal break to keep pace even as the city's equities endured a bruising selloff. The fundraising frenzy confirms the AI capital rush has outgrown Silicon Valley. Bloomberg →
• Rising interest costs and a looming debt-ceiling standoff leave US sovereign debt increasingly hostage to market sentiment, with one assessment calling the medium-term fiscal path unsustainable. Buyers showed no alarm on the day: the TSX gained 1%, CIBC rose 1.1% to lead Canadian bank gains, and SPY added 0.7%. Fortune →
• Iran's leverage over the Strait of Hormuz is slipping as Gulf producers reroute crude through pipelines, tanker transfers and military-protected crossings, pushing exports outside Iran back to roughly prewar levels. WTI eased 0.5% to $90.68, though the contract remains up nearly 50% year over year. OilPrice.com →
• China closed more than 670 lenders last year — a record — as regulators consolidate their way toward a sturdier financial system, and Fitch still ranks smaller banks as the sector's weakest link. The purge shows Beijing would rather shrink its way to stability than let regional stress fester. Financial Times →
• US airlines are balking at Boeing's latest 737 Max flight-management software, deterred by a string of bugs that reaches well beyond the flaw grabbing headlines this week. Carrier reluctance hands the manufacturer another reputational setback as it works to win back trust. The Air Current →
• Nearly 1,400 workers at an Ohio truck factory received layoff notices just days before a Trump rally in the state, a gut punch to the working-class coalition behind Republican victories. Freight-sector weakness is putting labor-market softness front and center ahead of the midterms. PBS →
• Disney cut 300 jobs and put hundreds more roles at risk as management presses ahead with its One Disney consolidation. The restructuring is the latest cost squeeze in a media industry still hunting for growth. TheStreet →

No playoff games yesterday.

Virtue Ethics

Think of the people you trust most. Chances are you trust them not because they memorized a rulebook but because of who they are: the colleague who owns her mistakes, the friend who turns up when it is inconvenient, the neighbor whose kindness seems effortless. Virtue ethics builds its entire account of morality around that observation. Rather than asking which acts are permitted or forbidden, it asks what kind of person to be — and insists the answer shapes everything else. Parents grasped this long before philosophers systematized it: raising a child well means cultivating honesty, generosity, and courage, not issuing a list of dos and don'ts.

At the heart of the view lies the virtue itself, from the Greek *arête*, meaning excellence. A virtue is not a habit or a policy but a disposition so entrenched in a person's character that, as philosophers like to say, it goes all the way down. Consider honesty. Someone who refrains from cheating only because honesty is the best policy, or because she fears being caught, does not yet count as honest in the virtue ethicist's eyes. The genuinely honest person treats "to do otherwise would be dishonest" as a reason in itself, and acts on it without calculation. Virtues, on this picture, are stable traits that govern how we notice, feel, desire, and choose.

Aristotle, the tradition's most influential figure, argued that such traits are acquired through practice and guided by *phronesis* — practical wisdom, the discernment to see what a particular situation requires. Courage, for instance, sits between cowardice and recklessness, and locating that mean is a skill learned by living. His larger target was *eudaimonia*, a rich term usually translated as flourishing: a life going well, not merely one that feels pleasant. Nor was he alone. In ancient China, Confucius and his follower Mencius developed a strikingly parallel picture in which moral self-cultivation, exemplary models, and settled dispositions form the backbone of ethical life.

For centuries this way of thinking dominated Western moral philosophy, then faded as rivals rose to prominence. Utilitarianism judged acts by their consequences; Kantian deontology judged them by conformity to duty. Both, critics charged, treated morality as a matter of external rules while neglecting character, motives, moral education, friendship, and the emotions. The revival arrived in 1958, when Elizabeth Anscombe published "Modern Moral Philosophy," a paper so incisive that it relaunched the field. Her complaint energized every camp: Kantians rediscovered their own neglected doctrine of virtue, and consequentialists built virtue into their theories too, producing a rich and contested landscape rather than a single doctrine.

Sharp questions remain. Critics ask whether virtue ethics can actually guide action: if the right act is whatever the virtuous person would characteristically do, how do we identify that person without already knowing what is right? Social psychology adds its own pressure, with studies suggesting that trivial factors — a foul odor, a passing mood — often sway behavior more than any stable trait does. Perhaps character is thinner than the tradition assumes; perhaps the experiments miss something real. Either way, one ancient question survives every modern challenge: not merely what should I do, but who should I be? Nobody holds a settled answer, and that may be exactly why it endures.

Want to go deeper? Read the full Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Virtue Ethics →

• NVIDIA has launched a 64GB configuration of its DGX Spark desktop AI workstation at $4,999, creating a lower-cost entry point for developers running local models. The larger 128GB GB10 system has simultaneously jumped to $6,950, a hike driven by rising memory prices. Servethehome.com →
• Apple has begun replacing iPhone 18 Pro Max handsets affected by cellular service failures on AT&T. Owners who still have a working connection are being urged to update immediately, before the fault cuts them off entirely. Mashable →
• Jagex has announced a fourth RuneScape MMO at RuneFest 2026, carrying the working title RS4. The game is being built in Unreal Engine, though the studio has not disclosed which version of the engine is in use. Techpowerup.com →
• A German Valorant player has been banned because of cheating carried out by a previous owner of their second-hand Ryzen 7 CPU, which Riot's anti-cheat system flagged. With no remedy short of replacing the entire PC, the case exposes how hardware-level bans can follow components through the used market. Kotaku →
• Developers at The Coalition say they are "proud to be one of Xbox's main titles" as Microsoft refocuses on exclusivity around Gears of War: E-Day. The comments signal a deliberate reversal of the multiplatform strategy Xbox pursued in recent years. IGN →
• A technical analysis of The Witcher 3 Remastered on Nintendo Switch 2 details the game's frame rate and resolution on the new console. The findings give prospective buyers concrete performance figures ahead of the port's release. Nintendoeverything.com →