Brian

this one sorcerer who lives across the street keeps casting a spell that changes my opinions about stuff and i love it

Price discrimination will be a massive, massive battle in the coming years . . .

In fairness, you'll still need huge tracts of land

Highly recommend "Chaos on the Bridge" if you haven't seen it. Documentary about TNG's early days.

MCP is the coming of Web 2.0 2.0 - Anil Dash A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

It’s been fun watching the unlikely rise of MCP as a standard, which is open and messy in a way that mimics the dynamics of the good parts of Web 2.0. Maybe something interesting will happen! www.anildash.com//2025/05/20/...

A stacked bar chart showing the share of total government spending by category for a selection of OECD countries. The data is from 2022, the latest year available. The countries are Finland, Germany, Japan, Sweden, Greece, the UK, Chile, Australia, South Korea, and the US. The categories are Social protection, Health, Education, Economic affairs, Public services, Other (which includes public safety, environment, housing, and recreation/culture), and Defense. For some categories, such as public services, the share spent is fairly similar across countries: it ranges from a low of 9% in Japan to a high of 15% in the US and Finland. In other categories, such as social protection, the difference across countries is much larger: from a low of 21% in the US to a high of 44% in Finland.

What do governments spend money on?

like clockwork:

A perfect moment in time with your best friends:

Brenda Carroll really needs to stop using my email in all her sweepstakes applications. One day I'll find you Brenda!!

Wolf Parade - "I'll Believe In Anything" (2005)

I visited once a few years back. It was awesome, but you're right that nowadays you might need to be on a school trip. Maybe they'll loosen up again.

- watch a jeweler do a repair in diamond district basement
- Tour of UN
- sailo.com charter boat / Helitour / double decker bus / horse carriage ride
- Fifth Ave / Soho flagship stores
- Gold reserves at NY Fed
- Yankees game
- Teddy Roosevelt home / Fraunces Tavern / Merchant House
- Wax Museum

- Summer Streets bike ride
- The Summit at Vanderbilt One
- CAMP store
- Indoor skiing in NJ mall
- Tenement Museum
- Ice Skate central Park
- Roosevelt Isl. cable car
- Bowlero / Lasertag
- Red Caboose hobby store
- The Yard playground Gov Isl.
- Chinese New Year in Chinatown

Not really an apples-to-apples comparison if you don't include the caloric cost of paving a smooth road though . . .

Carry - Grow your net worth with smart tax optimization Carry is an all-in-one platform for tax-advantaged accounts, investments and strategy for business owners and high earning professionals.

These days there are a bunch of software platforms for self-employed folks like carry.com. Do some googling for providers; ultimately self-employed can be way more tax efficient than W2.

Trump’s newest grift: Building a cryptocurrency empire while destroying its regulators Inside the Trump family’s sprawling crypto empire — from memecoins to mining — and how Trump is using presidential power to dismantle the regulators who could stop it

Newsletter: Inside the Trump family’s sprawling crypto empire — from memecoins to mining — and how Trump is using presidential power to dismantle the regulators who could stop it.

www.citationneeded.news/trump-crypto...

This is the fuel mix in ERCOT (Texas) for the past week (top) vs same week 4 years ago (bottom). Solar generation is in yellow. Solar barely registered in 2021; today it accounts for roughly 50% of generation during the day in the shoulder months.
data via @gridstatus.io

european tourism to the united states: freefalling

When does the book come out?

Remember in his first presidency when, as a prelude to his North Korea negotiations, he tried to convince the world he'd use nukes? Lots of wasted ink spilled back then too.

At least macroeconomics is getting some attention? Never heard the term "comparative advantage" so much in my life.

Age verification laws aren’t protecting kids. They’re building surveillance systems.
> 20 U.S. states want websites to collect IDs to block “harmful content” but what’s getting blocked is LGBTQ+ art, fan spaces, and education. The risk? Massive data leaks + government overreach. Our blog highlights👇

(with El Salvador jail being the downside case) 😞

Fair enough. But an upside case might be that having your work banned is great Streisand-effect PR. Look what happened to Ginsberg / Howl. Or Serrano / Piss Christ. Might kick-start an academic career with some publicity for those who want to gamble.

Courts will likely strike this stuff down by the time a complete application/admission cycle is complete. Just tell your students to have a backup. Don't count us out yet!

It's like RFK's brainworm was deputized by the virus kingdom: A sort of long-hatched plot, Bene Gesserit-style, to bring plagues back to the human race.

Brainworm and viruses winning this round . . .

Five years since the NBA canceled its remaining games March 11 2020 due to COVID and the lockdowns began shortly thereafter.

Surprised I haven't seen more retrospectives or anniversary coverage of it this week.

Feels like a big milestone to me.

There will always be a lag in real time translation even if computers continue to get faster and faster. Sentence structure is to blame. Beautiful to look at though.

Slightly better map

Didn't realize the federal government owns 80% of the land in Nevada:
www.nytimes.com/2016/01/06/u...

The IRS cuts have got to be in the top five dumbest Trump moves.