Nobody tell him, but the $2000 Trump Tariff rebate checks are actually a form of socialist Unconditional Bonus Income (UBI). He already did this a couple of times during the Covid-19 pandemic - if he keeps it up, it will become expected, and turn into a real Unconditional Basic Income.

#econsky

Episodes have been happening every week or 10 days, nobody knows how long they will keep going. Previous series like this have lasted as many as 80 episodes.
The USGS maintains three live streams on YouTube, where you can catch them as they happen.

No problems with a Turk named after Mohammed (Mehmet) being Medicare/Medicaid administrator, either.

Don’t expect this to be a universal phenomenon. What happens in speakers of languages like Chinese or Vietnamese where words are unitary and don’t have components to sequence, or polysynthetic languages that don’t have “words” at all?

Jose Delgado’s 1969 book “Physical control of the mind” summarized the destruction of an entire philosophical tradition of mind-body duality. An astounding number of philosophers still haven’t gotten the message.

Where are the videos from surveillance cameras, doorbell cameras, and dashcams?

The experts are stuck in their thought box. There are well understood reasons to conduct end-to-end tests of complex systems, as rocket scientists prove regularly.

Trump’s reasons aren’t technical - they’re saber-rattling. He believes sabers are no good unless you regularly shed blood with them.

We need better hurricane categories. Saffir-Simpson is fine for intensity, but there should be a magnitude scale that includes size, storm surge, and rainfall. Floods kill far more people than focused winds.

You’ve built in security resilience, and now you’ve learned that with a megascale service you need availability resilience, too. A good CIO will know the phrase “provider diversity“, and with your backend systems entirely dependent upon AWS, you don’t have it.

Concentration makes choosing #2 easier

Tried my first purchase with the help of AI yesterday -- did not go well. Two of the AI's suggestions weren't what I asked for, the third had a conventional error: the description in the catalog entry title was contradicted by the description in the details.

The word for this is "trustworthiness".

There’s already precedent for this in Congress. The Senate has two-member districts - the district is the entire state.

The OpenWorm project tried this approach and failed. What should be done differently next time?

Canada as a 51st state keeps coming up. Canadians should respond to absurdity with absurdity, and demand statehood for each one of their 13 provinces and territories, as a "start of a new America". But that would be spun as "we're negotiating", so it's probably better to just say "never".

Convenience absolutely overrides philosophy without a second thought. The first place that ever collected one of my fingerprints was Blockbuster Video, long before the DMV or any other government agency got around to it.

They go grocery shopping just like the rest of us, and are just as disturbed by the high prices at checkout.
But they suffer from a cognitive dissociative disorder. When they sit down in their offices to write, or in conference rooms to make decisions, they have no memories of ever being there.

Windows 10 support ended Wednesday. Not giving Microsoft any more of my login & other private data, so extended support is out.
Linux MInt, Ubuntu interim & LTS editions all failed in multiple ways on my HP ProDesk 600 G2. Veracrypt & ProtonVPN support isn't really there.
New Mac Mini should work.

Terrestrial History One of <em>Esquire</em>'s Most Anticipated Books of 2025<br /> One of <em>Literary Hub</em>'s Most Anticipated Books of 2025<br /><br /> A family saga following four generations on a time-bending jou...

Joe Mungo Reed's Terrestrial History is a puzzler. It sets up to be an epic like Robinson's Mars Trilogy, but then kind of evaporates, as if he got bored with the amount of writing that would need. But he invents a new way to end a time travel story along the way.

wwnorton.com/books/978132...

“obviously a plan devised by them years ago.” Yet the Trump administration is totally blindsided and can only give a knee-jerk reaction. In history books this will go down as a massive intelligence failure. But I repeat myself.

Uncovering the heterogeneity behind cross-cultural variation in antisocial punishment Antisocial punishment in public good games, i.e., punishment of individuals who contributed the same or more than their punisher, varies substantially…

Been looking for this for weeks: Bruhin et al. found that up to 19% of subjects from English Speaking, Protestant, and Confucian cultures will choose a lose-lose outcome, while in Orthodox/Ex-Communist and Arabic speaking cultures up to 53% of subjects will.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

We’re not there yet. POTUS has legal immunity, but not political immunity. There’s still the possibility (faint, but there) of impeachment, conviction, and removal from office.
And even the legal immunity is only for official acts against federal law. Immunity from state laws is still unresolved

It’s so frustrating when science PR is so bad that you can’t tell if a study is any good.

The mechanical mechanism of the piano flings the hammers at the strings. Once they’re in motion, no “touch” by the musician can affect the impact. It’s all in the dampers, controlled by release and pedal.

Nobody noticed that the 7 in 007 has a gun barrel and trigger attached?

“Audience capture” is a powerful drug. There’s vastly more engagement to be found arguing which “interpretation” of quantum mechanics is more wrong, than in trying to explain how in quantum field theory particles don’t exist.
Not to mention the “replication crisis” in social & biomedical sciences.

Custom sequenced microRNA (not to be confused with messenger RNA), with MRI-guided neurosurgery to get it to the right place inside the brain, plus infinite markup for a one-time cure that lasts a lifetime and doesn’t generate recurring revenue. $2.5 million doesn’t seem out of the question.

The death rays that guard life - Works in Progress Magazine We disinfect water before we drink it. Why don’t we disinfect the air before we breathe it?

Worried about whether to wear a mask against Covid-19 and Flu this season? Too bad there are no certifications for sanitized air that facilities could post on their doors the way they had "Come in, it's Kool inside" in the 1950s. [Kool was a brand of cigarette]

worksinprogress.co/issue/the-de...

When you take an item off the shelf, look at the price, say to yourself “that’s too expensive for me“ and put it back, who pays?

Need to convince Trump that these states should be expelled for disloyalty, “in order to form more perfect Union”. Easier than occupying them forever. SCOTUS will back him up this time.

North of Houston there‘s a spot where I-45 is crossed by five separate high-voltage transmission lines all sharing the same right of way. It would be wild if each of them was operated by a different company all competing with each other.

Can alternatives to capitalism avoid causing civilization to collapse? “That trick never works!” — Rocket J. Squirrel

Can alternatives to capitalism avoid causing civilization to collapse?

Alternatives like socialism and communism can't scale. Capitalist finance firms can improve returns, and incidentally sustainability, by aligning stakeholder interests and overcoming irrationalities.

medium.com/@GMcKCypress...

James Bond used a more high-tech solution than crawling, he rode in a motorized “pig” in three different films: Diamonds are Forever, The Living Daylights, and The World is not Enough. I don’t know if that was Ian Fleming’s idea, or the movie writers’.

entegrasolutions.com/james-bond-p...