Read it.

In 2022, Dr Dawn Wright, a professor of geography and oceanography at Oregon State University, said humans are ‘irrevocably’ changing the planet.

When it comes to exploring the deep sea, unless you suffer from thalassophobia (the fear of large bodies of water), it can be quite fascinating.

But Dr Wright’s strange discovery proved we needed to understand our planet better to preserve it.

Enviro-Nazis won’t be happy until humans become extinct.

“Sitting in sediment at the bottom of the ocean at the Earth’s deepest point: a beer bottle. It had traveled more than 6.7 miles to the darkest depths of the Pacific, label still intact,” Dr Wright explained.

“This discarded trash had managed to reach an unsullied part of our world before we actually did – a symbol of how deeply and irrevocably humans are affecting the natural world.”

Taking to X, she also reinforced her belief that we need to protect the planet better.

I swear, she must think that humans are some alien species come here just to discard sandwich wrappers or something.

For what it’s worth, it looks like a Heineken.

Read it.

So hit the gym! Your kids will thank you later.

Read it.

Travel agents are the go-to example of an industry killed by the internet. And the numbers are brutal: US agents peaked at around 124,000 in 2000 and collapsed to under 40,000 by 2020 – a 70% drop. Retail locations fell from 34,000 to 13,000[1]. But that collapse took a decade. The ones who survived did it by going upmarket. I keep thinking about this when I look at what’s coming for software engineering – except this time, I don’t think we get ten years.

Read it.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions are disrupting the construction industry in South Texas.

Builders attribute it to a previous period of large-scale deportations as a warning of pending economic consequences.

Industry leaders say arrests at or near construction sites have caused many workers to stay home, slowing projects and tightening labor availability across the Rio Grande Valley.

ICE has arrested more than 9,100 people in South Texas since President Donald Trump took office, nearly one-fifth of related arrests statewide during that period, according to ICE data obtained through a public records request and analyzed by the Texas Tribune.

Gee,  I guess they’ll just have to hire Americans. What a hardship.

The Telegraph (UK).

A statue of the baby Jesus was beheaded at a church on Christmas Eve.

It happened at St Patrick’s Church in Edinburgh’s Old Town, one of the Scottish capital’s most important Catholic places of worship.

Church officials asked the congregation for “prayers for reparation” of the Nativity scene after the incident and said they would “bless the church again”.

Two visitors to the church are understood to have become distressed and taken the baby Jesus figure from the altar ahead of midnight Mass on Dec 24.

Police Scotland said inquiries were ongoing, and it was not believed to be a hate crime targeted at Catholics. The incident is understood to have been mental health-related.

The Telegraph (UK).

A former Veganuary cheerleader has defected to help run a meat-eating campaign.

Toni Vernelli, 54, was head of communications at Veganuary, the annual vegan diet challenge, for nearly six years, having spent decades fighting to end animal cruelty.

But she has now urged people to “forget” the campaign and go back to eating meat, claiming vegan dogma is “not only unhelpful but actually damaging to the fundamental goal of reducing animal suffering”.

Instead, she is promoting a challenge in which three competitive eaters will consume nothing but animal products for a whole day.

Veganuary, launched in 2014 and run by a UK non-profit, is an annual pledge where people give up meat and dairy for a month. Supporters say they want to see a “vegan world” which is kinder to animals and the environment.

But Ms Vernelli said diet change campaigning only prolongs the misery of factory farming because it alienates people who want to help, while putting an “upper limit” on the good they can do.

She has now joined the charity FarmKind, which is launching its own “Forget Veganuary” campaign urging people to give to animal welfare causes rather than changing their diet.

Q: How do you tell a vegetarian?
A: You don’t tell a vegetarian—the vegetarian tells you.

Watch it.

Apparently there are more Canadians who refuse to put up with Wokeness than in the other Usual Suspects such as Britain and Europe. The suggestion is that it could cause Canada to come apart like a Narrative Media “news” story.

Of course, all of these problems are caused by insane judges and politicians, and (unfortunately), like the poor, insane judges and politicians we have with us always.

Economic Times of India.

More than 550 employees at a Louisiana manufacturing firm received a combined $240 million after the company was sold, despite holding no equity. The payout followed a decision by the owner to share 15 percent of sale proceeds with staff who stayed through layoffs, downturns and uncertainty. The bonuses, averaging about $443,000, rewarded long-term loyalty and transformed lives while boosting the local economy.

Raptitude.

I’ve been reading Lord of the Rings for two months and I’m just at the end of the first part. It’s not because I’m not enjoying it. It’s one of the most enjoyable reading experiences I can remember.

From the beginning, I’ve read the whole thing aloud. I’ve found reading aloud helpful for staying engaged — limiting myself to mouth-speed rather than eye-speed means I won’t rush, miss important details, and then lose interest, which has always been a problem for me.

At first I was anxious to read a 1,500-page book this way, because it would take so long. But, as someone pointed out to me, if I’m enjoying it, why would I want to be done with it sooner?

So I tried slowing down even more, and discovered something. I slowed to a pace that felt almost absurd, treating each sentence as though it might be a particularly important one. I gave each one maybe triple the usual time and attention, ignoring the fact that there are hundreds of pages to go.

This leisurely pace made Middle-Earth blossom before my eyes. When I paused after each comma, and let each sentence ring for a small moment after the period, the events of the story reached me with more weight and strength. That extra time gave space for Tolkien’s images and moods to propagate in my mind, which they did automatically.

Some part of me still wanted to rush and get on with it, to make good time, to gloss over the songs and lore to get to Moria and Mount Doom and the other marquee moments of the story. But the more I ignored that impulse, the better the experience got.

By offering the book about triple the usual amount of attentiveness, I was getting about triple the storyness (i.e. meaning, engagement, literary pleasure). Whatever the thing is that I’m seeking when I pick up a novel in the first place, there’s much more of it available at this pace.

Cal Newport.

The recent ?announcement? that Netflix formalized a deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery’s television and film studios, as well as the HBO Max streaming service, got me thinking about an essay that Derek Thompson published on ?his ?Substack titled ?“Everything is Television.?”

“A spooky convergence is happening in media,” he begins. “Everything that is not already television is turning into television.”

Thompson then gives three examples of what he means:

1. Social Media is moving from offering connection to streaming videos (in ?court documents? from this summer, Meta admitted that only 7% of activity on their Instagram platform involves users following people they know).

2. Podcasts are migrating inexorably toward video format.

3. Even AI is shifting toward visual media with the launch of new products like ?OpenAI’s Sora? and Meta’s Vibes.

Television, of course, can mean many things. “When I say ‘everything is turning into television,’” Thompson clarifies, “what I mean is that disparate forms of media and entertainment are converging on one thing: the continuous flow of episodic video.”

Read it.

Just a few questions, as an example, that senior+ engineers ask:

1. What problem are we actually trying to solve? (Not what solution do we want, but what’s the underlying problem?)
2. Who’s the user here and what’s painful for them? (They try to be specific. “Users” isn’t an answer.)
3. What are we assuming that might be wrong? (Every plan has hidden assumptions.)
4. What happens if we’re wrong and ship this anyway? (How bad is the downside?)

Read it.

Perfect software isn’t the best software. It’s perfect simply because it does exactly what you want, how you want it, when you want it.

It isn’t big either. We have confused “good” with “big”. In the Silicon Valley lexicon, software is only valuable if it scales. It must serve millions. It must capture markets. It must grow continuously.

Perfect software offers a different kind of value: Sufficiency. It’s the virtue of requiring less, not because you lack ambition, but because you have met the need. While growth demands a constant state of hunger, sufficiency offers satiety. And perfect software delivers that because the moment you deem something perfect, you become content.

Read it.

“We are preparing to enter the Asia market.” “We are targeting the global market.”

When we hear these phrases, we tend to interpret them in a very specific way:

No meaningful decisions have been made yet.

This is not criticism. It is an observation—one repeatedly confirmed in the field.

Phrases like “the Asian market,” “the European market,” or “the global market” sound like strategic declarations. In reality, they are often admissions that the hard questions have been postponed.

This article is not a GTM framework. It is not a market entry guide. And it is not a collection of success stories.

Its purpose is singular: to dismantle the flawed mental model that causes market strategies to fail before they even begin.

CATO.

Over half of Americans (55%) don’t know how Social Security is funded. Less than half (45%) know that today’s workers pay for current retirees, and that future workers will pay for their benefits when they retire. Nearly a quarter (23%) believe that their Social Security taxes are saved in a personal account for them. Another third (32%) say they don’t know how Social Security is funded.

It’s Free Government Money! What could possibly go wrong?

The Cato Institute’s August 2025 Social Security Survey of 2,200 Americans, conducted by Morning Consult, reveals that many Americans are deeply confused about how Social Security works, what it’s for, and what the future holds. Despite the program’s central role in retirement planning, the public lacks a basic understanding of how it’s funded or how much it pays.

And yet these people have a vote that is equal to yours. (By definition, half the population of any area are below average IQ.)

Watch it.

Warren Smith of the Secret Scholar Society podcast doesn’t treat Fuentes as a punching bag but tries to have an actual conversation with him, something I doubt you’ll have the opportunity to see anywhere else.

Why is everybody running around in circles and jumping up and down about Nick Fuentes, who is (let’s face it) a fairly fringe figure whose only real talent seems to be for winding up The Usual Suspects? Like Andrew Tate, Fuentes appears to be the New Osama Bin Laden, the boogeyman that the Left needs to leverage in order to get paid. Incomprehensible.

Welcome to the Real World of Disappointment, kid.

Quanta magazine.

The standard sperm-meets-egg story posits that sperm cells are hardly more than bundles of shrink-wrapped DNA with tails. Their mission is simple: Deliver a father’s genes into a mother’s egg for sexual reproduction. Just about all other aspects of a developing embryo, including its cellular and environmental components, have nothing to do with dad. Those all come from mom.

But nearly two decades of studies from multiple independent labs threaten to rewrite that story. They suggest that dad’s gametes shuttle more than DNA: Within a sperm’s minuscule head are stowaway molecules, which enter the egg and convey information about the father’s fitness, such as diet, exercise habits and stress levels, to his offspring. These non-DNA transfers may influence genomic activity that boots up during and after fertilization, exerting some control over the embryo’s development and influencing the adult they will become.

The Foundry.

The American experiment has not failed. It was hijacked by the progressive movement more than a century ago.

Over the past 100 years, the federal government has usurped roles never intended for it: family formation, moral instruction, income distribution, education, overregulation, even meaning itself, aided and abetted by the media/entertainment/advertising-industrial complex.

As the state grew more behemoth, church and community institutions were hollowed out; which was the cause and which the effect may be arguable, but the correlation is indisputable.

The “little platoons” that once formed Americans into responsible citizens have been crowded out by self-perpetuating bureaucracies fueled by massive, unsustainable debt.

The challenge of our time is to return the government to its constitutional limits, enabling families, churches, and community organizations to once again fulfill their historical responsibilities.

Read it.

This isn’t my first long road trip in an EV, but some of the challenges I had in that first trip happened here. About half of the Electrify America stops had at least one broken charger. Few of the chargers delivered close to the 200kW max recharge rate of the Buzz, but that was probably due to VW’s battery limits in winter conditions.

One key difference between my 2022 trip and this 2025 trip is that thankfully almost every charger had a card reader on it so I could tap to pay and charge instantly. Back in 2022, I was forced to use an app for every charger network that required you to have an account attached to a credit card and that sometimes took 10 minutes to set up at each new charger I hadn’t been to before.

Twice on this trip, I got to a charging station only to find it was full and had a line of people waiting to charge, so I had to look elsewhere. My biggest blunder was seeing a fast Rivian charger in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, Price, Utah on Apple Maps. When I drove up to the location, I found out it wasn’t done being built yet. So I had to use a slower 75kW ChargePoint station that took almost an hour to charge the battery back up because I was on my last 20 miles of range. Oops.

Rory Sutherland (whom I respect a great deal) is of opinion that anyone who drives an electric car won’t return to a gas-powered car, and that ‘range anxiety’ with respect to electric cars is overblown. I have my doubts about both of those positions. My wife and I drive hybrids, and I doubt that I would be happy falling back to a gas-powered car, but the advantage of a hybrid over an all-electric car is that you take your charger with you.

The Times (UK).

More than one thousand pubs are thought to have barred Labour politicians in a protest over higher business rates, campaigners have said.

Rachel Reeves’s local pub in her Leeds West & Pudsey constituency, the Marsh Inn, became the latest to join the ranks of the No Labour MPs protest this weekend.

UK Hospitality has warned that business rates for the average pub will increase 76 per cent after the chancellor’s changes, which could lead to some closures.

Can you imagine any American bar refusing service to Democrat members of Congress because they increased business taxes?

Read it.

But the AARP, the FBI, and your friendly local payments nerd will all tell you that if you’re abused on your debit card you are quite likely to be made whole, and if you’re abused via purchasing gift cards, it is unlikely any deep pockets will cover for you. The difference in treatment is partially regulatory carveouts, partially organized political pressure, and partly a side effect of an accountability sink specific to the industrial organization of gift cards.

Read it.

One of my favorite definitions of a problem comes from the late Gerald Weinberg

A problem is the difference between things as perceived and desired.

This definition is great because it’s actionable. It tells you that there are three ways to approach a problem:

1. Move the world towards the desired state
2. Change your perception of the current state
3. Change your desired state

Points two and three seem like cop-outs at first — you basically avoid solving the problem. But they often turn out to be not just viable but optimal since they force you to re-frame and re-contextualize the problem.

Read it.

Because we all want to do that, right?

There’s a growing list of public and private companies that are working to build reactors for various purposes. These reactors vary widely in their design, size, output, and potential purpose. Everything is on the table: from using the same designs we’ve used for decades to novel ideas still only on the drawing board.

This article is designed to serve as a point of reference when reading about a new company and the reactor they’re designing. Some of the features companies discuss are less novel than they sound, and vice versa. Hopefully, the information provided here can provide a more clear picture for the investor to make an informed decision.

Read it.

A recent article lays out the collapse of the dominant geopolitical model of “rising powers generate conflict”: The Stagnant Order And the End of Rising Powers (Foreign Affairs, paywalled). The basic idea is that the foundations of “rising powers”–demographics and productivity gains–no longer support grandiose planetary dominance.

Rather, demographics is already baked in as a crushing liability to all existing powers, and despite endless claims that technology will jumpstart productivity, the reality is productivity gains have flatlined for decades. “Growth” is a function of expanding debt, not productivity gains.

This dynamic extends beyond geopolitical models: all the models being used to explain and control the world are all collapsing: economic, social, political, they’re all collapsing because they are all constructs assembled in eras that no longer map the present.

As I explained in The Entire Bubble Economy Is a Hallucination, models collapse because of two limitations that define all models:

Read it.

The U.S. government is encouraging white men to report instances of workplace discrimination—part of the Trump administration’s broader effort to scale back DEI initiatives across the country.

Andrea Lucas—acting chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)—posted on X this week asking

“Are you a white male who’s experienced discrimination at work based on your race or sex?”

She added that those affected “may have a claim to recover money under federal civil rights laws.”

Read it.

It was less than three years ago — early 2023 — that I was writing about the then-universal government and industry line that electric vehicles (EVs) would soon be taking over the American car market. In April 2022 the Biden Administration had adopted aggressive vehicle mileage standards intended to be achievable only through rapid transition to EVs. Our “climate leader” states, California and New York, had then adopted regulations in August and September 2022, respectively, mandating a phase-out of sales of combustion vehicles, to culminate in 2035, after which only EVs would be allowed. In a post in January 2023, I linked to the websites of Ford and GM, where they both touted their grand plans for rapid conversion of their companies to the manufacture of mostly or entirely EVs. At that time, Ford was claiming that it would “lead America’s shift to EVs,” and would achieve 50% of its sales in that category by 2030. GM bragged about its “path to an all-electric future” by 2035.

Curtis Yarvin: “The test of any legacy system is always whether, if it did not exist, anyone would invent it.”

Read it.

Curtis Yarvin is an American political thinker, essayist, and software engineer known for his concept of the ‘Cathedral,’ his description of the modern West’s informal nexus of media, academia, and bureaucracy. Writing under the name Mencius Moldbug in the 2000s, he became one of the formative voices of the neoreactionary or postliberal movement. Combining historical erudition with irony and intellectual independence, Yarvin argues that Western democracy has ossified into a managerial order and that genuine renewal requires a return to first principles of authority and legitimacy.

Here is the dirty secret of campus race politics: it isn’t actually about race. No one cares about ‘black conservatives.’ There is nothing ‘historic’ about Clarence Thomas or Condoleezza Rice.

The point of ‘affirmative action’ is that it oversamples ideology. Race communism (communism, but with the workers and peasants replaced by people of color) is the central ideology of the Cathedral, and always has been. The word ‘progressive’ has been used in the same way for a century, from the Old Left to the New Left. Say ‘racial progressivism,’ and a progressive might even agree.

The real purpose of the admissions officers is to maintain ideological and political hegemony. This is hardly hard—most peoples’ instinct is normally to support the powers that be. But it’s always best to keep power in shape.

Without the ability to stack the political deck by using race as a proxy, the commissars will just have to select even harder for more hardcore communism itself. Here we see, for instance, sexual minorities taking the front seat over racial minorities.

Read it.

I thought Global Warming We’re All Gonna Die had gotten rid of all the Arctic ice.

hoe_math: “Universal Basic Income is like leaving food out around your house. It eventually attracts vermin. It is bad social hygiene.”

Read it.

During an October swing through Southeast Asia, US President Donald Trump struck same-day agreements with Malaysia and Thailand to deepen cooperation on critical minerals and rare earths, underscoring Washington’s push to diversify supply chains away from China, according to SCMP.

According to the White House, Trump and Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim agreed to expand collaboration on building and securing critical mineral and rare earth supply chains. Using similar language, Washington said it would also “strengthen cooperation [with Thailand] on critical minerals supply chains development and expansion,” including exploration, extraction and processing.

The back-to-back deals reflect how resource-rich economies have become central battlegrounds in the US-China rivalry over rare earths. Analysts say Beijing currently holds the advantage, having spent decades engaging countries across Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America. These nations often view China as a “partner that actually builds,” with investment that comes with fewer political conditions than US funding.

Victor Davis Hanson.

Recently, the Trump administration, as most administrations do at the beginning of their four-year term, issued a National Security Strategy—I guess we would call it a white paper—outlining the approach of the administration to foreign affairs and the protection of the security in the United States.

It’s written in a different style than past reports, different than the first term. And it has a lot of emphasis, as most do, on sections of the world. But what has caused the most controversy are two things.

Abroad, the report tells Europe that it’s experiencing “civilizational erasure,” and gives advice to the Europeans about what they must do to correct that, but in a manner of brotherly love or help, which the Europeans, of course, will see as condescending and interference into their internal affairs, except they want us to do it in the NATO part of the equation, but not the EU part. And that’s caused a lot of controversy.

Rory Sutherland:

The Democrats fundamentally, I think, are in this bizarre hall of mirrors where effectively their own opinions and thoughts have now become subordinated to a kind of  artificial world-view where you have to buy the entire album, as it were—there’s a Times journalist who talks about this, which is sort of ‘album politics’—in other words, it’s not just that you have left-wing politics, you have to buy into every single opinions that is believed to be from the Left, and you have to buy the whole package deal. And consequently you wind up with this very, very strange group of people thinking they’re normal.

Watch it.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Texas ought to cut back on cattle and start raising more bison.

The Times (UK).

Written examinations with a pen and paper “remain the purest test we have”, according to the head of the exams regulator Ofqual.

Sir Ian Bauckham said: “Pen and paper will always matter in the classroom and in exams. The written examination, sitting in an exam hall with a pen and paper, remains the purest test we have of a student’s command of their subject.”

He was speaking after Ofqual began a consultation into more typed assessments for GCSEs and A-levels on Thursday.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Victor Davis Hanson.

Each administration, at some point in its first or second year, has a strategic assessment, a strategic strategy of what the United States’ economic, diplomatic, political, and military objectives will be in foreign affairs.

Ours just came out. And one of the more controversial sections—which I think, otherwise, was a pretty sound strategy—was simply saying that our partners, the founders of Western civilization, the Europeans, are in dire trouble. And then the authors of the strategic assessment said they face “civilizational erasure.”

Well, you can see what that did to the Europeans. Nothing is more humiliating or makes the Europeans angrier than we upstart Americans—who our founders came from Europe and many of us did as well—to be lecturing the Europeans on what they’re doing wrong.

So, they’re very angry at us. But why are they angry at us? Because the assessment outlined why Europe’s in trouble. Its radical green proposals, their New Green Deal version is much more deleterious than ours. They have ample amounts of gas in the North Sea and oil. They have gas, natural gas, in France and other places. And yet, they’re hell-bent—if I could use that term—on wind and solar that’s costly and unreliable.

Financial Times, a Voice of the Crust.

(The Financial Times is the British analog of the Wall Street Journal—if the Wall Street Journal were run by the staff of Mother Jones.)

It is early October and Srinivasan is hosting what he’s called the Network State Conference, an event targeting “those interested in founding, funding and finding new communities”.

For years, the entrepreneur has preached to clubby tech gatherings that they should gather their online comrades and set up a physical homeland — a network state, be that a city or a country — by joining together to buy land. He has hailed this as the “ultimate exit” by Silicon Valley from “failing” US institutions and democracy.

But what was a fringe concept a matter of years ago is now attracting more interest as scrappy start-up chief executives and aggrieved billionaires contemplate the allure of tech-friendly havens unbound by legacy rules and regulation. While some are aspirational, reliant on their founders securing hard-to-come-by special economic zone status, there are now about 120 “start-up societies” in the works, according to an open-source database shared by Srinivasan. A few have received hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital from funds backed by the likes of investors Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, OpenAI founder Sam Altman and Brian Armstrong, Coinbase chief executive.

The basic problem is that there is no space on earth left that is not subject to an existing government, and governments are run by politicians, and politicians live to meddle. There is no escaping that fatal fact. The best you can do is pick a country that is less bad than the alternatives. Nomad Capitalist has an entire business model based on this painful truth.

Read it.

When Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced The Line on January 10, 2021, he promised a radical reimagining of urban life. “We need to transform the concept of a conventional city into that of a futuristic one.”

Tucked into the upper corner of the kingdom’s Tabuk province, the city would run like a ruler through the Neom region, housing nine million people, the population of Austria, within just 34 square kilometers, all powered by renewable energy. It imagines a world where every need sits within a five-minute walk, yet one can cross the entire city in twenty minutes. But even in a country wealthy enough to seed rain clouds and bankroll vast infrastructure, reality is colliding with ambition. The city that promised to “deliver new wonders for the world” is struggling to deliver its own foundation.

By 2030, only 2.4 kilometers of the 170-kilometer project will be completed, with the rest delayed as the government prioritizes energy infrastructure and scrambles for funding. The project’s leadership has been reshuffled, with the head of the sovereign wealth fund, The Public Investment Fund, now steering the effort amid deepening financial uncertainty. This is unsurprising. The Line was imagined as an engineering object, an architectural marvel, rather than a city that must grow from real human demand. The economic foundation beneath that vision is equally unstable. Saudi Arabia’s fiscal fortunes depend on oil, a commodity that swung from over $110 a barrel in 2012 to $42 in 2020 and now hovers near $70. The financial bedrock for this trillion-dollar city is, like the desert beneath it, shifting.