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Understanding the size and scale of modern warfare provides insights into corporate financial health and geopolitical stability, which are both influenced and impacted by military spending. The sheer size and weight of modern tanks come at staggering price tags, reflecting potential economic consequences for their use. This also impacts taxpayers and personal wealth, particularly in a world shaped by military power and billion-dollar manufacturing corporations. In addition, it provides insights into major world powers and how those countries are investing in national defense and potential conflicts.

Plus tanks are just spiff.

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Recently, I gave a presentation about edible plants at my local library. Kitchen herbs, in fact, that double as medicinals, which people can easily grow in their gardens or on window sills. While preparing my presentation, I was reminded that this topic is immense in its breadth and depth. One number especially stood out and even stopped me in my tracks.

There are 50,000 – 80,000 plants used medicinally worldwide, according to the Center for Biological Diversity. What a number! I feel a bit inadequate with my limited knowledge of several hundred of them.

The millennia-old knowledge of herbal medicine is practiced in all regions of the world and backed up by much international research—the Near East, Russia, East Africa, North East India, and even Transylvania. The list clearly goes on.

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I was choreographing a staff-fighting scene, and got to thinking about one of my favorite pole arms, the Japanese naginata. It was considered a women’s weapon, for defense of a small place like a castle corridor. Something like it appears in the Cat Among Dragon books, where female Azdhagi use their version, and Rada Ni Drako does as well. I’ve gotten to play with one once, carefully supervised. Like many pole arms, it derived from a scythe, a long curved blade on a long stick that was and is used to harvest hay for various uses.

That sent my mind wandering to how many basic tools and other things can be summed up as “a blade or a lump on a stick.” The Polish war hammer*, carpenters’ hammers, machetes and scythes and pruning hooks and sickles and the naginata and the pole saw, bow saws (two sticks), hoes, rakes (sticks on sticks), almost everything starts as “a thing attached to a stick.”

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There’s a gulf between Europe and America, and it involves laundry. When it comes to drying clothes, the former relies largely on air-drying, laying their clothes on racks or hanging them on lines outdoors. Households in the US and Canada mostly tumble-dry their laundry in mechanical dryers. The chasm is pretty marked: Europe’s greatest dryer enthusiasts, the Danes, use machine drying for just 28% of their laundry, while an estimated 80% of American households tumble-dry weekly.

It’s a gap that has persisted for decades, much to the puzzlement of international visitors. But in Japan, travelers from either side of the Atlantic are often surprised to discover a third way of drying clothes: Behold the yokushitsu kansouki.

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Sovereignty is a great word, and it has a nice ring to it. Everyone would like to be sovereign, but being so comes with costs and inconveniences. Therefore, it’s useful to break down the concept to see what we really mean by it and what we’d be prepared to do to be “sovereign”.

Confidentiality is often the first thing that comes to mind. Who can read all our communications and files? And will they sell our data? Or feed it to their AI? The Dutch Senate and House of Representatives recently decided that it’s no problem if Microsoft and the US government have access to their data. The Dutch government cloud policy requires a careful risk analysis for such a decision. Unfortunately, many parts of the government don’t actually fall under this policy, and therefore such a risk assessment is not publicly available for our houses of parliament, or it might not even exist.

It would be nice to read that though, because either it says “we don’t mind the Americans having access” or “we think they could spy on us but won’t”. Both would look pretty weird on paper .

Confidentiality is more exciting for a government than for a shoe store, so it’s not the most important aspect of sovereignty for everyone from a practical perspective.

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It’s often said about holograms that each piece of the hologram contains the entire holographic image. Even a tiny fragment will still contain the whole picture. This is not entirely true – while indeed each fragment of the hologram will contain data about the entire holographic image, some data is still lost, and the tinier the fragment the less detailed the final image. But if we ignore these technicalities we can still appreciate the general principle, that each small part contains the information about the whole.

So, I think something similar might be true for studying as well. Pick any non-trivial and not extremely technical subject, and study it thoroughly enough and you’ll learn a lot about everything else as well. There are alternative ways to state it, some more truthful than others. Perhaps we can say: each part (or aspect) of reality reveals information about reality as a whole. Or alternatively, in order to understand one part of reality well enough, you will have to learn a lot about the reality as a whole.

I don’t actually believe this to be a universally applicable principle, as there are lots of exceptions, but I feel that there is “something” about it that deserves our attention.

OffGuardian.

Kate Middleton has cancer. The King of England has cancer. Every day we hear of more and more people diagnosed with cancer—many of them quite young. And not a single report we hear, unless coming from alt media, will suggest that the Covid vaccines are a possible cause.

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The mass wealth migration to Florida from New York and other high-tax states has created record demand for household staff in elite Florida enclaves — especially Palm Beach. Demand for butlers (now called “hospitality managers” or “estate managers”) as well as nannies, chefs, drivers and personal security has surged, according to staffing agencies.

It’s the shortage of housekeepers, however, that has created the biggest mess for wealthy homeowners. Many of the wealthy emigres to Florida bought big homes and now need people to clean them. Hotels, resorts and businesses are also vying for cleaning staff. The result: Typical pay for housekeepers has rocketed from about $25 an hour in 2020 to $45 or $50 an hour today, according to some agencies.

Amazing how that works. You might even think that there’s some sort of invisible hand behind it. (Of course, if Florida were New York, there would quickly be government mandates in place to make sure that a set percentage of the help thus hired were formerly UnHoused.)

BBC.

If you took a worker from a 1920s construction site and transported them to a present day project, they would not be that surprised by what they saw, according to Sam O’Gorman.

“Overall, across Europe and the US, stuff is still built in a pretty manual fashion – not very different to the way it would have been built 100 years ago,” says Mr Gorman, an associate partner in the property practice of consultancy firm McKinsey.

Key point that I think has more importance than the Voice of the Crust gives it:

“But at the moment in this country, because of the government’s approach to planning policy, projects are beset with delays. And that just doesn’t work, you need a more flexible approach.”

Every political jurisdiction in North America and Europe (and, for all I know, in Africa and Asia as well) feels free to stick its nose in the housing, how it’s built and how it’s maintained, to the point that progress is strangled every time it rears its ‘flexible’ head. Every time someone gets a clever idea, there’s a building inspector right on the spot to write them up.

Astral Codex Ten.

Education isn’t just about facts. But it’s partly about facts. Facts are easy to measure, and they’re a useful signpost for deeper understanding. If someone has never heard of Chaucer, Dickens, Melville, Twain, or Joyce, they probably haven’t learned to appreciate great literature. If someone can’t identify Washington, Lincoln, or either Roosevelt, they probably don’t understand the ebb and flow of American history. So what facts does the average American know?

In a 1999 poll, only 66% of Americans age 18-29 knew that the US won independence from Britain (as opposed to some other country). About 47% of Americans can name all three branches of government (executive, legislative, and judicial). 37% know the closest planet to the sun (Mercury). 58% know which gas causes most global warming (carbon dioxide). 44% know Auschwitz was the site of a concentration camp. Fewer than 50% (ie worse than chance) can correctly answer a true-false question about whether electrons are bigger than atoms.

Far too many people fail to make the necessary distinction between education and training. The reason that college educations aren’t doing what people want them to is that the academic tradition is all about education, which does indeed make you a better person but is less successful in procuring gainful employment, and what most people going to college these days want is training (of which STEM is the poster child) that will get them a well-paying job.

The greatest illustration of this distinction is the famous Dr. Watson’s evaluation of Sherlock Holmes in the original Conan Doyle story A Study in Scarlet, which I urge you to read because it’s well worth reading.

Read it.

“Linked to” in news stories means “there is a strong correlation but we can’t really say that there’s a causal link without being called out for it, but we’re going to write as if there actually was a causal link because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to stir people up and get more clicks”.

New research led by King’s College London has found that thousands of DNA sequences originating from ancient viral infections are expressed in the brain, with some contributing to susceptibility for psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression.

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Over the years, a growing number of well-funded companies have folded or failed to thrive betting on adoption of connected-home technologies such as smart windows, lighting, security systems and kitchens.

And the misses continue. Earlier this month, smart-home upstart Brilliant disclosed that it laid off its entire staff while it seeks a buyer. Founded in 2015, the San Mateo, California-based company had raised $64 million in venture funding to scale an in-wall control system for lighting, doorbells, locks, cameras and other home systems.

A month earlier, View, a maker of smart glass for buildings, announced that it’s going private and filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Prior to going public in 2021, View had raised more than $1.8 billion in venture funding.

And around the end of last year, Veev, a heavily funded former unicorn that incorporated home automation systems in its panelized building model, shuttered and sold its assets to homebuilder and long-time investor Lennar.

Losses add up. That’s likely why, in recent months, U.S. venture investors have mostly closed the door on smart-home and smart-building investments.

Who wouldn’t want to have a ‘smart home’? A home in which everything that needed to be done could be done with very little effort on your part, like the Good Old Days when servants did the boring stuff for you? But, as my grandad liked to say, the devil is in the details.

UnHerd.

If the summer of 2020 was a party that eventually devolved into a chaotic rager, Morning After the Revolution is the album of unflattering photos taken by a guest who left before the police showed up. Look: there’s the moment from the pandemic where Donald Trump said he wanted schools to reopen, so we shut them down until 2023. There’s the time a male spa-goer displayed an erect penis in front of a 14-year-old girl, and media commentators hurried to dismiss the entire thing as a Right-wing hoax. There’s the one where we started recreationally destroying the lives of random white women who looked a little too much like manager-callers; there’s the $3,000 anti-racist dinner party and the “Defund the Police” banner!

“If every generation in a family has to start with nothing, it’s a stupid family. Inheritance is supposed to help people not to have to have the same problems their ancestors did.” — Steve Graham

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Certain types of guns have made it to the forefront through training, test of time, and preference. 24/7 Wall Street has reviewed the makers and types of firearms used nationwide to determine those used most often. Knowing the factors they consider helps them understand why they choose the ones they do. Capacity, accuracy, and cost are common and important aspects to consider when choosing a weapon, and this is no different for any American police department. Pistols seem the most prevalent, followed by shotguns and handguns used for backups.

Certain manufacturers have found their way to repeated use both for the common person and for officers of the law. Glock, established in the US in 1988, and Sig Sauer, who have been selling weapons since 1976, make the list most often. Most of these manufacturers have reached the top of the list in American sales. Positive feedback on these specific makers includes their magazine capacity, accuracy, weight, trigger pull, and safety features.

Use what the professionals use.

“Women don’t understand that they cost money.” — hoe_math.

Ben Shapiro.

Many ancient cultures believed that history was circular: Native American cultures often believed that reality itself was circular; Hinduism thinks similarly. The Judeo-Christian West thought differently: that God exists outside of time, but that he guides mankind forward, step by stumbling step, toward an eschatological culmination.

This means that the West has thought, more than any other culture, about progress.

It also means that the West tends to mistake movement in time for progress, and way stations in history as endpoints. Thus, World War I was labeled “the war to end all wars” … until World War II. In the aftermath of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama suggested the possibility of an “end of history” … until history reasserted itself along the lines of Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations.

“Soapboxing is a one-way conversation.” — Rian Stone

Check it out.

Erik Prince is a former Navy SEAL and founder of the Blackwater military security company that the left has used for a verbal punching bag since forever.

BBC.

Self-labelled neo-Luddites and the tech-stressed are searching for phones with fewer features. Industry experts cite precarious profit margins and a wobbly market around this niche need.

Most people choose friends poorly.

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The World Economic Forum’s catchphrase you’ll own nothing and be happy was widely mocked as an eyebrow-raising vision of a “sharing economy” future without the implicit agency granted by full ownership. Renting stuff that one needed only for one-time use has long been a market, and car-sharing makes sense for urban dwellers who only need a vehicle on occasion.

But to own nothing still implies powerlessness and poverty, not happiness, which continues to be associated with owning income streams and nice things, i.e. wealth.

Given our dependence on software / digital rights and the phantom wealth of credit-asset bubbles,”how much do we actually own?” is a fair question. Consider the recent New York Times article Why Tech Companies Are Not Your Friends: Lessons From Roku, which was reprinted in other publications with the more accurate title Our Gadgets Are Not Ours.

SciTechDaily.

A new study led by researchers from UCL and the University of Vigo suggests that the ability to regulate body temperature, a characteristic shared by all mammals and birds, may have first evolved in some dinosaurs during the early Jurassic period, around 180 million years ago.

In the early 20th century, dinosaurs were considered slow-moving, “cold-blooded” animals like modern-day reptiles, relying on heat from the sun to regulate their temperature. Newer discoveries indicate some dinosaur types were likely capable of generating their own body heat but when this adaptation occurred is unknown.

National Library of Medicine.

Results: Of the 51 patients completing the study, 26 (51%) were treated with duct tape, and 25 (49%) were treated with cryotherapy. Twenty-two patients (85%) in the duct tape arm vs 15 patients (60%) enrolled in the cryotherapy arm had complete resolution of their warts (P =.05 by chi(2) analysis). The majority of warts that responded to either therapy did so within the first month of treatment.

No indication as to whether WD-40 was involved.

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Why is it so hard for entrepreneurs to get mortgages? Why did the address I send my payment to change? Why don’t most banks own mortgages anymore? Why is there a thriving economy of small specialist lenders locally who only do mortgages? Why is a 30-year fixed rate mortgage available at all?

Welcome to the wild and wooly world for mortgages in the United States: the world’s most important manufactured product that virtually no users understand. For starters, virtually no one outside of the value chain considers a mortgage a manufactured product at all. Most people who own homes think they were the primary customer of the mortgage, but that’s not true.

The reason that people in ‘finance’ make eye-watering amounts of money is that they enjoy working in mathematically-complicated areas of the economy that make most people’s brains hurt.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

The Atlantic.

Allow me to explain my toilet theory of the internet. The premise, while unprovable, is quite simple: At any given moment, a great deal of the teeming, frenetic activity we experience online—clicks, views, posts, comments, likes, and shares—is coming from people who are scrolling on their phones in the bathroom.

Toilet theory isn’t necessarily literal, of course. Mindless scrolling isn’t limited to the bathroom, and plenty of idle or bored swiping happens during other down moments—while waiting in line, or sitting in gridlocked traffic. Right now, somebody somewhere is probably reading an article or liking an Instagram post with a phone in one hand and an irritable infant in the other.

I have a huge stack of Dilbert and Sherman’s Lagoon books in everyone of my bathrooms, so I never take the phone into the bathroom.

Watch it.

This expresses an eternal truth that is too seldom appreciated.

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Tired of buying stuff from Communists? They’ve got you covered.

“My wife doesn’t know how to weld, cut metal, paint, fix chainsaws, cut trees, take a tractor apart, or operate tractor hydraulics. She can’t cut a tree. She has no idea who to call for a burn permit. She doesn’t know what one is. These things are not her problems. On the other hand, I don’t do laundry any more. I don’t wash dishes. I open drawers, and my ironed clothes are there. I open cupboards and see clean dishes.

It’s a pretty good system. God knew what he was doing when he designed it.”

— Stephen Harper

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I’m enjoying the conversation about Project Hephaistos engendered by the article on Dyson spheres. In particular, Al Jackson and Alex Tolley have been kicking around the notion of Dyson sphere alternatives, ways of preserving a civilization that are, in Alex’s words, less ‘grabby’ and more accepting of their resource limitations.

…

As pointed out in the article, a number of Dyson sphere searches have been mounted, but we are only now coming around to serious candidates, and at that only seven out of a vast search field. Two of these are shown in the figure below. We’re a long way from knowing what these infrared signatures actually represent, but let’s dig into the Project Hephaistos work from its latest paper in 2024 and also ponder what astronomers can do as they try to learn more.

StrategyPage.

The high cost of the war in Ukraine plus a decade of economic sanctions has hurt the Russian economy. To make matters worse Russia has no major allies in Europe or overseas. That leaves Russia dependent on China, which has the second largest economy in the world. The Chinese expect to be paid for the substantial economic aid they have been providing Russia. None of this aid is military, but a lot of it is dual use. That is, which means Russia needs only add a few key components to turn dual use materials into a weapon. This would include guided missiles, military communications and ground-based radars. Without these large quantities of Chinese dual use items, Russia could not maintain its production of many key weapons.

One problem remains, how does Russia pay for all this? China suggested, and Russia accepted, that long-standing Chinese claims on a quarter of the Russian Far East and most of its prime coastal areas be considered as a form of payment. China never canceled these claims, even in the 1940s and 50s when China was very dependent on Russia. These claims amount to about nine percent of Russian territory. The Russian Far East contains part of Siberia as well as the large Pacific Ocean coastline and the port of Vladivostok. The relatively small coastal areas are the most densely populated of the Russian Far East. The entire Russian Far East is huge, at 6.9 million square kilometers. That is nearly the size of the eight million square kilometer continental United States. While these 48 states have 310 million people, the Russian Far East only has a population of 8.3 million. The Far East region contains 40 percent of Russian territory and less than six percent of Russia’s population. The region contains many naval and ballistic missile bases as well as ports that provide the cheapest way to get goods from the rest of Russia to the Far East. The Trans-Siberian Railroad alone cannot support the population and economy of the Far East region.

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A data privacy amendment buried within the Federal Aviation Administration re-authorization bill will allow private aircraft owners to fully block aircraft registration information. Concealing this information will make establishing who owns private aircraft much more difficult, and render aircraft harder to track.

President Joe Biden signed the bipartisan Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) re-authorization bill into law yesterday. Last week, it passed a vote in the Senate 88-4, before going on to pass a vote in the House of Representatives by 387 to 26 on Wednesday. The bill was introduced into the House in June of last year.

The FAA re-authorization bill renews the agency’s authority for the next five years, and authorizes more than $105 billion in funding for it from fiscal years 2024 through 2028. The legislation aims to improve aviation safety, as well as tighten protections for both airline workers and passengers.

Some people on the Internet make it a hobby to track the flights of billionaires and other famous people and publish this information to their followers. The people thus tracked, of course, consider this a security threat. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates are popular targets.