Read it.

Yet over the past 40 years, the national debt has grown exponentially, with none of the dire consequences repeatedly predicted. Interest rates have fluctuated, political gridlock has persisted, and deficits have widened, but the U.S. economy continues to function, grow, and attract global capital. The reason is that the U.S. continues to enjoy what economists call the “exorbitant privilege” of being the issuer of the world’s reserve currency. Treasuries remain the deepest, most liquid capital market globally, and the dollar is central to global trade, investment, and reserves. This creates a structural advantage that allows the U.S. to run larger deficits than other nations without facing the same level of market discipline. So long as global trust in U.S. institutions and the rule of law remains intact, there is a deep and steady demand for U.S. debt, providing a long runway before any severe funding stress emerges.

Moreover, deficit spending is no longer a temporary tool used in times of crisis; it has become an embedded feature of the economy. Social Security, Medicare, defense, and other entitlements are politically sacrosanct. At the same time, fiscal transfers (like tax credits and subsidies) are now a regular part of household consumption and corporate support. In many ways, the U.S. economy is now structurally reliant on deficit-financed stimulus. Growth, consumer spending, and even corporate investment increasingly depend on a steady stream of government outlays.

While U.S. debt and deficit levels are elevated, there is no imminent risk of fiscal collapse. However, it is worth examining the impact of rising debt and deficit levels on future economic prosperity.

Read it.

I am not an official Cheesehead. I have never been to Wisconsin, but I am a cheese addict. If life were a choice between chocolate and cheese, I would rather be a cheesehead than a chocoholic.

Cooking with cheese seems simple. I mean, everyone except Chuck Schumer knows that you cook a burger and then put cheese on top.

Manchego. Ummmmm.

Read it.

There’s this thing about USB-C that nobody really talks about. Not the part where we all had to buy new dongles (RIP my dongle drawer, 2010-2023). The other part.

See, we all thought USB-C was just going to be about charging things and moving files around like the other USBs. Very serious. Very purposeful. But because of the way it is it can do… other things.

…

The protocol doesn’t judge your life choices.

Read it.

For years, some of the world’s sharpest minds have been quietly turning your life into a series of games. Not merely to amuse you, but because they realized that the easiest way to make you do what they want is to make it fun. To escape their control, you must understand the creeping phenomenon of gamification, and how it makes you act against your own interests.

If you can be fooled into acting against your own interests merely by something disguised as a game, you deserve everything that happens to you. Think of it as evolution in action.

This guy needs to stop whining and  get over the belief that it’s his job to rescue the world.

Watch it.

The major problem is that ‘Chinese’ isn’t a language but a language group, each of which uses the same ideographic symbols but ‘pronounce’s each of those symbols differently. (In fact, one could add Japanese to this category, since kanji are these same ‘Chinese’ characters [more or less] with Japanese ‘pronunciations’.)

So some representation of Chinese sounds in, say, the Latin alphabet would merely apply to one of the Chinese languages (typically Mandarin) and leave the others behind–unless you used it to ‘write’ those others as well, which would ‘say the quiet part out loud’ that these are actually separate (though related) languages. And this would break the culutural unity of which the Chinese are so proud and which is one of the bases of their national identity.

Got no idea how this will work out, but it will be interesting to watch.

We’ll get you a Satanic … Mechanic….

Read it.

Unions are Democrat strongholds. Allowing public employees to unionize locks in Democrat control of the Administrative State. (Imagine how Democrats would scream if public employees were required to be armed at all times.)

Newsbusters.

Before politics overwhelmed the word, the primary meaning of “liberal” was “generous.”

President Donald Trump and the Republican Congress have given political liberals a chance to take that meaning back — by opening their wallets to show just how much they value NPR, PBS and other programs defunded by the GOP.

There’s no shortage of cash on the left:

Laurene Powell Jobs, the mega-rich backer of The Atlantic, has a net worth that was estimated above $11 billion a year ago and is thought to be even higher today.

George Soros, at 94, has a fortune in the vicinity of $7 billion, with billions more in his Open Society Foundations.

Bill Gates has about $115 billion, and his ex-wife, Melinda, around $30 billion.

Any one of these left-leaning billionaires could single-handedly make up the $535 million that NPR, PBS and local stations were getting annually from taxpayers before Congress zeroed out their subsidies.

And if half a billion a year is too much for one zillionaire, a half-dozen of them (or more) could share the burden without feeling a pinch.

But are wealthy liberals willing to put their money where their mouths are?

The Foundry.

Contrary to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ nutty claim that Republicans are trying to “steal the midterm elections” by redistricting in Texas, state legislators there are trying to correct what the Justice Department correctly calls “unconstitutional racially based” gerrymanders.

Their fix will ensure that the over 2 million new residents of Texas get what they are entitled to in Congress: fair representation.

The claim that engaging in mid-decade redistricting is somehow illegal is complete nonsense. No federal or state law, constitutional provision, or court precedent limits states to redistricting just once every 10 years. More frequent redistricting is simply rare because it often results in brutal political fights and years of litigation by those unhappy with the results.

Not only that, but Texas is acting to bring its districts in line with federal law and court decisions.

The Foundry.

Despite a popular Texas phrase, “Don’t California my Texas,” and a song about the phenomenon, Californians are increasingly relocating to Texas.

Roughly 100,000 Californians are moving to Texas a year—the equivalent of the population of Santa Barbara, according to a new study by StorageCafe.

“This makes California the largest source of newly-minted Texans, accounting for about 16% of all state-to-state migration into Texas, followed by Florida and Louisiana,” the report states.

Six of the top 10 California-to-Texas moving routes began in Los Angeles County, the report found.

Read it.

Believe The Science! Until it changes….

(Sometimes the old ways are best.)

Read it.

Many people in the rational sphere have been promoting Lumina/BCS3-L1, a genetically engineered bacterium, as an anti-cavity treatment. However, none have brought up a major negative interaction that may occur with a common genetic mutation.

In short, the treatment works by replacing lactic acid generating bacteria in the mouth with ones that instead convert sugars to ethanol, among other changes. Scott Alexander made a pretty good FAQ about this. Lactic acid results in cavities and teeth demineralization, while ethanol does not. I think this is a really cool idea, and would definitely try it if I didn’t think it would significantly increase my chances of getting oral cancer.

The Scot Alexander FAQ has Fashionable Web Site Design Disease, a combination of background color and type colors that are probably artistic but make it almost impossible to read, unless you use Safari Reader or actually print it on paper first. You have been warned.

Extract from the FAQ:

To move beyond the demographic of people willing to fly to Prospera and pay $20,000, Lantern will need FDA permission. The FDA has already set unreachable standards for any drug approval study, so Aaron wants to try a different route.

The FDA has lower standards for probiotics than for drugs. And technically, a bacterium which you take in order to change your natural microbiome is a probiotic. The genetic modifications are no disqualification; a few genetically-modified probiotics have already been approved. Some are almost as creative as Lumina: Zbiotics is a genetically engineered Bacillus species which sits in your stomach and (supposedly; I have not investigated this claim) prevents hangovers by metabolizing alcohol byproducts for you.

ALSO: Updates on Lumina Probiotic

ALSO: More thoughts and information from Yishan Wong

I have purchased a dose of this and once my current dental machinations are finished and I have had my next Thorough Cleaning I intend to try it.

The Telegraph (UK).

Migrants attempting to land on a beach in Spain were tackled to the ground by locals and tourists before being taken into custody by police.

Footage showed 13 men diving off a boat and swimming to the shore, where they were immediately met with fierce resistance from beachgoers in a tourist town in Andalusia, in the south of the country.

When those charged with law enforcement fail to act, ordinary people have to step up — and will.

Read it.

Johanna Nichols, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, has used her pioneering work in the field of language history to learn more about language development in North America. She has found that it can be traced back to two language groups that originated in Siberia. Her paper is published in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology.

Try doing that without breaking a nail.

Read it.

When was the last time a Democrat was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize? Obama, who received it for doing nothing more than being the Magic Negro.

Read it.

Monasteries are built to last not for decades or even centuries, but for millennia. A monastery is meant to remain there and make that place holy, and that is the reason why monasteries were so successful in the creation of Christendom. But consecrated life, or what the Church calls ‘religious life’—that is, life lived under special vows—underwent big changes. Those changes came about due to the adaptation of religious life in the face of moments of crisis. But in the long run, such changes probably had unhelpful consequences. The consequences to which I refer slowly changed the Christian Faith from the permanent form of a concrete and settled way of life, to a set of intangible ideas or propositions which one either agreed with or one did not.

Settled monastic orders in the Latin Church refer to their abbey as their “stability” for a reason.

The appearance of the friars marked a revolutionary change in which these new ‘monks’—free from the vow of stability—no longer remained in monasteries. They did not stay in one place to transform the area in which they’d settled, consecrating it down the centuries. These friars were on the move, wandering and preaching, turning up in cities and then disappearing again years later. They established lasting priories, but the friars moved between those priories constantly. The friars were to have no lasting attachment to a particular place and its surrounding landscape. What is more, rather than seeing this change in the Church as an unfortunate innovation necessitated by a passing crisis, new celebrity friars—including someone as influential as St. Thomas Aquinas—argued that their way of life marked the perfection of all religious life, combining as it did both contemplative and apostolic life, whereas monks were ‘disadvantaged’ by being contemplatives alone, so Aquinas argued.

By this change in the conception of a ‘consecrated person,’ the Church was set on a trajectory that ultimately unwound its mission centuries later. The friars were not farmers, artisans, and traders; they were full-time missionaries. They would come, render the faithful orthodox with their preaching, and leave. In this way, the definition of the Christian tacitly changed from a ‘liturgical person’ to a ‘person who accepts certain propositions.’ The Faith, without anyone noticing, slowly changed from the existential transfiguration of human nature and the ongoing transformation of human culture to a set of formulae requiring assent. In short, the threads of rationalism, which would later deconstruct the Church and her mission, were sewn into her most holy organ, namely the consecrated life of her religious orders.

Being a Christian changed from “what one did” to “what one believed”. Unfortunately, faith without works is dead.

The Atlantic, a Voice of the Crust.

Note that the headline is (perhaps deliberately) misleading. It suggests that we have here an examination of a world in which ‘extreme wealth were impossible”, whereas it actually discusses a world in which “we make extreme wealth impossible”, which is a different kettle of fish. (“Journalists”, of course, have grown expert at this sort of prestiverbitation.)

Throughout history human societies (and ideological groups within those societies) have attempted to impose their notion of The Good Life on their fellows, and pretend that it is somehow based in reality. They may even believe it. Reality, however, is what happens while you’re dreaming your dreams, and it doesn’t go away just because you imagine things to be a different than they actually are.

Also noticeable is the fact that it is written by a woman, as exemplified by its “FebBot ‘journalism”: Start with a tear-jerking anecdote designed to tell people How To Feel about the situation, then elide smoothly into a lecture based on the confident assumption that the audience will be ready to accept the not-too-hidden political agenda of the author as demonstrated fact, when in fact it is Just Another Story.

The significance of this is rooted in evolutionary psychology. Human beings evolved, both physically and socially, to be nomadic hunter-gatherers, and each sex evolved to fill distinct roles: men are the breadwinners, and women are the homemakers. We didn’t choose these roles–natural selection chose them for us, and wired our “firmware” to support them. As a result, men organize their social groups hierarchically, and women organize their social groups collectively. The hunt requires clear chains of command and structures of authority, because everybody needs to know precisely who’s in charge and where he fits in ongoing operations. Gathering (and nurturing babies) require cooperative work, pooling of resources, and firm social bonds among participants. Historically, men keep trying to make all of society hierarchical and women keep trying to make all of society collectivist. Both sides think that their way is the right way and the other way is the wrong way.

From the beginning of the species down to about the early 18oos, men typically won this particular conflict, because breadwinning was hard–until the coming of industrialization, built upon the invention of portable non-muscular power sources, made “breadwinning” something so easy that even women could do it. This, coupled with hormonal birth control, made the “homemaker” role on the part of women completely voluntary, with the inevitable impact on marriage rates and population growth.

Since a considerable portion of the “breadwinning community” is now composed of women, hardwired to prefer collectivism over hierarchy, we see “wealth inequality”, the social expression of hierarchy, being denigrated in favor of “egalitarianism”, the social expression of collectivism.

Go back and read the article again through that lens, and things become a lot clearer.

Note that the Starting Anecdote is about a rich woman, whose money came from her breadwinner husband, sharing that money with an institution for the collective benefit of a certain group of people, for which she is praised, mostly by other women. Female collectivism on the hoof.

Note that the supposed ill effects of “wealth inequality” are nowhere demonstrated except by some vague handwaving (by a female professor). The author writes in the sure and certain confidence that her feelings-based politically-correct-instructed audience will tag along dutifully and unquestioningly. The plain historical record that collectivism, on a scale larger than a nuclear family, has failed, always and everywhere, is simply ignored. And ignoring reality is what collectivists do best. And we are all doomed to suffer as a result.

(Sorry about beginning sentences with a conjunction; I’ve been reading far too much Greek lately.)

Power Line.

Administrative Law is sufficiently significant that I was able to take a course by that title in law school in the 80s.

Every day the news brings word of edicts handed down from on high by rulers whose names we have never heard of or voted for. I mean the heads of the various administrative agencies that control every corner of our lives.

Administrative law is not an inherently interesting subject. You may not be interested in administrative law, but administrative law is interested in you. William F. Buckley, Jr. used to say that “a liberal is someone who is determined to reach into your shower and adjust the water temperature for you.” That was in the good old days, when we thought the threat was subject to direct political control. What once was a jape is now the law. Since Buckley spoke federal regulators have extended their hands into every aspect of the home bathroom, including toilets and, yes, shower heads.

Philip Hamburger is the Maurice & Hilda Friedman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. In 2014 Hamburger published his monumental treatise Is Administrative Law Unlawful? In this post I am adapting the review I wrote for National Review.

Professor Hamburger observed that, although administrative law is unrecognized by the Constitution, it “has become the government’s primary mode of controlling Americans.” He further noted, however, that “administrative law has avoided much rancor because its burdens have been felt mostly by corporations.” That is changing: “Increasingly, however, administrative law has extended its reach to individuals. The entire society therefore now has opportunities to feel its hard edge.”

Read it.

No. One word: Prohibition. Those who do not learn from history will be butt-fucked by it the next time it comes around, which it invariably does.

Read it.

Hares are mammals belonging to the genus Lepus. They are herbivores and live either in pairs or alone. They nest in slight depressions, which are known as ‘forms’, and their young, known as leverets, are able to fend for themselves shortly after birth.

Hares are very different from rabbits. For one, they are generally much bigger than rabbits, and they have longer ears and more powerful, longer legs. They can reach speeds of up to 40mph when evading predators. Their habitats also vary considerably, with hares preferring open areas such as fields and grasslands, while rabbits are often found in shrubby areas where they create burrows called warrens.

Under British Forest Law, hunted prey were divided into two classes: Beasts of the Chase (red deer, roe deer, fallow deer, boar, fox, marten) and Beasts of the Warren (rabbits, partridge, pheasant, grouse, quail). Beasts of the Chase were reserved to the King, but Beasts of the Warren were reserved to the landlord.

Quillette.

With rare exceptions, most of the articles about the Trump administration’s science-funding policies have discussed them in catastrophic terms.

Because, as we all know, no science was ever done prior to it being the TOTAL RESPONSIBILITY of the U.S. government–and the U.S. taxpayer.

A professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine has called cuts to research funding the “apocalypse of American science.” Critics believe this will sound the death knell of the American economy and our scientific leadership. Despite this widespread condemnation, the administration shows no signs of changing course. The most recent estimate suggests that basic research endowments will fall by US$15 billion in 2026.

Just think of all those ‘research scientists’ having to go out and get a Real Job.

These claims are worth examining in more detail. For a start, the best available evidence does not demonstrate that federal science funding predicts economic growth. This claim has been evaluated multiple times, sometimes decades apart. In 1989, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) audited R&D investments and determined that federally financed research was having no significant effect on the economy. The Congressional Budget Office reached the same conclusion during its assessment in 1998. Another BLS audit in 2007 found that: “Returns to many forms of publicly financed R&D are near zero.”

International audits have returned similar results. In the late 1990s, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) looked at economic growth differences between countries, and reported their findings in 2003. The OECD could find “no clear-cut relationship between public R&D activities and growth.”

Even if the analysis is restricted to the “golden era” of NIH funding in the 1950s and 1960s, the effect on US growth is suspect. Given the massive public investment at that time, subsequent years should have demonstrated more rapid economic growth. But they did not. The annual growth rate of GDP after the 1950s was fairly stable. Terence Kealey has noted that total factor productivity (TFP) and other measurements that account for technological change fell in the post WWII era as federal science budgets expanded.

Read it.

Dogger Bank has a perimeter of 720 km and area of 17,600 km2, compared to Wales’ 20,600km2. It’s almost entirely within Britain’s territorial waters (sorry Germany). And it’s only 15-40 m below sea level to boot – so at depths humanity has constructed large engineering projects before.

Headline results: we estimate raising Dogger Bank would cost £97.5bn, but would bring present value benefits of £622 bn. Under the government’s standard method of cost-benefit analysis, this project would get a go-ahead, with a cost-benefit ratio of 6.2.

This would be way cool.

Read it.

As illegals flood into Blue States, Americans are migrating to Red States. Guess who wins?

UPDATE: Migration to Red States Is Accelerating, Study Says

Been there, done that.

BuzzFeed.

Try to figure out how many of these are written by women. My count is about 2/3.

Read it.

In the wake of a mass shooting in New York City that killed four people, Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said “idiot control” is needed rather than gun control.

Barring young black males from possessing any kind of weapon would be a step in the right direction.

Been there, done that.

The Telegraph (UK)

A toddler in India bit a venomous cobra so hard that he killed it.

Two-year-old Govinda Kumar was playing in his home in Bankatwa, a village in the eastern Indian state of Bihar, when he spotted the three-foot long snake and grabbed it.

The cobra lunged at the child and coiled itself around his tiny hands during the incident on Friday, his relatives said.
But instead of screaming, Govinda put the snake’s head in its mouth and clenched his jaw, Mateshwari Devi, the boy’s grandmother, recounted.

He quickly lost consciousness after ingesting some of the deadly venom, but was treated in hospital and has since been discharged.

The snake died on the spot.

A future Avenger.

Read it.

Left wing comedian Bill Maher admitted on Monday that he was dead wrong about the effect of President Trump’s tariffs – saying in an episode of his “Club Random”podcast that while many economists predicted tat Trump’s tariffs would immediately lead to inflation, he was among the doomsayers who were wrong.

Bloomberg, a Voice of the Crust.

Tesla Inc. has a plan to fend off cheaper competition from China with a $25,000 electric car. But first it has to overhaul a 100-year-old manufacturing process pioneered by Henry Ford.

The company is moving to what it calls an “unboxed” approach, which is more like building Legos than a traditional production line. Instead of a large, rectangular car moving along a linear conveyer belt, parts are assembled simultaneously in dedicated areas and then all put together at the end. Tesla says the change could reduce manufacturing footprints by more than 40%, allowing the carmaker to build future plants far faster and at less expense.

Changing a linear tree and branch model for a decentralized bush and swarm model. It might even work.

Of course, anybody who actually thinks that Tesla will ever put out a car that can be bought for $25,000 (Foolish Mortal) is smoking and not sharing.

New York magazine, so much a Voice of the Crust that I am amazed at so hypergamy-realistic anti-FemiNazi article survived to be published.

When we decided we wanted to be equal to men, we got on men’s time. We worked when they worked, retired when they retired, had to squeeze pregnancy, children, menopause somewhere impossibly in the margins. I have a friend, in her late 20s, who wears a mood ring; these days it is often red, flickering in the air like a siren when she explains her predicament to me. She has raised her fair share of same-age boyfriends. She has put her head down, worked laboriously alongside them, too. At last she is beginning to reap the dividends, earning the income to finally enjoy herself. But it is now, exactly at this precipice of freedom and pleasure, that a time problem comes closing in. If she would like to have children before 35, she must begin her next profession, motherhood, rather soon, compromising inevitably her original one. The same-age partner, equally unsettled in his career, will take only the minimum time off, she guesses, or else pay some cost which will come back to bite her. Everything unfailingly does. If she freezes her eggs to buy time, the decision and its logistics will burden her singly — and perhaps it will not work. Overlay the years a woman is supposed to establish herself in her career and her fertility window and it’s a perfect, miserable circle. By midlife women report feeling invisible, undervalued; it is a telling cliché, that after all this, some husbands leave for a younger girl. So when is her time, exactly? For leisure, ease, liberty? There is no brand of feminism which achieved female rest. If women’s problem in the ’50s was a paralyzing malaise, now it is that they are too active, too capable, never permitted a vacation they didn’t plan. It’s not that our efforts to have it all were fated for failure. They simply weren’t imaginative enough.

Read it.

A visitor to a French museum bit into a fresh banana worth millions of dollars taped to a wall last week, exhibitors said on Friday, in the latest such consumption of the conceptual artwork.

Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan — whose provocative creation entitled “Comedian” was bought for $6.2 million in New York last year — said he was disappointed the person did not also eat the skin and the tape.

After the hungry visitor struck on Saturday last week, “security staff rapidly and calmly intervened,” the Pompidou-Metz museum in eastern France said.

Saw that coming.

Read it.

One of the clearest and most recent tests of the Overton Window’s positioning, what society currently deems acceptable, came last week with two major ad campaigns from Nike and American Eagle. Unlike the backlash faced by Bud Light or Jaguar for pushing controversial leftist propaganda, these two brands steered away from woke landmines and promoted either a pro-family theme or actress Sydney Sweeney.

To begin the week, Nike posted a pro-family ad featuring pro-golfer Scottie Scheffler’s win at the 2025 British Open at Royal Portrush on Sunday. Nike’s marketing department released a highly unusual ad … not the usual left-wing politics or ‘body positivity’ nonsense, but a pro-family sports ad celebrating fatherhood and family.

Based Americans, not infected with the Marxist woke mind virus, cheered online, with many demanding more pro-family ads and less “woke BS” ads

New York Post.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) is taking aim at socialist Big Apple mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani – with aerial ads urging fed-up New Yorkers to flee to Florida.

“Hate Socialism? Us too! Move 2 FL,” read the banners the Sunshine State senator will fly over New York beaches this weekend.

In a statement, Scott described the ad campaign as a “friendly reminder” to New Yorkers that “in addition to our world class beaches, Florida is the state where you can escape socialism.”

Hivekit.

Futurama must have been amazing. No – not the TV series, but the model city it is named after, built for the 1939 New York’s World’s Fair by Norman Bel Geddes. It showed a bold vision for the future: thousands of tiny cars moving on wide highways – all without the need for a human driver. This future wasn’t too far away either – 1960 was the year envisioned for full self-driving cars by its creator.

77 years later, in 2016 Tesla announced “Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Teslas”. This was exciting. Chilling in the back of your car, watching a movie while being chauffeured to your destination sounded like a dream.

Today, in 2024, full self-driving is still mostly a dream. Outside of a few pilot projects in restricted areas, it is no more available than it was in 1939. And there are good reasons for that. For one, traffic is much more messy, chaotic, and unpredictable than it looks on the surface. And then, government regulators and legislators move at a snail’s pace when compared to technologists.

Gizmodo, a Voice of the Crust.

Tea, an app that lets women “rate” and “review” the men in their lives, has been on a hot streak lately, having shot to the top of the App Store and enjoyed several recent write-ups in major media outlets. Unfortunately, the app has now disclosed a data breach involving self-submitted user images. One report cites claims that some of the data has been shared on 4chan, the incel-ridden internet backwater best known for helping to spawn the QAnon conspiracy theory.

404 Media first reported on the data breach, writing that users from 4chan “claim to have discovered an exposed [Tea] database hosted on Google’s mobile app development platform, Firebase.” The notorious site’s resident trolls bragged that they were parsing personal data and selfies from the app’s internal databases.

404 attempted to verify the claims made on the site. “While reporting this story, a URL the 4chan user posted included a voluminous list of specific attachments associated with the Tea app,” the outlet wrote. While the files were initially viewable, the page now gives an error and 404 says that it “verified that Tea does contain the same storage bucket URL that 4chan claims was related to the exposure.” Gizmodo has not been able to independently verify this reporting.

Gizmodo is one of the supposedly-tech-oriented pubs that pivoted to Wokery during the COVID panic because the money was better and they get to signal their virtue by promoting the Narrative. The ritualistic phrases ‘incel-ridden internet backwater’, ‘QAnon’, and ‘conspiracy theory’ are characteristic.

The Telegraph (UK).

Robot bricklayers are set to be trialled on British construction sites amid warnings of a major labour shortage in the house building industry.

The machines, developed by Dutch company Monumental, use two mechanical arms that dispense mortar and lay bricks at a similar pace to a human.

That is equivalent to roughly 500 bricks per robot in a typical eight-hour shift, but they can be programmed to work around the clock if required – albeit under human supervision.

It represents one potential solution to help ease a chronic shortage of brickies in Britain’s construction industry, with experts warning that at least 25,000 more are needed to meet the Government’s house-building plans.

And eventually coming to America, presumably.

Illegal immigrants, call your coyote.

Watch it.

The Feral Historian does a deep dive on constraints due to people, technology, living space, frontiers and walls.

His discussion of the role of military service in a modern society (under the guise of a discussion of STAR TREK) is fascinating. One of the historical functions (not purposes; be sure to appreciate the distinction between those two concepts) is to absorb the excess young male population of the Underclass (who would otherwise cause trouble–sound familiar?) and the prospective heirs of the Overclass (who would otherwise lead revolts–sound familiar?) and (through training and service) turn them into folks invested in the current state of their culture. Just think about that for a bit.