Paul Graham.

I’m usually reluctant to make predictions about technology, but I feel fairly confident about this one: in a couple decades there won’t be many people who can write.

And their vote will count equally to yours.

Read it.

This article recounts the history of the diet-heart hypothesis from the late 1950s up to the current day, with revelations that have never before been published in the scientific literature. Insights include the role of authorities in launching the diet-hypothesis, including a potential conflict of interest for the American Heart Association; a number of crucial details regarding studies considered influential to the hypothesis; irregularities in the scientific reviews on saturated fats, for both the 2015 and 2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans; and possible conflicts of interest on the relevant subcommittee reviewing saturated fats for the 2020 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee. Information obtained via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) on emails from the 2015 process is published here for the first time. These findings are highly relevant to the 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines process, now underway, which has plans for a new review on saturated fats.

A reminder, to those of us who would profit by it, that scientific consensus is no guarantee of truth.

Read it.

Regenerative agriculture starts with the soil. The health of farm ground is connected to the financial viability and resiliency of the farm, said Chuck Rice, a professor at Kansas State University.

“We’ve lost 50% of our soil organic matter with 100 plus years of cultivation in the United States,” Rice said. “So we aren’t taking care of our soils.”

Methods like those Josh Payne has implemented on the Concordia farm revive — or regenerate — the soil and by extension the ecosystem. Regenerative agriculture methods aim to not only restore farmland to its prechemical and industrial state, but to help the land withstand the severe weather threats from climate change.

Climate change! Climate change! Climate change!

Read it.

Now I want to be clear what we’re doing here. I am not asking if the Republican Party is fascist (I think, broadly speaking, it isn’t) and certainly not if you are fascist (I certainly hope not). But I want to employ the concept of fascism as an ideology with more precision than its normal use (‘thing I don’t like’) and in that context ask if Donald Trump fits the definition of a fascist based on his own statements and if so, what does that mean. And I want to do it in a long-form context where we can get beyond slogans or tweet-length arguments and into some detail.

…

Mussolini and Hitler have become such bywords for evil in general conversation, peers to the Dark Lord Sauron or Frieza, that they need to be demystified to a significant degree to be useful for understanding human affairs and our momentum because these men did not appear suddenly as the villains we now know them to be. There were plenty of signs of what these men might do once in power, before they had it, but they did not stride on to the stage dressed in spikes and black robes. These were men, not wizards with mind control powers, so it is worth asking why people were so foolish to entrust them with power – to the near universal ruin of everyone involved.

This author makes the usual mistake of interpreting Trumpian hyperbole (which he has used all his life) for serious political talk, as if Trump were your standard Establishmentarian apparatchik. The actions of both Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and the public statements of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, make a much better case of them fitting this author’s definition of fascist (but of course he doesn’t go through that exercise because It’s All About Trump.

I think it’s rather plain that the American Federal government is effectively fascist and has been on course to be so since the administration of Woodrow Wilson, with a big boost from Franklin Roosevelt. Most of Trump’s ‘fascist’ statements are merely pointing out that he would do what most Democrat administrations have blatantly failed to do, their job in enforcing the law, such as acting to stop illegal immigration (rather than encouraging it) and pursuing a non-belligerent and pro-American foreign policy (remember how North Korea wasn’t a problem when Trump was President?). If you’re looking for censorship and violence against opponents, it would be hard for Trump to achieve what Obama and Biden have regularly done, whether against the January 6th demonstrators or against Trump himself.

Watch it.

If I ever win the lottery, I’m going to build a castle — out of stone. (With windows of transparent aluminum).

Read it.

For most of the 20th century, IQ scores steadily climbed, a phenomenon so consistent it was named the “Flynn effect” after the psychologist James Flynn, who first documented it. Generations across the globe were getting smarter, or at least, their scores on intelligence tests were improving. Explanations ranged from better nutrition and healthcare to more complex societies that required sharper minds. But now, as we move further into the 21st century, the Flynn effect seems to be crumbling. In some countries, the rise has plateaued; in others, it has reversed. What is going on? Are we getting dumber, or is something else at play?

A timely study by Sandra Oberleiter and her colleagues has provided an answer that is both unsettling and enlightening. Published in Intelligence, their research suggests that the Flynn effect is faltering because the nature of intelligence itself is shifting. The problem isn’t that we’re getting dumber. It’s that we’re getting more specialized, and that, in turn, is weakening the ties that bind our cognitive abilities together. In short, modern life is forcing us to become experts at the expense of being generalists.

Babylon Bee.

Satire — read quickly before it comes true.

Babylon Bee.

Satire — read quickly before it comes true.

Read it.

A new study has revealed that the iconic bronze-winged lion in St. Mark’s Square, Venice, may have originated in 8th-century China.

The discovery comes from a multidisciplinary team of experts in geology, chemistry, archaeology, and art history from the University of Padua, the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and the International Association for Mediterranean and Oriental Studies (Ismeo). Through advanced metallurgical analysis, the team discovered that a significant portion of the bronze used in the lion came from the lower Yangtze River basin in southeastern China, and it was likely cast during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE).

…

Lead isotope analysis of the bronze alloy provided indisputable evidence of the Chinese origin of the materials used in the statue. The results were announced on September 11, 2024, during an international conference on Marco Polo, part of Venice’s celebrations marking the 700th anniversary of the famous merchant’s death. Scholars have long debated the lion’s origins, with previous theories suggesting it could have been made in Anatolia during the Hellenistic era. However, the new evidence points directly to China.

Read it.

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the world that my two daughters — both under the age of three— will inhabit when they’re adults. Last night, I was surprised to find that my older daughter Yara was able to recognize a 1980s-style tape deck in a picture book we were reading (“this… a… music box,” she said, after studying it intently). And she certainly knows what the mail is — in fact, one of her favorite books is called The Jolly Postman.

But will the adult Yara personally write out and mail letters? Perhaps about as frequently as she will play cassette tapes. Which is to say: not never, but almost never.

Babylon Bee.

Satire —  read quickly before it comes true.

Babylon Bee.

Satire — read quickly before it comes true.

Read it.

In Ancient Greek philosophy, ataraxia (Greek: ????????, from ?- indicating negation or absence and ?????- tarach- ‘to disturb, trouble’ with the abstract noun suffix -??), generally translated as ‘unperturbedness’, ‘imperturbability’, ‘equanimity’, or ‘tranquility’, is a lucid state of robust equanimity characterized by ongoing freedom from distress and worry.

Sounds like a disease, doesn’t it? “Well, ma’am, you got a really bad case of ataraxia. I recommend watching MSNBC until you get over it.”

“Hey, John, come on over and watch the election/Superbowl/Rings of Power with us.”
“Nope. I’ve got ataraxia, and I need to isolate for a couple of weeks.”

The Register.

Good luck with that.

Sales of “dumb” phones are on the rise in the UK, according to telco Virgin Media O2 (VMO2), with parents choosing them instead of smartphones to try and spare their kids from the perils of social media and instant messaging.

One of the largest mobile operators in Britain, VMO2 says it has seen sales of non-smartphones double year-on-year, with a significant spike this September, as the new school year started.

Many Reg readers will recall feature phones, which supported basic voice calling and text messages, but often lacked a touchscreen or the ability to download and run apps, and even internet access more generally. If VMO2 can be believed, these are enjoying something of a comeback as parents try to make informed choices regarding their children’s online safety.

Make the kid wear an AirTag and you’re good. They can always borrow a friend’s phone if they need to make a call.

The Atlantic.

The backlash against the world’s most hated font may finally be ending.

On the morning of July 4, 2012, two big headlines came from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Geneva. The first was that the Italian physicist Fabiola Gianotti had made a significant discovery in quantum field theory. The second was that her PowerPoint presentation about it had been delivered in Comic Sans. Hilarity competed with outrage: Critics argued that Comic Sans was a font for children’s-party invitations, with a promise of fun and games. It was not meant for important developments in particle mass. Lisa Randall, the first tenured female theoretical-physics professor at Harvard, emailed Gianotti with congratulations and the question on everybody’s mind: Why Comic Sans? “Because I like it,” Gianotti replied.

Take that, stuck-up Ivy League bitch.

Read it.

Vicki Umipeg was prematurely born at 22 weeks, weighing 3 pounds. Her optic nerve was damaged due to high oxygen in the incubator, resulting in complete blindness. She had no visual experiences, no awareness of light whatsoever.

her neck, back, and leg. While being rescued in the hospital, she found herself floating to the ceiling.

She had panoramic vision and saw a woman’s body lying on a metal operating table, with a male and a female medical staff working to save her. When she noticed the distinct wedding ring on the woman’s hand, she realized it was her ring, and the woman lying there was her.

As she had been blind all her life, she had never seen that ring or her body. Only in that near-death experience (NDE) did she see her ring.

…

“She had a 360-degree vision, where she could simultaneously be aware of and process vision during her near-death experience, in front of her, behind her, right, left, up, down.”

“In fact, I told Vicki that the rest of us in our earthly lives have these pie-shaped visual fields because of the location of our eyes, in our eye sockets. She literally laughed at me because her entire life experience with vision [during her NDE] was at 360 or spherical vision.”

Furthermore, initially unfamiliar with math and science, Vicki intuitively grasped calculus and understood how planets are formed after her NDE. She gained answers to questions about science, math, life, planets, and God, experiencing a flood of knowledge and understanding languages she didn’t know before.

New York Times.

Sales of solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles have soared over the last few years — helping to slow global warming and take dangerous pollutants out of the atmosphere.

“Why are you spreading sawdust around?”
“Keeps the elephants away.”
“But there aren’t any elephants in Brooklyn.”
“See how effective it is?”

But one technology critical to fighting climate change is lagging, thanks to a combination of high interest rates, rising costs, misinformation and the cycle of home construction. Adoption of heat pumps, one of the primary ways to cut emissions from buildings, has slowed in the United States and stalled in Europe, endangering the switch to clean energy.

Oh noes!

Homeowners may also run into trouble when trying to find contractors to install heat pumps. Barton James, the president and CEO of the Air Conditioning Contractors of America, says many contractors don’t have training on how to properly install heat pumps; if they install them incorrectly, the ensuing problems can sour consumers on the technology.

Oh, ya think?

In the United States, low gas prices also make the economics of heat pumps more challenging. Gas is around three times cheaper than electricity — while heat pumps make up most of that ground with efficiency, they aren’t the most cost-effective option for every household.

Being ‘climate-friendly’ is easy … if you’re rich.

Read it.

Giulia Manfrini, 36, from Turin in northern Italy, had been surfing in the waters of the Mentawai Islands Regency, West Sumatra Province, before the incident on Friday, according to reports.

Two witnesses are said to have tried to provide first aid to Ms Manfrini – who was later taken to a medical centre – after a swordfish struck her in the chest.

James Colston, who set up a travel agency with Ms Manfrini, said on Instagram: “Even with the brave efforts of her partner, local resort staff and doctors, Giulia couldn’t be saved.”

Be careful out there.

Read it.

The top technology executive at Sam’s Club, Walmart Inc.’s club chain, is leaving the company due to a policy requiring thousands of corporate employees to relocate to headquarters in Arkansas, people familiar with the matter said.

Cheryl Ainoa, chief technology officer of Sam’s Club, is declining to move to Bentonville, Arkansas, due to personal reasons, the people said. She’s departing the company after nearly five years.

sWalmart has asked many of its employees from smaller offices, as well as remote workers around the US, to move to the company’s larger corporate offices. Most employees are going to Arkansas. The policy has moved many executive roles to move to Bentonville, according to a memo from Walmart Chief Technology Officer and Chief Development Officer Suresh Kumar, which was viewed by Bloomberg News.

I thing she just doesn’t want to move to Arkansas. Can’t say that I blame her.

Joel Kotkin.

No power on earth is more fearsome than a highly educated class that faces a constrained, even dismal, future. Such people have played a role in revolutionary upheavals in Europe, Russia, and Latin America—and could potentially do so here in the United States.

The key to radical agitation lies in what one Marxist scholar described as “the swelling population of college graduates caught in a vise of low-paying jobs.” Modern activism rarely stems from blue-collar workers. Instead, it mostly comes from the alienated-educated class, which emerged in its contemporary form with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The key lies in the disjunction between those who consider themselves enlightened and fit to lead, as defined by tests and degrees, and the less-educated classes that work hard, innovate, and take risks. The educated class has expanded globally as college enrollment has exploded—which grew almost 80% between 1970 and 2010—even as job opportunities for many of that class have declined.

ZMan indulges in a little history.

Long forgotten is the fact that the label “neoconservative” was a smear coined by a socialist named Michael Harrington. These newly minted conservatives were often called Trotskyites because they never abandoned their old ideology, but simply opposed the people who came to dominate the American left. Of course, others accused them of being a stalking horse for Zionism and the Israel lobby. Still others suspected that their obsession with Russia was the real motivation.

In other words, from the very start no one trusted their sincerity with regards to their conversion to the conservative cause. They brought lots of money and organizational might, so the Buckley crowd overlooked these concerns and welcomed them into the movement over many objections. Before long, the neocons organized the purge of their doubters and enemies in the movement. Half a century or so since this started, the skeptics of these people have been vindicated.

Buried in that post about Kristol and Cohen is an easily overlooked assertion that has always been at the heart of the issue. They claim that conservative Jews have specific interests that they think are better served by the Democrats now. Leaving aside their definition of “conservative Jews”, what they are arguing is that this subgroup of Americans has interests peculiar to themselves that can conflict with the majority interests of the country, but those minority interests come first.

New York Times.

If you’re 16 years old, live in California and just passed your driver’s license test, the first thing you should do is drive your family to In-N-Out Burger for a milkshake and some animal-style fries.
The first thing a parent should do is call the insurance company to update the policy. That part, however, will probably give you indigestion.

Last month, when Debbie Mukamal called her insurer as she and her daughter rolled away from an In-N-Out drive-through in their 2018 Subaru, the representative casually informed her that her annual premium would triple, from about $1,700 to over $5,000.

She has it pretty good, it turns out. There are plenty of families with three or four children whose annual premiums will top $20,000 this year. That can be enough to replace one of the cars that the policy covers.

How can this be? It’s the insurance industry, which means it’s complicated, unpredictable and more or less mandatory. Buckle up, since failure to do so can cost you money, and away we go.

Read it.

The problem with solving problems is that once they are solved, no one needs the solver anymore. The better kinds of problems are recurring problems that ensure customer retention, employing plumbers, locksmiths and police officers, but the best kind are the completely unsolvable problems.

And those are the only kinds of problems that the Left wants to solve.

Given enough human ingenuity and technological development, most problems can concievably be addressed and that is why the Left has to contrive to make them unsolvable by either causing the problem (homelessness), defining it in such a way that it is inherently unsolvable (equity), defining the inappropriate problem while obscuring the actual problem (gun violence) or inventing fake problems (global warming) that can never be solved because they don’t exist in the first place.

OffGuardian.

Are humans headed for extinction? When we stop evolving both physically and psychologically, where will we be? It is always assumed that evolution is a good thing. A process that is designed to create the best of the best.

Survival of the fittest and all of that.

Even if we don’t believe in the entirety of Darwin’s theory, most people are apt to believe that individual species have evolved in some way—finches in the wild develop better beaks for eating insects that have changed over millennia, or creatures develop into animals that fit and function better in a changing environment.

What about us? What are we headed for?

Babylon Bee.

Satire – read quickly before it comes true.

Read it.

And who could blame them?

Generation Z (Gen Z) has a reputation for being challenging to work with and difficult to manage.

In August, Intelligent.com surveyed 966 business leaders involved in hiring decisions at their company to explore attitudes toward hiring recent Gen Z college graduates.

Read it.

It’s a disturbing trend that has been spreading over the past few years: Gay and Trans couples buying off surrogate mothers to have babies for them, then taking those babies and using them as fashion accessories for social media clout. The trend includes bizarre newborn baby photo ops in which the couples (usually gay or trans men) pose in a hospital bed with the baby as if they just gave birth to it.

Virginia Postrel.

Like printed books, perspective drawing, and double-entry bookkeeping, pockets were heralds of the modern era. In most times and places, people have either carried their money, combs, papers, and other small items in bags separate from their garments or tucked them into belts or sleeves. Integrated pockets are a product of European tailoring, which dates back only to the 14th century. They emerged when men’s breeches ballooned in the mid-1500s.

Everything you didn’t know about pockets.

Watch it.

A very good question. My grandmother cooked with lard. My mother cooked with Crisco. I preferred the lard.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Babylon Bee.

Satire — read quickly before it comes true.

Read it.

Black men in battleground Georgia, many of whom voted for President Joe Biden in 2020, are now turning to Republican nominee Donald Trump, expressing “buyer’s remorse” over the Biden-Harris administration, Politico reported.

“I’m not necessarily the biggest fan of Trump, but I’ll definitely take Trump over Harris,” said Arthur Beauford, a black 28-year-old whose family is “Democrat, all the way.”

Beauford said that Harris wasn’t qualified to be president as she “just seems to have been given everything” in her career.

Babylon Bee.

Satire — read quickly before it comes true.

Fortune.

Wealthy U.S. citizens are more likely to support Vice President Kamala Harris over former President Donald Trump in this year’s presidential election. But regardless of who wins in November, more and more millionaires are looking for a backup plan to escape the political environment in the U.S. through golden passport and citizenship by investment programs.

Gee, I wonder why?

The survey finds that while Harris commands a “strong lead” over Trump amongst these wealthy citizens—52% support the VP compared to 42% for Trump—many still report that they are looking for more economic opportunities abroad.

Any problems are the result of Biden/Harris policies. What’s not to like?

Americans Are Fleeing With Their Wealth (Nomad Capitalist)

Read it.

What’s a medical drug? Ask someone on the street and they’re likely to tell you it’s the kind of thing you take when you’re unwell.

This understanding is wrong, as we will see. But after a thorough investigation, my colleagues and I found no other potential definitions are any better.

Despite their centrality to medicine, we have no idea what medical drugs are. We can’t even tell the difference between drugs and food, let alone drugs and so-called “natural” alternatives.

A drug is a substance that is taken (or put) into the body in anticipation of its having a chemical effect (typically beneficial) on that body.

Ask me a hard one.

Read it.

I’ve been working from home since long before the pandemic. It’s been almost 10 years of partial ‘wfh’ and 6 years of full time ‘wfh’ for me, and frankly I don’t see it ever changing on my end, without threats of physical violence or bags of money.

Some folks really missed the office social club when the shutdown happened, and I get that. But being a ‘tech person’ who needs to focus on things in a deep way, and having to share some open plan office space with a hundred other people every day… The two things just don’t mix well. In addition, being in the DevOps/SRE space means that I often need space to bang my head against the wall (figuratively of course) or yell out about the injustice of yet another bug in a Terraform provider that I don’t have the time to upgrade from.

There’s just no way the tradeoff of going back to an office would work for me. Lets look at the two sides here from my perspective and see how it might compare to yours:

Read it.

While one could interpret “Science” as referring to the epistemological concept of methodologies employed to discern truths, this seems incongruous in our particular context. Instead, “Science” seems to serve as a shorthand for a collective body of research: observations, experiments, and models related to climate change. This body of research presumably “tells us that the sooner we respond to climate change, the lower the risks and the costs will be in the future.”

Additionally, “Science” as used here goes beyond the descriptive by implying an ethical obligation to act in a certain way. This violates Hume’s is/ought distinction providing “Science” with a religious character. Blurring the distinction between science and religion (between descriptive and normative claims) leads to the “Believe The Science” disaster observed over the last few years.

Linguistically, “Science” is presented as the acting entity in the sentence. Rewriting the beginning of the sentence, “Science tells us” as “We have been told by Science” highlights how strange and ridiculous it is to have “Science” as the main actor (although, note, that it makes sense if you replace “Science” with “God”).

Read it.

Faced with a housing shortage, Los Angeles once had a solution. From the San Fernando Valley to Culver City to La Cienega Heights, developers in the 1950s and ’60s tore down thousands of older buildings and filled in virtually every square foot with aggressively economical two- or three-story apartment complexes — known locally as dingbats.

Subdivided into as many units as the lots could accommodate — usually between 6 and 12 — most of these stucco boxes left little room outdoors, except for an exposed carport slung beneath the second floor. This new format for affordable multifamily living became nearly as ubiquitous as the single-family tract housing that iconified the much-mythologized Southern California suburban lifestyle.