“Our entirely predictable Social Security “crisis,” to put it bluntly, is a political choice made by a pay-to-play government that under President Donald Trump has become baldly transactional. Congress could close the gap tomorrow if lawmakers would get their priorities straight and start acting in the interests of the broader public and not just the richest 10 percent.”
“South Korea gave the world K-pop, 12-step skincare routines, and parasocial relationships with virtual boyfriends. Its latest export is a fake online store you can shop at without buying anything, and it’s the first one that’s actively trying to save you money.”
“Detractors might scoff at Musk’s ambition to die on Mars, but at least the dying part would be easy. The Martian air is 95% carbon dioxide. Breathing this air would suffocate the average human in a few seconds. The surface air pressure is six millibars, roughly equivalent to the pressure 22 miles above Earth. Were Musk to very inadvisably step out onto the Martian surface in his “Occupy Mars” T-shirt and sandals, all the water in his body would vaporize in an instant, making it difficult to predict what would kill him faster: asphyxiation or a kind of total bodily implosion. Either way, the near-vacuum conditions would soon desiccate his corpse, leaving behind a freeze-dried mummy that — owing to the lack of moisture and putrefying bacteria — would never decompose.”
“It’s one thing for a fan to share or remix copyrighted material out of love for the source material, with no commercial motive. (“No copyright intended!”) It’s another for a marketing agency to take an entire living author’s book, replace its art with AI slop, add an AI word generator, monetize the traffic, promote it in their portfolio, and then outrank the official site everywhere.”
“But the ways in which this year’s El Niño will interact with the effects of global warming — and what that means for food security — is something scientists are still actively observing and untangling.”
“The search for the overtly spectacular obscured how the regular can be spectacular, and how the spectacular regular can be ethereal. We’re not as captivated by the Knicks if they become NBA champions in 2009 or 2023, because our need for something good to counterbalance everything bad would not have been as strong. It matters that the president is who he is, and that the only game he attended is the only game they lost in a month. And the only Knicks home game in the Finals he didn’t attend saw witness to the greatest comeback in NBA playoff history. Even the harshest skeptic of the supernatural’s ability to be telekinetic can’t ignore the cosmic directive of the basketball gods giving Trump the finger. The joy vacuum with the pathological disposition to make everything about himself couldn’t derail their destiny.”
“The Volunteer Pilots Taking Abortion Patients Where They Need to Go”.
RIP, Alan Greenspan, longtime former Chair of the Federal Reserve.
“Does this mean we can now aim ChatGPT or other chatbots at any hard math problem and expect success if we wait long enough and pay for enough tokens? No. We still have no idea which problems A.I. will succeed at and which it won’t. That’s why OpenAI didn’t single out this 80-year-old problem as a focused goal. They tossed ChatGPT at hundreds of unsolved math problems that the ever-imaginative Paul Erdős left us. This question about dots on the table just happened to be the most famous of the handful that ChatGPT solved. OpenAI is not alone. Google DeepMind has been applying a similar approach: feed A.I. systems large lists of open math problems and report any successes.”
RIP, Clive Davis, legendary music mogul and member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame who brought Janis Joplin, Whitney Houston, and Bruce Springsteen to the world and nurtured many others.
“The easiest way to not be photographed with fascists is to not go to places where fascists coagulate.”
“But the fact of the matter is that the sin and/or salvation of other intelligent creatures on other planets or in other galaxies is their business and we have no idea. We do not have their Bible, only ours, and ours is about us, not about them. We earthling Christians have our earthling-Christian Bibles and our earthling-Christian understanding of what God’s redemption means and our earthling-Christian ideas about how it works/worked/is working here, but “is it certain that this is the only possible mode of Redemption?” (That question is from Lewis’ 1958 essay.)”
Happy 25th blogiversary to Chad Orzel, whom I discovered way back when. I’m now less than six months out from my own 25th blogiversary.
“On the other hand, when a celebrity publicly loses their mind at a critic, they are doing something validating: they are acknowledging that we still matter”.
“At a time when billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos crush entire communities to make their next million in a minute, anti-corruption lawmakers need to connect the dots between corruption and voters’ rising cost of living. Our proposed solution is clear: Tax the billionaires to deconcentrate their wealth and reduce their influence over everything from elections to affordability to freedom of the press.”
RIP, Jill Smokler, founder of the Scary Mommy blog.
“In 2025, the baby name “Donald” hit its lowest point of popularity in U.S. history, according to data maintained by the Social Security Administration and reviewed by NOTUS.”
Wishing Linda Cohn all the best with her retirement.
“Put more simply: Soccer is full of people who are either (A) spying on someone; (B) actively worried that someone is spying on them; or (C) both.”
“Pools are mercilessly complicated—and I’m talking about little ones. This is literally monumental in size. It would take a master class in technical execution to be able to work on this thing in a competent capacity. But you don’t need Swimming Pool Steve to tell you that when you see what appears to be the interior surface peeling up and floating in chunks, that’s an “oh, crap” moment.”
RIP, David Clayton-Thomas, lead singer for Blood, Sweat & Tears.
“Major League Baseball should want to widen opportunity for players to enter the professional ranks, not narrow it. It also should want to do everything possible to attract the best athletes, rather than risk losing them to other sports.”
“Coming after many musical artists have declined to participate, it’s another sign of how badly Trump—and his approach to this hallowed national anniversary—have alienated the middle of the country. Trump’s treatment of this moment as akin to a monarchical festival is of a piece with his ballroom, his triumphal arch, and other efforts to transform the nation’s capital into something more like a czar’s imperial court. It’s giving Democrats like [Pennsylvania Governor Josh] Shapiro an opening to decline to participate in the president’s Bonapartist self-glorification while giving voice to a disinterested, public-spirited patriotism more in sync with the virtues of republican governance.”
“They will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body, and they’ll go after the president’s family, the Cabinet, his donors and friends—half of you in this room will be targeted.”
“But there’s a big picture here that is important to recognize: Google is making a decisive move away from the open internet. They are building their own closed information garden and that’s a decisive shift away from the model that undergirded all of the company’s history down until the last couple years. Because Google is so big and has such a dominant role in architect of the internet that’s a decisive shift for the future of the internet as well.”
Happy 100th birthday, Mel Brooks!
Given that we haven’t run the Biosphere experiment successfully here on Earth, I don’t see us being ready for Mars yet.
Also even if we solve all the issues with getting to Mars, I suspect that it’s a one-way trip because of the long duration of micro, then severely reduced gravity. Your body likely changes too much. We’d create a new human species if anyone survived on Mars.
I’ll get in line to help Elon pack.
Uhh, Social Security’s problems are driven by both hands of the duopoly. No president this century of either party has made a proposal to increase the FICA income tax cap. No Congress led by either party has done that, either.
But Biden’s expanding Social Security to federal employees without adding money? That bill came from Congress, and had been kicked around by both parties since 2013.
Going back even further, why isn’t the FICA tax cap COLAed? For that matter, why didn’t Pelosi COLA the last minimum wage hike, now nearly 20 years old? (On my site, I made that call at the time, in 2007.)
All politics and posturing.
At the Pink Dome, too.
Why hasn’t Dannie Goeb COLA-ed the homestead exemption? (And why do Rethuglicans, and some Democrats, extol capitalism until it cuts the wrong way?)
For THAT matter, why do we have a separate FICA tax? Cuz FDR himself was worried about “the dole.”
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/07/20/presidents-and-their-debts-fdr-to-bush/fdr-budget-hawk
Off to write at MY site.
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Walled gardens? Arguably Apple started that with iPhone apps.
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Rosenthal, sadly, is wrong in multiple ways. First, the NFL and NBA have both shortened their drafts since the start of this century. Last I checked, neither is dying.
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Climate crisis? We’re headed to 5C in a century without SERIOUS action. (The Paris Accords, most gutted by two people — Dear Leader [think, Democrats] and Xi Jinping — was not and is not “serious.”) Sorry, Michael Mann, but James Hansen is not alarmist and other people besides him have said this. (This is why I call the likes of Mann and Katharine Hayhoe “climate change neoliberals” and “climate change Obamiacs.”)
I am no economist, but what I am reading about Greenspan is that he was in many ways responsible for the deregulation of financial markets and he also kept rates too low for too long, which together caused the boom and crash of 2008.
https://www.dw.com/en/the-man-who-knew-but-didnt-say-alan-greenspan-1926-2026/a-77658667
p.s. freeze-dried Elon collecting dust on Mars can’t happen soon enough.
“ I’m now less than six months out from my own 25th blogiversary.”
There should be a party for that! I wouldn’t think that there’s all that many blogs going strong for that long.
Also Congratulations