He is who he always was and he was very transparent about his goals. The rot is in us, the American people. And, of course, in the legacy media.
Executive Functioning in ADHD and autism: NYT guide
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/10/well/mind/executive-function-tips.html
Pretty good really.
“subscribers have mostly ignored Discovery’s enormous assortment of lowbrow reality shows and unscripted lifestyle content”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/10/business/media/hbo-max-warner-bros-discovery.html
Why they merged then split. Daytime TV fair doesn’t work for a streaming audience.
Novo Nordisk trillion dollar error: “Novo did file a patent there for semaglutide. . .but the last time they paid the annual maintenance fee on it was 2018”
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/novo-nordisk-s-canadian-mistake
Semaglutide goes generic in Canada. Maybe invasion delayed while Canada supplies US market?
“Roundabouts in Minnesota have had over an 80% reduction in fatal and serious injury crashes.”
https://www.dot.state.mn.us/roundabouts/safety.html
No wonder they are popular. Crashes tend to be low consequences vs t-bone of running an intersection.
“Trump administration is scrambling to rehire many federal employees dismissed under DOGE’s staff-slashing initiatives”
https://www.startribune.com/trump-races-to-fix-a-big-mistake-doge-fired-too-many-people/601368798
Musk takes the blame. Fed workers needed big raises before DOGE, raises will need to be bigger now.
Apple paper: “LRMs effectively overthink on simple problems, outperform LLMs on mid-complexity puzzles, and fail in the same exact way LLMs do on high-complexity tasks and puzzles”
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/08/apple-research-lrms
Encouraging sign that we have hit a hard AI limit for at least a few years. The longer the better.
“A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official said Tuesday she was resigning from her role overseeing updates to the agency’s COVID-19 vaccine recommendations”
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/the-golden-age-of-resignations
People with courage and convictions.
HCR: “Journey to American Democracy: a series of short videos about American history that we will release on my YouTube channel, Facebook, and Instagram”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-7-2025
An antidote to MAGA lies.
HCR has very much seized her moment. Historians arise.
How the market for US bonds works and why MAGA-America will pay more interest on debt or will have inflation or both.
https://www.twincities.com/2025/06/08/real-world-economics-bonds-part-2-how-this-affects-us/
A very clear explanation that includes appropriate caveats. The balance of debt vs inflation seems inherently unpredictable.
COVID update: “asymptomatic throughout infection was 44.1”
https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/common-misconceptions-about-covid
I liked this update.
“many of the guidelines … simply hygiene theater”
Funding journalism- “… government give individual tax credits to people, who could then support the news outlet(s) of their choice. The model for this already exists: the charitable contribution tax deduction”
https://cepr.net/publications/saving-journalism-will-require-some-new-thinking/
Someone agrees with me.
“every adult in the country would have the right to give $100, regardless of whether they owed taxes or not”
Remember tariffs? “deadline come and gone for best trade offers, and the radio silence by the Trump White House about trade since that deadline has passed”
https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-curious-incident-of-the-trade
Trade negotiator comments are enlightening.
Post-shame MAGA loves their corruption.
https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/corruption-in-plain-sight-is-still
Our culture is broken. It isn’t just legacy media.
Jedeed: The Great MAGA Crack-Up
https://www.bannedinyourstate.com/p/the-great-maga-crack-up
This is all you need. Read and feel better.
“Why has Apple failed this badly?”
https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/06/03/2155
Apple feels like America. The numbers seem good but it is broken inside. Apple feels know it is broken, eventually investors will figure it out.
Vietnam joins upper income world: “1.91 children per woman”.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/04/world/asia/vietnam-two-child-policy.html
That demographic transition, driven by female education and falling infant mortality, is as close to a law of physics that sociology has.
It cannot be stopped. Revealed preference applies.
“Prime Minister Mark Carney has made it a priority to remove [trade] barriers among Canada’s 10 provinces and three territories”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/04/world/canada/trump-canada-province-trade-beer.html
Canada, where I grew up, is weirder than most understand. The provinces behave more or less like loosely federated nations.
“Administration officials said the Ukrainians did not notify them before launching Operation Spider Web.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-3-2025
There is a lot of wiggle room in the word “notify”.
Baumol’s Disease remission? “health care got steadily less affordable until around 1990, then leveled off, and now has been getting more affordable since around 2012”
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/service-costs-arent-exploding-anymore
Not what I expected. This essay deserves a discussion.
“Biden was old but governed normally. Trump governs erratically because he’s unglued. That’s the true cover-up”
https://www.publicnotice.co/p/trump-cognitive-decline-cover-up
A cover-up led by the NYT.
Sky AI assistant for macOS: “amazing that they seem to be doing more than what Apple promised, yet without requiring the apps to rearchitect everything around intents”
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/06/03/sky-preview/
Time to relaunch Claris to hold everything not OS.
Cheap drones now dominate warfare. The MAGA are ensuring China’s continued dominance.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/how-chinese-drones-could-defeat-america
The NYT devoted a lot of effort to destroy Joe Biden and minimize his achievements and goals.
“At least two women among the dozens of cases reviewed by The New York Times took their own lives after being approached by investigators armed with DNA evidence”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/03/us/forensic-genetic-geneology-dna-babies.html
Babies stillborn or left to die by mothers later identified through DNA tracing.
“In England, Canada … infanticide is a separate crime from murder”
A tour of incel ideology courtesy of a customized ChatGPT (prompt tailored) implementation
https://www.citationneeded.news/openai-incel-chatbot-subhuman-men/
We need journalists trained in anthropology to explain our world. I’m really curious about the female side of this ideology — I suspect they do exist. I’d also like to learn about the surgeons that do cosmetic orthognathic reconstructions (the real deal is $$$$ and technically hard). Fascinating but disturbing tribe.
Terms I learned of: hardmaxxing (surgery), softmaxxing (gym), mogging (emulating arrogance), mewing (it’s funny, not scary).
Taurine Revisited: “factors that were associated with poor outcomes in AML, only the taurine transporter and the LCL receptor showed up from the list of upregulated genes”
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/taurine-revisited
Lots of interesting taurine physiology.
COVID vaccine status: public health view
https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/covid-summer-and-confusion-measles
I read this as no major change in ability to get vaccine but uncertain insurance coverage where “shared decision making”
The data center bubble: Blackstone private equity.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/02/business/ai-data-centers-private-equity.html
Reminds me of “dark fiber”. Overbuilt during .com bubble. I think much was used before it was technically obsolete.
Big tech usually leases rather than owns, not clear who Blackstone will sell them to.
A curious article on Mexico’s “left” authoritarian populism.
https://www.persuasion.community/p/mexico-and-the-road-us-democrats
MAGA without the tax cuts? He doesn’t talk about corruption and its consequences. It is not a grim essay.
The key point is her popularity, similar to Putin’s numbers.
“multimodal generation lets Large Language Models directly create images by adding tiny patches of color one after another”
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-recent-history-of-ai-in-32-otters
I learned things. Good explainer.
Why bartenders want you to open a tab: efficiency, lower credit card fees
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/31/business/gen-z-bar-etiquette.html
I never liked tabs. It’s not a Gen Z thing really.
1670-2025: RIP “Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading Into Hudson’s Bay”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/01/world/canada/canada-hudsons-bay-stores-closing.html
I remember their glory days.
Lotterman Bond primer: “capital assets of the seller plus the seller’s ability to make money”
Drezner on Musk’s aversion to therapy and psychiatry. 🆓
https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/go-the-fk-to-therapy
“I have never met anyone more in need of therapy in their life …
… You killed an estimated 300,000 people, mostly children, in your first month working for the federal government”
I suspect his last psychiatrist told him he has a schizoaffective disorder and recommended antipsychotics.
Federal worker DOGE destruction continues as the head rat moves on.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/us/politics/federal-workers-musk-doge.html
The salaries of fed workers are going to have to rise quite a bit. It was already very hard to hire due to low compensation, now there’s no trust.
Palantir merges gov data to create a profile on every American.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/technology/trump-palantir-data-americans.html
“Some current and former Palantir employees have been unnerved by the work.”
Palantir is high grade evil. This sounds similar to China’s social credit database.
“the moral rot at the core of Trumpism, which every day disgraces our country, which we are proud of and love.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/opinion/trump-vance-morality.html
Of all the weird things in my recent life, one of the weirdest was developing a modicum of respect for David Brooks. I didn’t give enough credit to his chronic concerns about community and values (social capital). He was right, I was wrong.
“USING NEURAL NETWORKS TO FOOL THE HUMAN MIND IS LIKE USING A BAZOOKA TO FIGHT A HAMSTER.”
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/villainy-2
Zach W Classic.
“Mr. Musk has received advance warning of the [drug] tests”
Allegedly he actually go tested. I find that hard to believe. Lots of psychedelics and boatloads of ketamine
“He has denounced traditional therapy and antidepressants.”
He and RFK likely bond over there Scientology-like psych hatred.
“liver immunotherapy technique to known respiratory allergans in sensitized mice dramatically protects them from asthma symptoms”
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/new-route-asthma-treatment-through-liver-all-places
Liver screens out problematic cells. In mice but encouraging. Fixing asthma would be cool.
TACO trade – brutal Michael de Adder cartoon
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/taco-trade
It’s probably over as an investment strategy, but the TACO memes do enrage Trump.
Dwarf Planet: “OF201 … 24,000 years to travel around the sun … as close as 4.2 billion miles … as far out as 151 billion”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/science/dwarf-planet-nine-discovery.html
Not every day we add a planet to the solar system. Even a dwarf planet.
“Pluto, Eris, the large asteroid Ceres … beyond Neptune, Haumea and Makemake” and probably 100 more.
Noah Smith, voice of the technarchy, on the end of X.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-age-of-twitter-is-finally-ending
“many of the smartest users have left the platform, so that replies are dominated by activists, trolls, and bored people tossing off rote statements”
More concrete data than I usually see. I wonder if Smith is going to break with Musk. If Noah is abandoning X it’s officially dead.
Stocks Rally on ‘TACO Trade’: “short for Trump Always Chickens Out”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/27/business/stock-market-trump-tariffs.html
Buy on the bad news, sell after the chicken squawks.
Haiti hires Erik (Blackwater) Prince for gang warfare.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/28/us/haiti-erik-prince-blackwater-gangs.html
“expected to send up to 150 mercenaries to Haiti over the summer.”
“U.N. officials have warned that the capital is in danger of falling under complete criminal control.”
Biden / UN effort failed. So now it’s foreign mercenaries. Prince is said a bad name in the mercenary industry.
Jon Udell – MCP Is RSS for AI
https://thenewstack.io/mcp-is-rss-for-ai-more-use-cases-for-model-context-protocol/
I am delighted Jon is writing on this topic. Deserves carefully study
Cognitively impaired dependents of boomers living on streets once mothers die.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/27/us/politics/homelessness-baby-boomers.html
“he reveled in sports and neighborhood friends but mostly felt lost in class.”
“Analyzing census data at 10-year intervals, he found that throughout their lives late baby boomers had been at least 1.5 times as likely to become homeless as people born roughly a decade later.”
As parents of two dependent adults we think of this every day. Our estate planning is the most complex thing we have ever attempted — and we have loads of degrees and expertise and a reasonable estate. Most such dependents live with parents until the parents die.
Confusing NYT article on “autonomous” trucks suggests they will show up in selected states: “Runs in the snow appear more distant”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/27/business/driverless-semi-trucks-aurora-innovation.html
It’s unclear from article what the remote control vs autonomous balance is. They were expected 5-10y ago. Texas is probably best geography.
Shithole country autocrat: Trump family scams and theft grow quickly
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/words-and-phrases-we-can-do-without-41d
“The Trump family and its business partners have collected $320 million in fees from a new cryptocurrency, brokered overseas real estate deals worth billions of dollars and are opening an exclusive club in Washington called the Executive Branch charging $500,000 apiece to join”
Medicaid work requirement: “most people still will be eligible, but will get kicked off because they can’t manage the paperwork”
https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/what-we-wrote-in-the-new-york-times
Our son is disabled. The paperwork is obscene. It only makes sense as a way to deny services.
Separately, implementing a work requirement in a non-punitive way would greatly *increase* the cost of Medicaid coverage.