https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-8-2025
Rand is a bad person but it appears he does have a spine.
Mouse Brain Map start: “Finding wiring rules is a win. The brain is a lot less messy than people thought”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/09/science/neuroscience-brain-mice-map.html
1 mm sq, 200,000 cells, 523 million connections, 1.6 PB.
David Brooks admits he got it badly wrong: “To watch the loss of your nation’s honor is embarrassing and painful.”
Brooks rarely says anything that is not annoying but I give credit for admitting error.
“Trump … Morality is for suckers. The strong do what they want and the weak suffer what they must.”
“… birds and mammals did not inherit the neural pathways that generate intelligence from a common ancestor, but rather evolved them independently”
https://www.quantamagazine.org/intelligence-evolved-at-least-twice-in-vertebrate-animals-20250407/
Bird brains are more space efficient.
“circuits that composed the mammalian neocortex and the avian DVR developed at different times, in different orders and in different regions of the brain.”
The base neuron structures seem same. Implications for artificial minds.
“Colossal scientists deciphered the dire wolf genome, rewrote the genetic code of the common gray wolf to match it, and, using domestic dogs as surrogate mothers…”
https://time.com/7274542/colossal-dire-wolf/
“Creating the dire wolves called for making just 20 edits in 14 genes in the common gray wolf … white coat, larger size, more powerful shoulders, wider head, larger teeth and jaws, more-muscular legs, and characteristic vocalizations, especially howling and whining.”
“elephant genes will simply be rewritten to match the mammoth”
macOS: “space occupied on disk for a restored volume can be substantially greater than the original or its backup”
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/04/07/how-robust-are-apfs-clone-and-sparse-files/
Clone files in TM become separate files on restore.
“network transfers currently appear to explode sparse files to full size prior to transfer”
“Chinese Academy of Social Sciences announced that it was shutting down the center where Mr. He worked”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/world/asia/china-trade-war-tariffs.html
A small detail in article about China tariff response, but it shows Xi and Trump use same methods to crush dissent.
“Kennedy this afternoon conceded on X that “[t]he most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-6-2025-sunday
Antivaxx community knows RFK must lie now to advance the future agenda. Technically he did not say the MMR vaccine was better than measles …
Since 2013 bottom 25% students doing worse, accelerated by COVID
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/us/low-performing-students-reasons.html
“[bottom tier] Adults have also been struggling with literacy since 2012 …”
I believe it is the tech, especially smartphone. The constant distraction, but also the difficulty the bottom quartile has working with the tech that schools require them to use. #massdisability
Home contract work industry never recovered from the Great Recession: subcontracting to avoid regulation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/magazine/contractors-construction-real-estate.html
Despite breaking lots of laws the margins are still too small. The article doesn’t explain why — presumably it is Baumol’s Cost Disease. Productivity has not changed in 50-100 years.
Meanwhile in China: vast product production.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/business/china-manufacturing-exports-trump-tariffs.html
“China is using more factory robots than the rest of the world combined …. factory output is bigger than the combined manufacturing of the United States, Germany, Japan, South Korea and Britain.”
But
“housing market crash since 2021 has wiped out much of the savings of the middle class and ruined many wealthy families.”
How Waltz added Goldberg to the Signal breach: “he number was erroneously saved during a “contact suggestion update” by Waltz’s iPhone, which one person described as the function where an iPhone algorithm adds a previously unknown number to an exist
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/06/signal-group-chat-leak-how-it-happened
So funny. Done in by Apple being helpful. I bet that mistake happens fairly often.
Also, of course, why there are processes and tools around secure technologies to prevent errors like this.
This gets to the root of our true gov problems: “White House had authorized the use of Signal, largely because there is no alternative platform to text in real time across different agencies”
A pragmatic economist reviews the contradictions of Trump’s assault on world trade
“While that tariff will hit every container of unprocessed products clearing customs, trucking, processing, warehousing and retailers’ costs here need not change.”
So a 10% tariff, even if borne entirely by Americans, may be significantly less than a 10% price increase. Good stuff in here.
“Given years to adjust to the new tariffs, seasonal vegetable production and canning could again be important in these mid-Atlantic states, although many farm fields have become suburbs.”
Sequoia 15.4 is a big release with very little documentation of changes.
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/04/06/last-week-on-my-mac-sequoia-spring/
I’m waiting a few weeks on this one. With this many undocumented changes a 15.4.1 can’t be far away. Many changes, however, are more about preparing for macOS 16.
Canada gov funded billboards remind US residents that tariffs are a tax.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/06/us/canada-tariffs-billboards-pittsburgh-pennsylvania.html
“billboards aren’t paid for by an industry trade group or a political action committee, but rather by the sovereign (for now) government of Canada, a point that is noted in the not-so-fine print.”
I loved the “for now” there.
“He ain’t built shit,” Musk said of Navarro.”
Rick Steves cheerful travelogue style one hour intro to fascism in 20th century Europe.
https://www.ricksteves.com/watch-read-listen/video/tv-show/fascism
Steves is best known for his chipper and very efficient guided tours of European museums and destinations. His voice guided my daughter and I through the Vatican museum in about 3 hours(!).
He applies this method to a MAGA-inspired tour of fascism. It’s engaging, brilliant, and wicked.
“When we wrote our book on administrative burdens, we pointed to Social Security as a model to emulate”
https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/as-savings-crater-social-security
“SSA said that 40 percent of direct deposit fraud occurred via calls to the agency. That is wholly different, and massively less, than 40 percent of calls being fraudulent.”
The way to break social security is to degrade services. As Musk is doing. (Caveat: SSA has pretty bad software. It could be improved with time, money, and thought.)
Trump’s National Park Service makes a happier American history: “webpage changes resulted not from demands from above, but from lower-level employees seeking to comply with what they believed Trump wanted”
Ben Franklin’s slaves fade away.
Trump loyalists advancing the MAGA agenda, as Project 2025 planned. Fear of job loss drove more expansive revisions.
Fear is the key.
“The notion that taxing Lesotho gemstones is necessary for the U.S. to add steel jobs in Ohio is so absurd that I briefly lost consciousness in the middle of writing this sentence.”
This, dear NYT, is how you cover madness. I like how Thompson listed 3 incompatible post-hoc justifications from Team Trump.
Apple Wallet: “tap the + button top-right, tap Travel Card and then just search for the city you’ll be visiting … have a local transit card ready for use on arrival.”
Across the world migrating to apps has made it harder for non-locals to visit. I wonder if Apple is thinking about this ..
Jared Bernstein: “we depend less on trade than most other countries. That means, as Trump has correctly argued, we can hurt them more than they can hurt us.”
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/a-trade-warfor-what
This essay assumes the US doesn’t invade Greenland or turn Canada into an American colony. Bernstein further assumes rational responses to the trade wars. Given those assumptions, what lies ahead for Americans is merely recession, growing misery, and general decline for decades to come.
Solid reference.
Musk takes down social security services: “downsize its phone operations … forced an influx of traffic to the SSA website. The strain of that traffic has reportedly caused the website to crash multiple times.”
Twitter goes down and the world is briefly a better place. SSA goes down and vulnerable people suffer.
(This morning the site went down as we tried to document our disabled son’s income.)
“We aren’t the first society to come unglued. We almost certainly will not be the last.”
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/youre-not-crazy-america-has-gone-mad/
1. If sociology and anthropology had not died in the 1980s we might have been monitoring our society and culture and anticipated collapse.
2. Without falsifiability an industrial civilization cannot endure.
Drezner explains why NYT journalists lost reality: trapped in their own narrative
https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/there-are-no-adults-in-the-room
“Who is the president listening to on policy? What are the possible faultlines…”
There is a standard policy outline they follow. They have been writing the same template for decades. Now it doesn’t work but they can’t stop.
Historian of reconstruction on the MAGA age: Crushing reconstruction.
“even the robber barons were not that bad; at least they endowed some libraries and foundations and fellowships and had some idea of wanting to pretend to some sort of cultural capital. But here, at this moment, we are in a regime with these billionaires who seem unaccountable to anyone”
Musk is in too deep. He can’t leave MAGA.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/musk-stepping-back-dont-bet-on-it
Well argued by Josh. He is on the tiger now.
Musk is too wealthy to face justice — under our old standards. But there is a narrow chance American democracy survives return to the justice standards of years gone by. Then he faces prison time.
Fallows deep dive into American tariff history: “No one who has looked into Smoot-Hawley has said, “Let’s do that again!” Until today.”
https://fallows.substack.com/p/launching-the-economic-version-of
Readable and solid.
On the bright side the Trump’s Tariffs may save the world.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/04/trump-tariffs-political-capital/682274/
Americans may now learn authoritarian rule is not all as much fun as it sounds. (Maybe.)
Which would give human civilization better survival odds.
EU trade war option: “partly cutting off the [US] banks from projects worth roughly 2 trillion euros ($2.2 trillion) each year”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/02/business/dealbook/trump-tariffs-europe-response.html
“anti-coercion instrument”.
I genuinely appreciated Joe Biden and said so often.
Hands Off: De-escalation Training · MoveOn
https://www.mobilize.us/moveon/event/766084/
What we do now.
The Trump Reich: “Canadians would have to choose between resistance, knowing full well that they would probably lose in the end, or surrender without a fight to save lives … their destination is not statehood and American citizenship, but some kind of
https://gwynnedyer.com/2025/three-hours-in-greenland/
Cancel your vacation plans, you will be spending that money and time on your protest marches.
Adding paperwork requirement hassle drops healthcare enrollment by a third.
https://www.aeaweb.org/research/ordeals-selection-health-insurance
Nice study. Huge effect for relatively minor hassle. America “funds” many “benefits” by adding hassles. Checks the social safety net box.
Tsai reviews xAI “acquisition” of X/Twitter.
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/04/01/xai-acquires-x-twitter/
Hiding the body.
“before he was through, Booker’s speech had been liked on TikTok 400 million times”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-1-2025
Best coverage of the speech.
“I’m not saying that the Trump team’s thinking is unsound. I don’t see any thinking at all.”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/stop-looking-for-methods-in-the-madness
Somewhere there are dreams and visions. In the heads of Musk and Miller certainly. But they do not agree even before they are thrown into the chaotic blender of Trump’s dying rotted brain.
“offered reassignment to the Indian Health Service, which is the sort of thing that Elon Musk’s crew of young sociopaths probably regard as a funny joke”
Sociopaths or brats? Bad parenting or just bad luck?
“If a senior Trump appointee told me it was raining, I would first stick my head out the window for confirmation, and second make sure that they weren’t just pissing on my shoes.”
macOS 18.4 white wallpaper bug
https://leancrew.com/all-this/2025/04/a-macos-18-4-walpaper-bug/
I’ll wait for 18.4.1. If they broke this there are likely bigger problems.
“A democracy is a government of collective action by the people. Let this be a reminder, it is time to do more… before it is no more.”
If Trump can invade Greenland he will.
Ethno-religious movement hits Bangladesh, women targeted.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/01/world/asia/bangladesh-islam.html
Bangladesh has done far better than was expected in the 1980s. Now everything is at risk.
K finally gets there: “the world needs fewer manufacturing workers than it used to, just as it no longer needs a lot of farmers”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/a-note-on-trade-deficits-and-manufacturing
The slow death of rural America is one of several contributors to the collapse of the GOP and the rise of MAGA. Globalization and IT are two others.
“I also very much doubt several key swing states critical to the 2028 election would place him on their ballots in obvious defiance of the constitution.”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/dont-make-an-idol-out-of-donald-trumps-will
Forget about Trump III.
Ramadan: “going from the longest to the shortest Ramadan fasting periods (1.4 hours per day) leads to a difference in growth rates on the order of one percentage point of growth”
https://musgrave.substack.com/p/the-social-science-of-ramadan
But happiness increases.
James Bruce, traveler: “he travelled by land from Tunis to Tripoli, and at Ptolemaida took passage for Candia; but was shipwrecked near Benghazi and had to swim ashore”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bruce
18th century Scot, best known for first euro to trace Nile to Ethiopia. Fun wikipedia bio.
“presently returning to the desert to recover his journals and his baggage, which had been abandoned in consequence of the death of all his camels”
France fines Apple $162M for App Tracking Transparency: “follows a complaint by a group of trade associations representing advertisers who are no longer able to access user data to serve personalized ads”
If true this is Trump-class stupid.
“several analysts remain focused less on recession calls than on trying to make sense of why so many people are feeling down about their economic lives.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/31/business/economy/wealth-cash-inequality.html
The article notes much wealth growth is not liquid – including home equity. So it overstates prosperity for many. Decreases in cash balances a hint.
I am happy at least some experts are asking the important “why”.
Semantic Scholar – keep an eye on it.
https://www.semanticscholar.org/
This site shows up a lot in Perplexity reasoning chains. It’s funded by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) and was launched in 2015.
Their blog has no feed. So they aren’t terribly bright. Still interesting.
Hypogamy: early signs American women may eventually accept “marrying down” the education track.
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2025/03/marrying-down-wife-education-hypogamy/682223/
Some of the examples are wealthy small businessmen with no degree. Which is NOT a real change.
But there are signs of hope. Women are just smarter (on average).
US military and cabinet using Signal on personal devices means NSA has to disclose vulnerabilities.
White Afrikaner refugees: “United States has deployed multiple teams to convert commercial office space in Pretoria … into ad hoc refugee centers…”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/30/us/politics/trump-south-africa-white-afrikaners-refugee.html
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