I talk to high school teachers all the time, and they tend to be ideologically captured by whatever the next big thing is. There's so much groupthink going on, it's ridiculous. When we complain that students are reaching the workforce without useful skills, teachers love to say, "you see, we're not teaching students the skills that the workforce needs right now... we're teaching them the skills the workforce will need decades from now." This is just a mantra they repeat. So sure, they think AI must be the next big thing and everyone needs to learn it, instead of the fundamental skills that explain how it's all working at the base level.

They're also obsessed with equality to an absolutely absurd degree. One younger teacher we spoke with said, "I don't give homework because it's only the students who are already going well who do the homework, so it doesn't benefit everyone." An older more experienced teacher nearby said, "you understand that we're still going to need doctors in the future, right?" The first teacher looked confused.

However, most people who ask that do it while pointing to people who are actually quite important producers, such as financiers. Be careful not to conflate "don't produce anything of value" with "do something I don't understand the importance of".

Of course there are people in every profession who get paid a lot more than they're worth. This is less true of manual labor jobs where the output is easy to see and measure, but it's true across the board. Even in manual labor jobs you can have people whose output is negative. They may pick X apples or whatever, but they might do it while making everyone around them work slower.

Just to complete the description of the "empty chair" tactic, this is why lawsuits typically name anyone and everyone who might possibly be blamed, including many who clearly aren't culpable. It's not because the plaintiff or the plaintiff's attorney actually thinks all of those extra targets really might be liable, it's so that the culpable parties can't try to shift the blame to an empty chair, forcing the plaintiff to explain why the empty chair isn't culpable (i.e., defend them). Of course this means that those clearly non-culpable parties might have to defend themselves, which sucks for them.

So... you didn't actually look at the size of WikiMedia Foundation's bank account.

WikiMedia absolutely has enough money to run Wikipedia indefinitely if they treated their current pile of money as an endowment and just used the income from it to support the site. They don't have "billions upon billions", but they do have almost $300M, and they spend about $3M per year on hosting, and probably about that much again on technical staff to run the site, so about $6M per year. That's 2% per year. Assuming they can get a 6% average return on their assets, they can fully fund Wikipedia forever, and then some.

So, what do they do with all of the donations instead, if the money isn't needed to run Wikipedia? It funds the foundation's grant programs. Of course, you might actually like their grant programs. I think some of their grants are great, myself, and if they were honest about what they're using it for I might be inclined to give. But they're not, and the fact that they continue lying to Wikipedia's user base really pisses me off, so I don't give and I strongly discourage everyone I can from giving, at every opportunity.

Me too, but it took a lot longer and I was a lot less thorough. I would skim a half-dozen links from the search result, the LLM reads a lot more, and a lot more thoroughly.

I do. I tell the LLM to always include links to its sources, and I check them. Not all of them, but enough to make sure the LLM is accurately representing them. Granted that other people might not do this, but those other people also wouldn't check more than the first hit from the search engine, which is basically the same problem. If you only read the top hit, you're trusting the search engine's ranking algorithm.

That seems like a potential risk. I have't actually seen that happening in any of the stuff I've looked at.

Adverts pay for the web. And also clutter it up. Both of these things are true. Without advertising, there would be very little content that isn't paywalled, and there would be far less content than there is. Slashdot wouldn't exist, for example. The key is to keep advertising sufficiently profitable that it can fund the web, but not so intrusive that it make the web awful.

How do we do that? The best idea I've seen is to use adblockers that selectively block the obnoxious ads. But not enough people do it, so that doesn't work either.

This. There seems to be a widespread assumption that random genetic changes are somehow less problematic than carefully-selected ones because they're "natural" or something. It's not like cosmic rays, mutagenic chemicals, transcription errors and other sources of random genetic mutation are somehow careful not to make harmful changes. Engineered changes might not be better than random mutations, but they're clearly not worse.

Er, I guess I couldn't decide whether to say "closer" or "more closely" and munged them together. :-)

If only there were a way to preview posts before submitting them...

I'm not seeing why "launch and loiter" is beneficial. If Mars transfer windows were only hours, or even days, long, I could see that it's useful to launch early so that you don't end up missing your window because of weather or ground equipment problems, but the transfer windows are weeks to months in duration.

It seems to me that this strategy is mainly driven by lack of confidence in New Glenn, which makes sense given that it's a completely unproven platform. Over the 8+ weeks of the 2026 launch window they could certainly get to space with a reliable platform. Something like Falcon 9 might have some delays due to weather or minor technical issues, but it's extremely unlikely it would miss the window entirely. But New Glenn might have weeks of delays, so launching early might make sense.

What would make even more sense is if NASA is concerned that New Glenn might fail catastrophically. Making the attempt a full year early might provide enough time to build and launch a replacement.

Does anyone who follows this more closer have a better explanation?

Well, he renamed it and made minor changes around the edges so he could claim that it was broken and he fixed it. And then, of course, proceeded to violate the agreement he signed.

You guys get that 4.3% is low unemployment, right? Something like 90% of the last 30 years have had higher unemployment rate than that. It's the participation rate that's dropping, and that's almost entirely a demographic issue... there are more people retiring every year than graduating. The labor pool, as a percentage of the total population, is falling. This was all known well in advance and has been talked about to death. Those lower 4.3% of the population... the vast majority of them are really difficult to employ. A small percentage of people show up work late, or get drunk before they come to work, or whatever, and it's that group that finds it hard to stay employed.

Excellent post, just a couple of comments.

First, it's interesting that Nikkos said "a previous administration", without naming it. It was, of course, Trump 1.0.

Second, international treaties on refugees don't require a country to accept every refugee and there are multiple examples where nations have made agreements that modify which county must handle asylum claims. For example, the US-Canada Safe Third Country agreement specifies that asylum seekers must make their asylum claim in whichever country they arrive in first. If the US and Mexico had a similar agreement, then refugees could not enter from Mexico at all. Trump tried to get Mexico to sign a Safe Third Country agreement, but Mexico refused -- and it probably would have been invalid anyway, since Mexico might not satisfy the requirements of a "safe" country under the US law that authorizes the signing of Safe Third Country agreements.

Instead, Trump signed the "Migrant Protection Protocols" agreement with Mexico, which was the "remain in place" agreement. You said that no other country should be willing to put up with it, but Mexico did formally agree to it, though only to avoid tariffs. Of course, Mexico has declined to renew the protocols in Trump 2.0 (though Trump announced they had, which Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum immediately denied -- Trump's habit of unilaterally announcing that an agreement has been reached obviously doesn't really work).

Anyway, there are lots of reasons why countries might agree to various limitations on asylum processes to manage refugee volumes, and these agreements are often perfectly valid under international and national law. Trump, of course, doesn't care about legality, or humanity, only what he can get away with.

If you're referring to the chargers, I agree. They have a bad reputation currently. But I think a lot of the effort and resources has to go into more generation and distribution infrastructure, which tends to be robust, but expensive and it takes a while. I do think the AI boom is going to leave us with a lot of unused electrical capacity, and I think that's a good think for EVs.

I work in the automotive industry. Two years ago the attitude across the automotive industry was that whole industry was switching to EVs and it was all expected to happen at a completely unrealistic pace. There was still a ton of charging infrastructure to build out, but the industry was expecting high double-digit growth and a rapid phasing out of gas vehicles within a few years. It was absurd at the time. Then a couple years later and the whole industry has flipped (yes, this has a lot to do with government subsidies and Trump winning the election) and now everyone thinks EVs are "dead". This is, of course, just as silly as the continual proclamations that the PC market is dead. In reality, the EV market will continue to exist and mature, and with a number of really promising battery technologies in the pipeline, not to mention a massive build-out of electrical generation capacity to support an AI future that's primed to burst for a few years, there's actually a bright future for EVs. Just not on the ridiculous timeline that everyone was thinking two years ago.

There's another detail that often gets missed. I don't know the details myself, but the way it's been described to me, mid-size pickup trucks fall into a category under the EPA or something which requires them to meet much more stringent environmental and other regulations that full-size pickups are exempt from, and at the end of the day it means that the price difference between a mid-size and a full-size truck was much smaller than it should be based on the amount of materials and extra functionality you get from a full-size truck, so that caused the auto-makers to discontinue most (all?) of their mid-size lineups. You really couldn't buy a smaller truck for about a decade or so. I think the last one was the Colorado.