This is the entire point.

It's called the Shock Doctrine. Except the Trump administration is creating the crisis-es (sp?) himself, and then exploiting the ensuing chaos.

https://www.salon.com/2025/04/...

From the link below:
In this strategy, political actors exploit the chaos of natural disasters, wars, and other crises to push through unpopular policies such as deregulation and privatization. This economic "shock therapy" favors corporate interests while disadvantaging and disenfranchising citizens when they are too distracted and overwhelmed to respond or resist effectively.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It shouldn't be too difficult to find, but I can't stumble upon it.

Seriously. Is Slashdot being used as a source of information (seeded)?

Back in 2024 UBS mentioned this trend but didn't put a # to it.

https://www.ubs.com/global/en/...

For pop and rap, good lyrics sell songs. Relatable. Things people want to hear about. And a catchy beat, but that is secondary. The art is the words and how they are expressed.

A lot of these are more ephemeral art, they are relevant for a short period of time and go stale quickly based on shifting interests.

And that's fine. They aren't Bach, they aren't the Doors (I'm not equating the two, just very different example of "permanent art"). It's art though. I DJ school dances, almost all student suggested songs are difference every year. Except Taylor Swift.

Myself, I'm into more pure electronic music. Armin van Buren, Mike Candies, Infected Mushroom, Hardwell. Trance and psych stuff, perfect for working and driving (and thinking, so in general). The art there is the production, especially for a recorded track. Get it setup in the software, and "record" (export) one time for perfect results... Songs are built (and it's fun).

I believe AI can run roughshod over electronica. It's a very natural fit. Especially trained on quality human production, which no doubt will happen.

For the record, I purchased FL Studio back when it was Fruity Loops (they really mean free lifetime updates).

I briefly looked into ML/gen AI for MIDI composition, that seems the most directly route for patterned music (and the most flexible on the output side).

It's being reset, trust in the US as a trading partner and as a safe investment environment is being lost.

The dollar is depreciating and bond rates are chaotic. And this is very early in the process, it's difficult to say how trust in the US will be in 4 years. It's difficult to see it getting better.

There was already that suspect $400 million contract for armored Cybertrucks that "disappeared".

But that was nothing. Given the sales of Tesla are falling out and the brand it like shiny poo, there will have to be a pivot.

Given Musk's current position, moving to become a military supplier makes the most sense. Big fat government tit. The biggest.

Musk wants to build 5,000 Optimus humanoid robots THIS YEAR. What are those going to be doing?

Hint: Musk himself called it a "legion"...

https://www.teslarati.com/tesl...

There's also the "Detox" exercise of leaving your phone at home. and only taking it with you when it's absolutely necessary for example to work if you have to use a third factor authentication application to get into your computer)

Just switch on "airplane mode". No incoming calls, message notifications, or app push crud. (If you've got any apps, other than alarm/calendar notices for your schedule reminders which YOU set up, that poke brain-derailng messages at you, disable (or delete) them.)

Then get into the habit of not going to it for anything non-essential while in this mode.

Now you can use it for a key, or wallet, or whatever, if you must, without it constantly killing your attention span with interruptions. Yet you can always turn it back on to make a call, or in the timeslot you reserved for handling this trivia.

No incoming calls, though. (What a relief: No phone spammers!)

The tariffs are terrible for farmers.

The tariffs cause the prices of the inputs and equipment to go up, but the price of the crops go down.

During the "Light Tariff Wars" of Trump's first term, farmer lost $27 billion in sales.

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/03...

https://www.axios.com/local/ch...

Just change one word and the concept carries over:
America has a population growth problem and a labor cost problem. People aren't having enough kids to keep America running and American labor is getting too expensive for their oversaturation economy.

In America we kick out immigrants and move to have our children fill the labor void (until the Tesla Optimus robots can kindly enough replace the child labor).

In Florida: "remove numerous existing protections for teenage workers, and allow them, in the Florida governorâ(TM)s words, to step into the shoes of immigrants who supply Floridaâ(TM)s tourism and agriculture industries with âoedirt cheap laborâ."

https://www.theguardian.com/us...

This is a great reason NOT to have kids.

There is one scientist later on in the first part who does say they couldn't rule out someone who may have been infected at the lab visiting the market and starting the ball rolling, but they also say there is no evidence to back this up. Considering the number of people who ride that line each day, if there was a sick person from the lab spreading their infection, there should have been far more people getting sick all over the place. That didn't happen. The earliest known infections were all clustered around the market.

It doesn't have to have been an infected human. An infected experimental animal - or a pest animal that had come into contact with lab animals or materials - could have been an initial vector.

For some time stories have circulated that low-paid lab techies at the Wuhan lab had been known to supplement their income by taking experimental animals they had been ordered to kill and dispose of safely and instead sell them at the wet market.

is it just me, or does that sound like a sexy place?

I hear chines live-food-animal markets are called that because they typically sell seafood (fish, lobsters, etc.) which are kept alive in big water tanks.

Traffic is horribly non linear.

So is fluid dynamics.

It's also very complicated and counter-intuitive, to the point that even experts had to resort to models in wind tunnels and scaling laws, until supercomputers and their algorithms could model it down to submicroscopic levels and handle the details of the positive-feedback transitions.

By leaving room between their car and the one ahead of them, drivers can absorb a wave of braking in dense traffic conditions that would otherwise be amplified into a full-blown "phantom" traffic jam with no obvious cause. "Just keeping away," he says, can help traffic flow smoothly.

Some driving techniques make traffic behave like fluids: Compressible gasses (Car ahead of you slows - you slow some but progressively more as you get closer, Car beside you jogs left two feet, you jog one foot. etc.) Liquids (cars close up and hold constant distance) Crystals (at a traffic light or full stop, cars close up into a tight ordered array.) Condensation (similar near-constant spacing but not so ordered and flows (more easily), Chrystallization, Melting, Sublimation, Evaporation (when the obstruction clears and the first cars can speed up, then later ones, ...), laminar (smooth) flow, turbulent flow, shock waves, ...

Spacing out lets you behave more like a gas - or the first of the liquid behind a bubble - rather than a liquid or solid. When a sudden speed reduction throws a shock wave at you at several times the traffic speed, you can let the gas compress or the cavitation bubble shrink, diffusing the shock wave into an acoustic wave and avoding a collision with the car ahead. It also lets you even out the flow, remaining laminar rather than starting an eddy and going turbulent.

Maybe some of these strategies can be expressed as situational behaviors for driving that are ... indicated as desirable by easily observable local conditions ...

If that works out, then we can look into what additional driving tactics could be enabled by an infrastructure that brings in information that is NOT available by local observation, presenting it to the driver in a way that does not cause more problems by distraction that it solves. That would let drivers get some of the advantages of self-driving car network communication, too.

Maybe self-driving cars can be trained to be cooperative, which would probably result in better driving.

Maybe some of these strategies can be expressed as situational behaviors for driving that are simple enough to be easily understood, indicated as desirable by easily observable local conditons, work when only some people use them, and can be shown to be good for success of the person using them.

Then we could just teach them and gain some of the benefits via voluntary actions driven by enlightened self-interest.

(Sort of like teaching Objectivism to prison inmates - practically the only thing, short of certain real religious conversions - that reduces recidivism, by giving him a recipe for going straight and showing what's in it for the convict if he uses it after release..)

... this suggests any galaxy (with a central black hole will also have a few hypervelocity stars flying around ... spiral arm or star /star cluster /cloud formation ...

And if so, this should have been going on since galaxies with central black holes were a thing - which is quite early. What might this mean for more recent inter- and galactic architecture?