And don't just look at COVID: "Models and real-time trackers estimate that hundreds of thousands of additional people died in 2025 because major USAID programs were halted or sharply curtailed, with published and public-facing efforts producing a plausible 2025 range from roughly 500,000 up to more than 1.6 million excess deaths depending on the metric and modeling choices [1][2]. The clearest single real-time tracker government and press outlets citeâ"ImpactCounterâ"reported an estimate of more than 760,000 deaths attributable to the cuts since January 2025" https://factually.co/fact-chec...

Those trashing philosophy might look to the world of AI, where, the NYTimes recent article "The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors" , argued that philosophy graduates are finding good jobs jobs.

A sense of what is already happening without any waiting for the next election or even this court decision is given in today's Guardian report about the Musk Rat is already evading EPA regulations by running gas turbines from the back of trucks to drive his xAI plants. The claim is that if the turbines are not on the ground, they are not subject to laws on the ground, despite the emissions they emit.

Friends from Denmark told me that when Facebook built its first data farm in Denmark, Zuck and the country's prime minister proudly boasted that this would be a carbon neutral data center, as Danish power comes mostly from wind farms. What neither said was that Facebook would draw so much of this power that domestic electricity in the country had to come from coal sources in Eastern Europe, pushing up the country's footprint dramatically.

The real challenging decision may be not so much what Google tools they separate, but how they break up (or don't) the data that Google has stolen from all its users and that all those tools rely on.

Perhaps not an "improvement." The EPA is currently suing Chevron because its "plastic-based fuels ... are likely to cause cancer." (https://www.propublica.org/article/epa-chevron-cancer-causing-fuels.) Can we be confident that Exxon, with such a magnificent history of impartiality and honesty in its research, has made sure that it is not releasing carcinogens?

Tristram Shandy, the 18th century novel, may not have been up on frozen embryos, but, after discussing baptizing the foetus by inoculation, it suggests that wasn't going far enough. So, it decides, we should really start by baptizing the "homunculis" (ie, in that day, sperm). So watch out guys. The good judge may come after you if he sees you tossing that stuff away.

In 2010 Bill Gates' dad commented on the ways kids like his, and the firms they ran, would do all they could to avoid paying taxes: https://www.investmentnews.com...

Of course, you mean an "X" ...

[ (sigh) speaking of crap and no substance ... ]

{Surely you mean a "Xeet" --but be careful how you pronounce that!}

When U.S. libraries tried to block pornography on their public terminals, it was said that the pictures accompanying recipes for blancmange were removed.

To rate how good/bad better/worse things are, it's worth listening to the WNYC "On the Media" broadcast "What we know about the border". It begins with one of their own journalists being stopped and takes it from there.

As one of the comments on the Independent story notes, the gains UPS achieved this way explain why roundabouts are so much more efficient than traffic lights. Moreover, as roundabouts allow left turns, they can increase efficiency without increasing distance (and while reducing accidents). The U.S., however, seems stoically anti roundabout. Every city appears to have a token roundabout, and it functions, as far as I can tell, to induce panic in all drivers and thus prevent more from being built.

While claiming to be a new approach, a glance at the early Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society indicates that this idea is very old. The modern journal's move to "cohesive stories" was in many ways a reaction to the initial idea of listing observations and discoveries. Hence, the table of contents of the first issue (March 6, 1667) includes:

- An Account of the Improvement of Optick Glasses at Rome
- Observations ... of a Spot on one of the Belts of the Planet Jupiter
- Motions of the late Comet predicted
...
- Relations of a very odd Monstrous Calf
- A Peculiar Lead-Ore in Germany
- the New American Whale

Perhaps the final item before the list of new books and "lately dead" anticipates the change to cohesiveness: - Narrative concerning the success of Pendulum-Watches at Sea