FUN FACT: We are paying more money for worse versions of ALMOST everything because private equity firms buy up beloved brands, cut product quality to the bone, hike prices to squeeze out margins, and leave a trail of debt-ridden husks behind.

I want cd players in cars to be a thing again. I want to pull out a cd, load it, and listen to the entire album from start to finish without paying some streaming company to listen to a band. Yes, I said it..bring it back. I have gotta look in to doing this for my car.

It would've been easy to bash Flock in Senate today, but the reality is that this crisis would've not happened had there been any form of regulation or guard rails. So, let's demand them. And let's vote with the same ferocity we post with.

The Kennedy Center’s Grand Foyer is 630 feet long and 63 feet high. Its crystal chandeliers were a gift from Sweden before the Center opened in 1971 and collectively contain 6,144 bulbs. The huge mirrors on the left were another international gift, from Belgium.

Hmm…🤔

I don’t believe the average American truly understands the impact of what is getting ready to happen with the economy.

The lesson I learned as U.S. Ambassador to NATO on 9/11 when our Allies rushed to defend us—it’s good to have friends in the world. We need them now more than ever.

As US Ambassador to NATO on 9/11, the first to call me to suggest we invoke Article 5 was Canadian Ambassador David Wright. Our allies came to our rescue that terrible day. I’ll call David this morning 25 years later to thank him and our great neighbor Canada once again!

The cameras are already everywhere. What’s changing is that AI can remove one of the last practical limits on mass surveillance: the fact that there were never enough human beings to watch everything.

Artists to Mathematicians:

⚡️The chart is not telling me teenagers suddenly lost IQ. It is telling me civilization has started consuming the cognitive substrate required to express intelligence. The hidden variable is attention. Reading, mathematics, and science all require the same underlying machinery: hold a problem in working memory, tolerate confusion, resist distraction, build a representation over time, then reason inside it. Modern childhood increasingly trains the opposite loop: stimulus → reaction → novelty → stimulus → reaction → novelty Short video, notifications, algorithmic feeds, constant task-switching, reduced long-form reading, less boredom, less unstructured thought. The brain adapts to the environment it repeatedly inhabits. So the frightening possibility is not “kids are genetically becoming stupider.” It is: we are taking perfectly capable brains and training them into cognitive shallowness during the years when attentional architecture is being built. That would explain why reading gets hit especially hard. Reading is almost pure sustained internal simulation. Nothing moves. Nothing rewards you every three seconds. You must manufacture the world inside your own head. And the pandemic looks more like an accelerant than the origin. The decline was already forming before it. COVID then removed structure, normalized screens further, damaged attendance, and widened learning gaps. The next phase may be even stranger because AI removes another layer of cognitive friction. Previously, a student who did not understand something had to wrestle with it. Now the answer can appear immediately. That is incredibly useful, but struggle itself is part of how cognition gets built. So the deepest risk is not AI making people less intelligent. It is humans progressively outsourcing the exact cognitive operations that used to develop intelligence in the first place. The civilization-level pattern would be: better tools → less cognitive friction → weaker native cognitive endurance → greater dependence on tools → even less friction That is a reflexive loop. And if it continues, you could get the strangest outcome imaginable: the most intelligent civilization in history, surrounded by the most powerful cognitive machinery ever built, while the median human becomes less able to think without it. That is what this chart makes me worry about.

Itämeren turvallisuustilanne on siirtynyt uuteen vaiheeseen. Kyse ei ole yksittäisistä häiriöistä ja tilanteista vaan pitkäkestoisesta strategisesta asetelmasta, jossa Venäjä testaa rajoja sodan kynnyksen alapuolella. Viittä asiaa kannattaa nyt seurata erityisen tarkasti. 1/7

I learned for old audio stuff you really want someone to replace capacitors and take a look at components that degrade like solder, you might just be buying a junk DAC about to die that doesn't even sound like how it actually sounded when you were 20, and doesn't perform either.

16 years ago Google pulled its search engine out of China because they wouldn’t submit to an authoritarian government. Today, they’re renaming lakes to appease one.

This is how Sun’s gravity holds the planets in the same orbit!

Yesterday, out of nowhere, UVB-76, the Russian military's mysterious "Doomsday Buzzer" shortwave transmitter, stopped buzzing and delivered a cryptic message. Anyways, have a great weekend everyone! 😐

Yosemite is not Donald Trump’s to give away. We will use every tool at our disposal to stop this corruption.

The most short-sighted assumption of the past 25 years has been that we can discard physical libraries because everything is digital and always will be. But the digital vanishes like smoke & knowledge is rapidly disappearing from the web. You have to invest in physical media.

They’ll fine you because a microphone decided your car was too loud. They’ll dispatch cops because an aerial scan found a backyard shed that wasn’t in the database. They’ll build a searchable record of every church, clinic, gun store, protest and political meeting you visit. They’ll identify you through street cameras and dispatch police without ever asking your name. The police state of the future will be contactless: no checkpoint, no inspector, no conversation - just a camera, an algorithm, and an automatic penalty. Every new power will be sold as “efficiency.” Keep pushing against it. If not, freedom will be the inefficiency they eliminate.

but they were, all of them, deceived, for another watch was made…