For those of us having our lives upended by Trump’s destructive reign (like my house not selling), this NYT story purports to spot a light at the end of the tunnel that we sincerely hope isn’t just another smash-mouth engine barreling down the tracks.
First, it reminds us that Trump is leveraging a very small margin — hardly a mandate.
Meh! I say. That’s like winning the statistic game but losing the actual game.
As for the inevitable popularity decline that defines the modern presidency … all I see is Trump replicating his decline from the first time around — for now. He’s in the 40-44% approval range, which remains his political calling card.
How would I break that down? Anecdotally, I would say one-out-of-five Americans really believe he can walk on water — no questions asked — and that another one-of-five just prefer his craziness to the Dems — no answers required.
So, what it really all comes down to is the general pain tolerance level for Republican districts/counties, or those who have truly suspended their disbelief and are ready to ride out this madness no matter the personal cost.
Take your medicine … drink the Kool-Aid … call it what you will. A certain amount of it is just wanting others to feel the same pain you’re enduring. That’s the lowest common denominator out there right now — that willful Schadenfreude.
And what we see is that we live in a country where Blue foots the “welfare” bill for Red, so, if Red wants to deconstruct the “administrative state,” that’s where the deepest pain is headed.
How long to break away from the Trump-is-my-god mindset? I don’t believe it can be broken at this point for the True Believers, so it’s all about that other one-in-five succumbing to the realization that rule-by-disruption only gets you so far.
Musk’s DOGE effort exemplifies: damage across the board and, in return, modest savings that are certain to be lost in the subsequent crisis responses forced upon the Fed when states (at least Red ones) inevitably hit some too-rocky-to-handle disruption. In other words, a lot of sound and fury gaining nothing.
Trump will only grow more desperate as his revolution-by-sheer-disruption fails to magically re-render the American economy and instead simply self-inflicts a nasty recession. Soon enough, everybody outside of the faithful will be sworn enemies and traitors deserving of all manner of un-Constitutional persecution in the name of saving the “true” America.
Tell El Salvador we’re going to need a bigger prison!
“I just think this administration is inherently pronatalist,” said the activist Simone Collins, referring to the movement to reverse declining birthrates.
Ms. Collins, along with her husband, Malcolm Collins, sent the White House several draft executive orders, including one that would bestow a “National Medal of Motherhood” to mothers with six or more children.
From America’s New Map (2023) on the reality of the one-way demographic transition:
Before you know it, your society is middle-aged and navigating a global economy driven primarily by youthful demands that strike you as trivial and greedy. You eventually become the elder sitting on globalization’s porch, yelling at those damn kids to get off my lawn! That fear-driven sense of replacement can motivate your society toward cruel and hateful policies. As your body politic grows increasingly aged and infirm, you stop investing in a tomorrow you both fear and expect you will never see.
At that point, your nation faces a choice: open your economy to more youthful immigrants and accept how they alter your national identity, or indulge in xenophobia, shut yourself off from the world, achieve self-sufficiency no matter the economic cost, and somehow manage your aging from within (How much for that robot in the window?). In the latter strategy, your government might go to great lengths to encourage a natural increase (e.g., tax breaks, subsidized childcare, “hero mother” medals). You can add a stick to those carrots by outlawing abortion—even contraception, recasting pregnancy as legal jeopardy.
History says none of these will be enough.
The pro-natalist movement is a global White baby-boom movement. Show me a White majority nation where that percentage is slipping and I’ll show you a pro-natalist movement. You will not find these movements in any majority non-White countries.
New research on a weirdly extreme weather phenomenon that grows more frequent with climate change.
Recent research by M. S. Kukal of the University of Idaho and M. Hobbins of the University of Colorado and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has identified a dangerous pattern.
Hopefully for us climate skeptics, this is EXACTLY the sort of bad-news-only climate research that DOGE has eliminated completely — as in, no research, no problem.
[SIDENOTE: INSERT HEAD IN SAND, POSITION ASS FOR MAXIMUM KICK ZONE DEFINITION]
So we are confronted with yet another new term to describe intense water-shifting around our planet — my favorite still being “atmospheric rivers”:
A thirstwave isn’t just a hot spell. It’s a multi-day period where the atmosphere pulls moisture from the land with extraordinary force.
Kukal and Hobbins define it precisely: a thirstwave occurs when the standardized short-crop evapotranspiration (ETos) exceeds the 90th percentile for at least three consecutive days.
“A thirstwave is a period of extremely high evaporative demand that, like its cousin the heat wave, can wreak havoc on a growing season.” noted the researchers.
This definition mirrors how meteorologists define heatwaves but centers on a different metric. Instead of just temperature, ETos includes radiation, humidity, and wind – factors that dramatically impact water loss from crops.
My sense? We just do a crappy job of terra-forming here on Earth. Maybe we should get a whole lot better at managing — even manipulating — our weather here before we try to do so on any other planets.
Seriously.
We are weather-manipulating all the time. We just refuse to admit it even as it grows ever more in-your-face extreme.
Read it and feel your tears evaporate:
One of the most surprising findings in the study is that thirstwaves don’t align with regions that usually have the highest overall evaporative demand. While the Southwest often leads in seasonal ETos, thirstwave intensity and frequency follow different paths.
Places like the Prairie Gateway and Mississippi Portal now lead in thirstwave severity. That shift means farmers in new regions are facing environmental conditions they weren’t prepared for a generation ago.
The High Plains suffer some of the most intense thirstwaves, often exceeding 1 mm per day above the norm. Meanwhile, counties in the South and West Coast report the most frequent events.
This mismatch between long-term averages and extreme conditions shows why thirstwave-specific metrics are essential for future planning.
Radical acceptance, say I. Radical acceptance.
Without it, we’re just living in a dream world awaiting miracles.
4) Well, I love that dirty air … oh, Delhi, you’re my home!
The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) refers to the concept of an inverted-U-shaped relationship between pollution and per capita income. It assumes that pollution initially increases with income, but eventually declines as income continues to rise.
I ask you, who could have possibly seen this coming?
Singapore professor with a brutal historical analogy that strikes me as exactly on the mark:
“When our Dynasty first arose, its awe-inspiring virtue gradually spread and became established. Wherever its name and influence reached, there was none who did not come to Court.” So reads an imperial statement from the Ming dynasty describing the 15th-century Chinese tributary system. Trump thinks of his world in somewhat similar, grandiose terms as well, although he was far less elegant in his description of it at the recent National Republican Congressional Committee dinner: “This time I’m doing what I want to do with respect to the tariffs. … These countries are calling us up, kissing my a--. They are. They are dying to make a deal. … ‘I’ll do anything, sir!’”
When Asians cite you for the sort of backpedaling arrogance that hampered China’s development for centuries on-end, that is pretty brutal.
The gist of the argument here: in pursuing such hyper-mercantilist extortion tactics, Trump 2.0 is obviously seeking to monetize America’s past and present sponsorship of our international liberal trade order otherwise known as globalization.
I get it: America has been putting out as global policeman and rule enforcer for decades and now wants to either shed a lot of those self-perceived obligations or get paid for keeping them up — or both, if you know Trump.
As always with our present POTUS, the logic is there; it’s just buried under such primitive definitions and instincts for … wait for it … “revenge!
That approach, per the Asian academic, is doomed to fail:
Tributary systems are only as strong as the power that maintains them. In pursuit of his objectives, Trump has imperiously abandoned the art of persuasion that had been integral to the maintenance of America’s global influence in the past. History has shown us that many tributary systems decline at least in part under the weight of hubris, arrogance and overconfidence. The collapses of tributary systems built by the Habsburgs and the Ming dynasty tell a cautionary tale in that regard.
All those years of abiding by the UN Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) while not actually ratifying it … finally … pays off! America never joined the International Seabed Authority that arose out of UNCLOS.
Now, with our fears growing about China dominating certain precious mineral supply chains, we’re ready to cut loose with a … what to call it? …. experiment in further disrupting food chains in the world’s oceans.
Parts of the ocean floor are blanketed by potato-size nodules containing valuable minerals like nickel, cobalt and manganese that are essential to advanced technologies that the United States considers critical to its economic and military security, but whose supply chains are increasingly controlled by China.
No commercial-scale seabed mining has ever taken place. The technological hurdles are high, and there have been serious concerns about the environmental consequences.
As a result, in the 1990s most nations agreed to join an independent International Seabed Authority that would govern mining of the ocean floor in international waters. Because the United States isn’t a signatory, the Trump administration is relying on an obscure 1980 law that empowers the federal government to issue seabed mining permits in international waters.
Cool! Turns out we have a national law that allows us to do whatever we want in international waters when it comes to seabed mining!
Let the gold rush begin!
Many nations are eager to see seabed mining become a reality. But until now the prevailing consensus has been that economic imperatives shouldn’t take precedence over the risk that mining could damage the fishing industry and oceanic food chains or could affect the ocean’s essential role in absorbing planet-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
What could possibly go wrong? Plenty. We know so little about the deep seabed that constitutes the majority of our planet’s hard surface. Then again, we have such a great history of environment-damaging activities when it comes to mining and strip mining in particular.
Naturally, some “experts” chime it to ruin everything:
Some analysts questioned the need for a rush toward seabed mining, given that there is currently a glut of nickel and cobalt from traditional mining. In addition, manufacturers of electric-vehicle batteries, one of the main markets for the metals, are moving toward battery designs that rely on other elements.
Details, details.
Rather than get along with one another, nation-states and their flagship companies are better off racing to exploit the deep seabed. Certainly the Russians and Chinese have even better environmental records than we!
I won’t pretend to understand. I just find it impressive as I have a mind that naturally seeks to organize disparate developments.
MIT researchers have created a periodic table that shows how more than 20 classical machine-learning algorithms are connected. The new framework sheds light on how scientists could fuse strategies from different methods to improve existing AI models or come up with new ones.
For instance, the researchers used their framework to combine elements of two different algorithms to create a new image-classification algorithm that performed 8 percent better than current state-of-the-art approaches.
The periodic table stems from one key idea: All these algorithms learn a specific kind of relationship between data points. While each algorithm may accomplish that in a slightly different way, the core mathematics behind each approach is the same.
Building on these insights, the researchers identified a unifying equation that underlies many classical AI algorithms. They used that equation to reframe popular methods and arrange them into a table, categorizing each based on the approximate relationships it learns.
Just like the periodic table of chemical elements, which initially contained blank squares that were later filled in by scientists, the periodic table of machine learning also has empty spaces. These spaces predict where algorithms should exist, but which haven’t been discovered yet.
The table gives researchers a toolkit to design new algorithms without the need to rediscover ideas from prior approaches, says Shaden Alshammari, an MIT graduate student and lead author of a paper on this new framework.
I got nothing to add to that, other than to say, keep up the great work MIT — the ONLY university in the world that dared to award me a “B” in a graduate class.
China is smart not to budge. Xi looks powerful doing so, and then there’s that “don’t throw me in the briar patch” outcome that is forced upon the Chinese government (diminishing dependence on export-driven growth and shifting it to domestic consumption), which it can then blame any transition pain upon those “evil Americans!”
Honestly, it feels like a win-win for China and a lose-lose for the US.
But we shall see. Trump is blinking rapidly. I expect a “Xi, STOP!” plea at any moment. Either that or Bessent’s head explodes in frustration during a Fox News appearance.
I know how this tilted economic landscape favors the Tech Bros up on high — to extremes not suffered for many decades here in the US. I’m just not seeing enough benefit for the rest of us.
The trust-busting will come because it has to come.
I pity the fool who prefers breathing the air in either China or India over the West’s far cleaner environment. That’s what getting rid of all that coal-for-electricity got us.
Not surprised to see the EU outshine us on renewables but I am surprised by their doubling of our percentage share of hydropower. That is impressive.
Thank God for the fracking revolution on natural gas, otherwise we’d be screwed.
