SatSats

 On this day:

1972
Watergate scandal: An 18½-minute gap appears in the tape recording of the conversations between U.S. President Richard Nixon and his advisers regarding the recent arrests of his operatives while breaking into the Watergate complex
2009
During the Iranian election protests, the death of Neda Agha-Soltan is captured on video and spreads virally on the Internet, making it “probably the most widely witnessed death in human history”.

***

Nobody is needy in the market economy because some people are rich. The riches of the rich are not the cause of the poverty of anybody. The process that makes some people rich is, on the contrary, the corollary of the process that improves many peoples’ want satisfaction. The entrepreneurs, the capitalists, and the technologists prosper as far as they succeed in best supplying the consumers.--von Mises

***

AI must be a worry; the NYT is quoting the Pope about it.
Pope Leo says we must “disarm” AI—that is, discredit “the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern.”

Man's relentless quest for incomplete knowledge?
Can AI paper over our faults, order our moral chaos, solve our 'original sin' in a technologically inspired spiritual dictatorship?
Is AI the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge or just another branch?

***

The new records detail at least a dozen investors with addresses in mainland China, Hong Kong or Russia who acquired stakes in SpaceX years ago through a middleman firm in the U.S. called Tomales Bay Capital. The investments are relatively small, ranging from $800,000 to $40 million, and were made between 2018 and 2021.


***

From a recent article in City Journal:

Earlier this month, the Democratic Socialists of America’s top leadership met in person for the National Political Committee (NPC), the DSA’s governing body. The result of the meeting was “Workers Deserve More!”, a rebooted platform for the organization featuring a host of radical proposals. The document commits DSA to scrapping the U.S. Senate, “abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state,” defunding the Department of War, amnesty for all immigrants, and “replac[ing] the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.”

***

China may soon be the world's biggest producer of foie gras. The French are worried.

***


SatSats

Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche revealed that the Justice Department is investigating more than 8,000 fraud cases, which he said represent over $1 trillion in taxpayer funds potentially stolen each year by "increasingly sophisticated and opportunistic fraudsters."

*

Last year, executives at Swiss bank UBS spoke of the beginnings of the "largest private wealth migration in history," during which 44% of their billionaire clients under age 55 had moved once or more within the previous 12 months.

*

11% of marriages in the US are between Blacks and Whites, yet Black-White couples in TV ads would make you think that mixed racial marriages were much more common. Since identification of the audience with the ad is a basic, that peculiarity is hard to explain.

*

A Mediterranean diet rich in vegetables, fish, and olive oil reduces dementia risk even in people carrying two copies of the APOE4 gene variant — which raises Alzheimer’s risk 12-fold — according to a 2025 Harvard study in Nature Medicine, in the first finding that a daily food pattern can partially overcome a genetic predisposition long thought to be inescapable

*

Of all 46 chromosomes contained in most human cells, the Y chromosome is the only one that can be lost without the cell dying.

*

Ozempic may increase human lifespan by 3-5 years.

*

New York City’s $125 billion budget is that it is bigger than the $115 billion expected to be spent this year by the entire state of Florida. New York City has 8.5 million people; the state of Florida has 23.6 million.

*

Mobile phone theft in London:

• An estimated 90,000 mobile devices were officially reported stolen to the Metropolitan Police over the previous calendar year.
• *
• The successful recovery rate for stolen electronic hardware currently languishes at an abysmal margin of under 2 percent.
  
  
• *
• Cybersecurity experts estimate the secondary extortion market generates tens of millions of dollars in untraceable cryptocurrency revenues annually.
• Ransom demands typically range from $500 to $2,000, depending on the perceived financial status 

SatStats

On this day:
1525
Martin Luther marries Katharina von Bora, against the celibacy rule decreed by the Roman Catholic Church for priests and nuns.
1966
The United States Supreme Court rules in Miranda v. Arizona that the police must inform suspects of their rights before questioning them.
1983
Pioneer 10 becomes the first man-made object to leave the central Solar System when it passes beyond the orbit of Neptune (the furthest planet from the Sun at the time).

***

“Sick of his arrogance and Trump-like condescension to the media he begs for money to every time he gets fired!” --Jimmy Murphy on Tortorella, bringing what everyone wants in sports: more politics.

***

Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard is revealing new evidence of longstanding United States government funding for more than 120 biolabs in over 30 countries.

***

Smith then inquired into the causes of wealth. He didn’t inquire into the causes of poverty. Smith understood that poverty is humanity’s default mode. Nearly all people before Smith’s time — and still most people during his time — were mired in poverty. Poverty is simply the condition we suffer when wealth isn’t created. Wealth, not poverty, demands explanation because wealth, not poverty, has causes.--Post


***





SatStats

Among 70-year-old men, roughly 40 percent show loss of Y in their blood cells, and among 93-year-olds, that number rises to 57 percent.

*

The middle class is shrinking, but so is the proportion of Americans below the middle class — because the upper-middle class is growing. As of 2022, they report, the share of wealth held by the middle class had fallen to 8% from 24% in 1989, while the share held by the top 3% rose from 26% in 1989 to 53% in 2022.

*

“No child deaths have been definitively linked to Covid vaccines, according to a report from the FDA that was quietly made public.”

*

Albert Einstein’s estate was worth just $65,000 when he died.

*

A study by GCheck found that, faced with anxiety about how automation could impact job security, 63% of 1,500 workers surveyed reported that they exaggerate their AI skills to appear more up-to-date. That number shot up to 80% among Gen Z workers as the tech threatens early-career and entry-level roles more drastically.

*

Wind and solar generated more electricity than gas globally for the first month ever in April 2026, according to data analysed by global energy think tank Ember. Together, wind and solar generated 22% of global electricity in April 2026, compared with 20% from gas.

*
New York City’s $125 billion budget is that it is bigger than the $115 billion expected to be spent this year by the entire state of Florida. New York City has 8.5 million people; the state of Florida has 23.6 million.

*

Swedish intel on Russia

 While Russia has claimed GDP expanded by about 13% between 2020 and 2024, Sweden’s analysis of nighttime luminosity suggests the economy actually shrank by 8% during that span.

Moscow has also lowballed inflation substantially, according to Stenergard, who pointed out that Russia’s official inflation figure in 2024 was 10% while the central bank hiked interest rates to 21% that year.

Similarly, Sweden’s military intelligence chief has estimated that today’s inflation is likely closer to the current benchmark borrowing cost of 15% than the government’s official reading of 5.2%.

“This would mean Russia is overstating its purchasing power, and that its military spending capacity is weaker than it appears,” Stenergard wrote.

But Swedish intelligence believes Russia would need the average price for Urals oil to stay above $100 a barrel for the rest of the year to provide a meaningful benefit to the government’s finances,

At the same time, more advanced Ukrainian drones with longer ranges have evaded air defenses and attacked Russian oil export terminals, limiting the gains from higher oil prices.

Ukraine has been making battlefield gains in recent months and has inflicted 1.2 million casualties on Russia since the war started, with new recruits increasingly difficult to find.

“Russia’s economy, in nominal terms, is barely bigger than the State of New York’s, smaller than that of Texas and fragile,” she said. 

Putin’s approval rate has fallen to 65.6% from 77.8% at the start of the year and prewar levels well above 80%.

Inflationary pressures will persist for years amid a demographic downturn, military mobilizations, and the high demand for labor in the defense industry.

Russia’s government has estimated the workforce will need 3.1 million more workers by 2030, according to Interfax. And in the next five years, the total shortfall will hit 11 million jobs when including a ramp-up in retirement.

Stats

On this day:
70
Siege of Jerusalem: Titus and his Roman legions breach the Second Wall of Jerusalem. The Jewish defenders retreat to the First Wall. The Romans build a circumvallation, cutting down all trees within fifteen kilometers.
1431
Hundred Years’ War: in Rouen, France, 19-year-old Joan of Arc is burned at the stake by an English-dominated tribunal. Because of this the Catholic Church remembers this day as the celebration of Saint Joan of Arc.
1806
Andrew Jackson kills Charles Dickinson in a duel after Dickinson had accused Jackson’s wife of bigamy.
1814
Napoleonic Wars: War of the Sixth Coalition – the Treaty of Paris (1814) is signed returning French borders to their 1792 extent. Napoleon Bonaparte is exiled to Elba.
1854
The Kansas-Nebraska Act becomes law, establishing the US territories of Nebraska and Kansas.

1871
The Paris Commune falls.

***

Grownups report: President Trump's name must be removed from the Kennedy Center, according to an order signed Friday by a D.C. district judge.

***

Claude Lemieux, who became a successful agent after his 21-season NHL career, in which he won four Stanley Cups, died by suicide on Thursday, according to authorities. He was 60.

***

Astonishing:

Peter Thiel appears to have found a new spot. He isn't alone in looking beyond America's shores.

The PayPal and Palantir cofounder and prominent libertarian has been spending more time in Argentina, The New York Times reported, where he has enrolled his children in school and bought a home in one of Buenos Aires' wealthiest neighborhoods.

Among the ultrawealthy, that fits a larger pattern. The rich are treating their lives in America like part of an investment portfolio: still worth betting on, but increasingly in need of a hedge.--BI


***

Stats

In the days before the Memorial Day weekend, rates on 30 year Treasury bonds hit their highest level in 19 years at 5.2%, and the benchmark 10-year reached 4.7%, the top reading since mid-2007. If those kinds of yields take hold, the scenario for federal interest expense posited in the CBO’s “Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036,” released in February, descends from dire to near-disastrous. Takeaway: America’s track to fiscal safety has lost all margin for error, and nothing demonstrates that better than the long-term impact of loftier-than-expected rates. --Fortune

*

Early results provide no clear evidence that a school's smartphone ban policy reduced screen time or improved psychological well-being.

*

Estimates of data center impact show positive effects on total employment, data-processing employment, construction employment, establishments, house prices, and electricity prices at different horizons after data center growth. We also find positive effects on tax returns, adjusted gross income, and wages, while annual payroll responds less robustly. The results suggest that data centers create measurable local activity, increase house prices, and affect local electricity markets through higher prices.

*

Outside of Sloan and the EECS MEng program, still in the midst of admissions, compared with 2024, our departments’ new enrollments for next year are down close to 20%.

That means that, in total, outside of Sloan, we could have about 500 fewer graduate students. Which means we’ll have many fewer students advancing the work of MIT, and undergraduates will have fewer grad students as mentors in their research.- The president of MIT

*

U.S. natural gas consumers have saved $4.5-$5.3 trillion between 2007 and 2025, equivalent to $237-$276 billion annually.

*

Healthcare and Social Assistance have added nearly 1.8 million private-sector jobs in the US since the end of 2023 while all of other industries combined have lost 127,800 jobs.

*

Chinese battery manufacturer Calb has broken ground on a €2 Billion gigafactory in southern Portugal which is expected to represent more than 4% of the country’s GDP when in full swing.”

*

Latin America is the new frontier for Old Colony Mennonites. They are spread across 200 colonies with 200,000 people in a combined area almost equal to that of the Netherlands and twice that of Israel.

*

Quality-adjusted AI production in the United States grew at over 2,000 percent per year in 2024 and 2025, driven by three compounding forces: expanding data-center capacity, hardware efficiency gains, and—the largest of the three—algorithmic progress.
Treating the AI sector as a coherent economic entity yields preliminary estimates of nominal AI GDP at approximately $250 billion in 2025, growing at roughly 2,600 percent per year in quality-adjusted real terms.
National economic statistics accounts were not designed to track this kind of activity. Statistics agencies should begin developing AI-focused satellite accounts now, before the measurement gap becomes a policy gap.

*

“For the first time in decades, new and recent graduates with at least a bachelor’s degree have consistently higher unemployment rates than the overall American workforce, according to data on 22-to-27-year-olds compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.”

*

Households expecting children report shorter financial planning horizons, which may explain their lower risk-taking. These results suggest declining fertility can increase young adults’ stock market participation through childbearing expectations.

*

In Tajikistan, remittances — the money sent or brought back by migrants — amounted to 48% of GDP in 2024.
According to a report from the International Organization for Migration, about 1.2 million Tajiks were in Russia in mid-2024, which is more than a tenth of Tajikistan’s total population.

*

Exposure increases interclass (high- and low-parent-income) marriage but has no detectable effect on interracial (White and Black) marriage. A spatial marriage market model predicts that residential segregation—one of many forms of exposure—accounts for more than one-third of marital sorting by class but less than 5% by race.

*

Economic relocation to the US vs Europe:

SatStats

Mamdani is the mayor/artist formerly known as Young Cardamom.

***

OpenAI pioneered a $20-per-month subscription three years ago, a price point many competitors matched. That price has not changed, even as features and performance have improved substantially.

One recent analysis found that “GPT-4-equivalent performance now costs $0.40/million tokens versus $20 in late 2022.” That is the equivalent of a 70 percent annual deflation rate — remarkable by any standard, especially in a time when affordability has become a dominant public concern.

And this is only the foundational model layer. On top of it sits a sprawling ecosystem of consumer applications, enterprise tools, device integrations and start-ups aiming to serve niches as specific as gyms and hair salons.

***

Another AI metaphor: Suppose you are the best maker of horse carriages in Belgium around the time the automobile is invented. You might want to take on as many orders as possible for new carriages because you know your future is precarious. Or, maybe you get your hands on one of these new-fangled automobiles as soon as possible and learn how fix them. Both options require you to WORK HARDER but these seem to be the two best options available. Paradoxical but true.

***

Vegas came back last night!

***

Only five of the Starship spacecraft’s six engines ignited, preventing it from reaching the correct orbital path, although the trajectory remained “within bounds” for a suborbital flight.

***

SatStats



The fertility rate in the Central African Republic is about 6 births per woman.

The fertility rate in China is about 1 birth per woman.


*


Only 30 percent of NYC's residents report being “happy” with Mamdani’s performance.


*


More than 500,000 American adolescents reported inhalant use in the past year,


*


Drawing on a wide-ranging new dataset, we estimate that at least five million people were captured from hundreds of locations across Eastern Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. We hypothesize that, over time, raids encouraged an economically advantageous process of defensive state-building linked to raided societies’ resistance to and lack of integration into the slave trade. Using difference-in-differences and instrumental variables strategies, we find that exposure to raids is positively associated with long-run urban growth and related indicators of demographic and commercial development. --Cambridge


*


The City of Pittsburgh gained the highest number of new residents statewide between 2020 and 2025. More than 4,500 people were born or moved into the city in that period, an increase of 1.5%


*


Cumbria Police made 7.7 arrests per 10,000 people for 'malicious speech' over two years, about 2.5 times the national average. So 'malicious speech' can vary with region?


*


The Debt was 30% of GDP at the beginning of the Depression, 41% at the beginning of World War II, 122% in 1946, at the end of the war . . . and then fell gradually back to 30% by 1981.


*


In this article, we use large language models to extract granular and validated data on about 100,000 articles published in over 150 political science journals from 2010 to 2024. We show that fewer than 2% of articles that rely on statistical methods report null-only findings in their abstracts, while over 90% of papers highlight significant results.


*


Bonded servants had virtually disappeared in America by 1800.

*

Canada has the largest decline in happiness in the world (along with the U.K.)

*

SatStats/China

Physics is actually too hard for physicists.--David Hilbert

***

What if they thought "The border is secure" was true?

***

A team at the University of Hong Kong has developed a new “super steel” that can survive the harsh conditions needed to make green hydrogen from seawater. The material uses an unexpected double-protection mechanism that resists corrosion far better than conventional stainless steel. Even more impressive, it could replace costly titanium parts used in today’s hydrogen systems.

***

SatStats/China

While the recent explosion in U.S. federal debt has raised numerous red flags, a broader measure of indebtedness across the public and private sectors shows borrowing as a share of GDP is actually down since 2010.

By contrast, China’s total debt-to-GDP ratio, excluding the financial sector, doubled in that span and has now topped 300%, according to Mark Williams, chief Asia economist at Capital Economics.

He pointed out that China’s debt surge has come despite weaker borrowing from households, which have been battered by the real estate market’s collapse.

But borrowing by companies as well as the central and local governments has continued to far outpace GDP growth, which has slowed in recent years, pushing the overall debt ratio higher.

Nearly 40% of outstanding debt is now owed by the public sector, including so-called local government financing vehicles, Williams calculated.

The result is total debt that surpasses the U.S., the eurozone, the U.K., and other emerging markets. Aside from some smaller economies, only Japan has more debt.

“China’s current level of indebtedness puts it in a league of its own,” Williams said.

U.S. federal debt has set its own grim milestones and is now more than 100% of GDP for the first time since the immediate aftermath of World War II.
But total public and private debt last year was about 265% of GDP, which has been robust lately. It’s also down sharply from pandemic-era highs, when governments unleashed a flood of stimulus. The eurozone and U.K. have similar trajectories.

But Chinese companies are borrowing more than they are selling. Business debt has doubled since 2019, while revenues are only 30% higher, according to Capital Economics.

Creditors continue to roll over loans to keep struggling firms afloat, even as nearly one-third of them are losing money, Williams noted. That worsens overcapacity and deflation, while preventing that capital from going to healthier borrowers.

China has been suffering from deflation for three straight years, the longest such streak since its transition to a market economy in the late 1970s.

“The irony is that one driver of both government borrowing and the lax lending standards of [state-owned] banks is the desire to prop up economic growth and prevent job losses,” Williams said. “But the product of a credit boom that has been underway for 18 years is a banking system propping up unproductive firms, widespread losses across industry, and entrenched overcapacity.” (From Fortune)

Satstats

On this day:

1897
The Greco-Turkish War is declared between Greece and the Ottoman Empire.
1906
An earthquake and fire destroy much of San Francisco, California.
1930
BBC Radio announces that there is no news on that day.
1942
World War II: The Doolittle Raid on Japan. Tokyo, Yokohama, Kobe and Nagoya are bombed.
1943
World War II: Operation Vengeance, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto is killed when his aircraft is shot down by U.S. fighters over Bougainville Island.
1988
The United States launches Operation Praying Mantis against Iranian naval forces in the largest naval battle since World War II.

*** 

If the Democrats came up with a plan for all Americans to jump off a thousand-foot cliff tomorrow, some Republicans would come up with an 'alternative’ plan in which we would all jump off a 500-foot cliff next week.--Sowell

***

The Iroquois Confederacy — or the Haudenosaunee Confederacy — was a league made up of six distinct Native American Indian nations that spoke the same language. The Confederacy is most well-known for its role in the Fur Trade and the major wars that shaped the American Colonies.

***

Many reports act as if Iran--or the U.S.--never considered the posibility of taking advantage of the chokepoint in the Persian Gulf. They must not remember the Iran-Iraq War and its spillover when Iran incidentally mined a U.S. ship, resulting in Operation Praying Mantis.

By 1988, Iran and Iraq had been locked in a brutal war for nearly eight years. Hundreds of thousands had died in grinding trench warfare reminiscent of World War I. Both nations sought to strangle the other's economy by attacking oil tankers in the Persian Gulf.

Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps laid mines in international shipping lanes and used small speedboats to harass and attack merchant vessels. The conflict became known as the Tanker War.

***

Braden “Clavicular” Peters was rushed to the hospital earlier this week after suffering a suspected drug overdose.

The 20-year-old is a so-called “looksmaxxing” influencer who attempts to “maximize” his physical appearance through often ill-advised practices, which range from treating facial acne to plastic surgery and “bonesmashing,” a bizarre phenomenon that involves striking one’s own face with a hammer.

***


Satstats

According to Bilmes, a policy lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School, the cost of the ongoing Iran war is likely to exceed $1 trillion.

*

In 2015 coal generated 69% of China’s primary energy, and by 2024 it was down to 56% — much higher than the US at 8%. But the actual volume of coal consumed was greater than ever, simply because China’s electricity demand continues to grow. Despite its efforts to reduce coal use, four years after Xi’s pledge, China was consuming 40% more coal than the rest of the world combined.

*

A full 29% of the city’s budget, an astounding $39 billion, goes to a school system where enrollment is down, truancy is up, and achievement is stagnant.

*

There are over 4400 hit and runs a year in Pittsburgh

*

The defense budget is just 13 percent of total federal spending.

*

Last year, we paid $970 billion in interest costs; this year, we will surpass $1 trillion. Interest costs so far this year “have been the second-largest spending category for the federal government — outpacing outlays for all budget categories except for Social Security.”

*

Almost a quarter-billion calls are placed to 911 each year in the United States. A large share of them involve social problems, not crimes or emergencies—yet police are always dispatched.

*

Physician incomes are extraordinarily high in the United States. A new NBER paper finds that U.S. physicians earn roughly two to four times as much as their counterparts in Canada, the Netherlands, and Sweden.

*

Though roughly the size of California, Paraguay’s $47 billion economy is about 1% of California’s.

*

By one metric, all ten of the most influential science papers of the last decade came from the United States.

SatStats

On this day:

1689
William III and Mary II are crowned as joint sovereigns of Britain.
1814
The Treaty of Fontainebleau ends the War of the Sixth Coalition against Napoleon Bonaparte, and forces him to abdicate unconditionally for the first time.
1868
Former Shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu surrenders Edo Castle to Imperial forces, marking the end of the Tokugawa shogunate.
1951
Korean War: President Harry Truman relieves General of the Army Douglas MacArthur of overall command in Korea.
1968
President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1968, prohibiting discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing.
2006
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announces that Iran has successfully enriched uranium.

***

"You unconsciously stand up straight in a cathedral. The art, the sweep, the ceilings are so high that you aspire even in your posture. You crouch down low to enter a darkened shack. The sound of our leadership now makes us all crouch too low.

Why do we recoil when a leader is vulgar and violent in his language and thinking? Coarse language obviously implies coarse thinking, and no one wants that in a leader entrusted to bring peace and prosperity. Beyond that, throughout history political authority has come wrapped in a certain formality and ceremony. Dignity enhanced power. A British king even 500 years ago didn’t think himself free to speak in public like a fishmonger or a street whore. He had to present himself at a certain height so people would look up to him."--Peggy Noonan

***

Tokugawa Yoshinobu (born Oct. 28, 1837, Edo, Japan—died Jan. 22, 1913, Tokyo) was the last Tokugawa shogun of Japan, who helped make the Meiji Restoration (1868)—the overthrow of the shogunate and restoration of power to the emperor—a relatively peaceful transition.

***

After 16 years in power doing Russia's bidding in Brussels, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party is at risk of losing power in Sunday's parliamentary elections, with challenger Peter Magyar significantly ahead in polls.

 An internal intelligence report for Russia’s SVR intelligence service, revealed in March, outlined a strategy dubbed “the Gamechanger”, which included staging an assassination attempt against Orban to “fundamentally alter the entire paradigm of the election campaign”.

***

The right is obsessed with the idea that mysterious forces of fraud have run off with all the money, while the left has convinced itself that billionaires aren’t paying any taxes.

But it’s not some huge secret why it seems like the government keeps spending and spending without us getting any amazing new public services — it’s transferred to the elderly.

(Not to say there is no fraud. See Below)

***

SatStats

Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche revealed that the Justice Department is investigating more than 8,000 fraud cases, which he said represent over $1 trillion in taxpayer funds potentially stolen each year by "increasingly sophisticated and opportunistic fraudsters."

*

In 1938, 11 percent of blacks were born to unmarried women. By 1965, that number had grown to 25 percent. Now it’s about 75 percent. Even during slavery, when marriage between blacks was illegal, a higher percentage of black children were raised by their biological mothers and fathers than today. In 1940, 86 percent of black children were born inside marriage. Today, only 35 percent of black children are born inside marriage.

*

Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s most recent full-year calculations, accounted for $4.2 trillion of a total $7 trillion in spending for 2025.

*

Consistent with previous years, in 2025, TB disease disproportionally affected non-U.S.–born persons. Among non-U.S.–born persons, there were 7,858 (77%) provisionally reported TB cases, with a corresponding rate of 15.4 per 100,000 persons. Among U.S.-born persons, there were 2,252 (22%) provisionally reported TB cases with a corresponding rate of 0.8 per 100,000 persons.

*

American families collectively have a jaw-dropping $34.1 trillion in home equity as of the fourth quarter of 2025, according to the Federal Reserve

*

Almost 20% of full-time workers tapped their 401(k) plans for loans last year — the highest share since the company started tracking the data.

Full-time workers cut their contribution rate in 2025 to 8.9%, from 9.2% a year earlier, while one in four workers reduced their annual savings in their 401(k) or other types of employer-sponsored accounts.

*

The number one job in NY is social services.

*

There is a greater percentage of Sikhs in Canada than there are in India…

*

The NY state comptroller: spending on services for the NYC street homeless population ran to $81,705 per person last year, up from $28,428 pp 6yrs ago. Figures do not include all kinds of other spending, such as supportive housing, policing costs etc.

*

Canada has observed the largest decline in happiness in the world (along with the UK)

*

The richest 10% of South Africans hold 71% of the wealth, while the poorest 60% hold just 7%.

SatStats (crime)

On this day:

193
Roman Emperor Pertinax is assassinated by Praetorian Guards, who then sell the throne in an auction to Didius Julianus.
1802
Heinrich Wilhelm Matthäus Olbers discovers 2 Pallas, the second asteroid known to man
1871
The Paris Commune is formally established in Paris.
1939
Spanish Civil War: Generalissimo Francisco Franco conquers Madrid.
1941
World War II: Battle of Cape Matapan – in the Mediterranean Sea, British Admiral Andrew Browne Cunningham leads the Royal Navy in the destruction of three major Italian heavy cruisers and two destroyers.
1969
The McGill français movement protest occurs, the second largest protest in Montreal’s history with 10,000 trade unionists, leftist activists, CEGEP students, and even some McGill students at McGill’s Roddick Gates. This led to the majority of the protesters getting arrested.
1979
Operators of Three Mile Island’s Unit 2 nuclear reactor outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, fail to recognize that a relief valve in the primary coolant system has stuck open following an unexpected shutdown. As a result, enough coolant drains out of the system to allow the core to overheat and partially melt down.

***

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.--Voltaire

***

The Commune of Paris was an insurrection against the French government from March 18 to May 28, 1871, following France’s defeat in the Franco-German War, including the Siege of Paris by the Germans and the collapse of Napoleon III’s Second Empire (1852–70).

***

Previous research has suggested that dogs likely diverged from wolves more than 15,000 years ago, during the Palaeolithic period.

Domesticated dogs were already widely distributed across western Eurasia by at least 14,300 years ago, according to a recent paper. Dogs were the only domesticated animal present in Europe before agriculture, the researchers said.

***

SatStats (crime)

In 2023, during the Biden administration, the FBI made unmarked and unprecedented revisions to murder data for the prior two decades. These changes increased annual murder estimates during prior presidencies by as much as 7% and decreased estimates during Biden’s presidency by as much as 5%.
As a result of the FBI’s 2023 revisions and other factors, the number of homicides recorded on death certificates that were not reported as murders by the FBI rose from a low of 16 killings in 2003 to an average of 3,711 killings per year during Biden’s presidency

*

If the U.S. murder rate remains at the same level as in 2023, one in every 200 people in the nation will ultimately be murdered.

*

In 1964, about 16% of recorded aggravated assaults with a firearm resulted in death. By 1999, this figure fell to about 5%. 

     Per a 2002 paper in the journal Homicide Studies: The “principal explanation” for this “downward trend in lethality” is improvements in medical technology and related medical support services.

*

In the United States, the portion of murders in which a suspect is identified and acted upon by the criminal justice system declined from 92% in 1960 to 58% in 2023.
From 1965 to 2022, roughly 337,601 murders were committed in the U.S. that were still unsolved as of 2022.

*

In 2023, the police chief of Washington DC reported that “the average homicide suspect has been arrested 11 times prior to them committing a homicide.

*

Among suspects arrested for homicide during 2019 in Baltimore, Maryland:

     -81% had prior criminal records.
     -52% were previously arrested for violent crimes.
     -27% were on parole and probation.
     -They were previously arrested an average of eight times.

*

A Bureau of Justice Statistics study based on crime data from 1974 to 1985 found that:
     -42% of Americans will be the victim of a completed violent crime in the course of their lives.
     -83% of Americans will be the victim of an attempted or completed violent crime.
     -52% of Americans will be the victim of an attempted or completed violent crime more than once.

SatStats

On this day:

1152
Annulment of the marriage of King Louis VII of France and Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine.
1556
In Oxford, Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer is burned at the stake.
1857
An earthquake in Tokyo, Japan kills over 100,000.
1933
Construction of Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp, is completed.
1935
Shah Reza Pahlavi formally asks the international community to call Persia by its native name, Iran, which means 'Land of the Aryans.'
1943
Wehrmacht officer Rudolf Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff plots to assassinate Adolf Hitler by using a suicide bomb, but the plan falls through. Von Gersdorff is able to defuse the bomb in time and avoid suspicion.
1980
US President Jimmy Carter announces a United States boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow to protest the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan.
1989
Sports Illustrated reports allegations tying baseball player Pete Rose to baseball gambling.

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Nobody is needy in the market economy because of the fact that some people are rich.--von mise

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The U.S. national debt crossed a new milestone Wednesday, surpassing $39 trillion, a record reached five months after the debt sailed past the $38 trillion mark.

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Lisa Kudrow has a biology degree from Vassar and is worth about $130 million.

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The U.S. Department of Agriculture runs a roughly $10 billion annual housing program for nonfarmers in nonagricultural communities.

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The annulment of the marriage of King Louis VII of France and Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine allowed her to marry Henrry 11 of England and create the Plantagenet era. She was the mother of several future kings, including Richard the Lionheart and John, and her hand was everywhere in the political affairs of England and Europe. She was imprisoned by her husband for 16 years for her support of their sons' rebellion against him, and continued to be a power after his death.

SatStats

Arielle Kuperberg, a demographer and sociologist at the University of Maryland, handles a data set of more than 14,000 undergraduates across 44 colleges, including elite universities. She’s found a 33 percent increase in the number of people who are married in college since 2019. Kuperberg says, "My generation is more religious and socially conservative than our parents, so of course we’re marrying earlier. We’re definitely going to see this trend increasing.”

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In the U.S., the average ransomware payment was $11.6 million.
In the U.K., £7.7 million, or about $10.3 million.
In the European Union, €8.4 million, or about $9.7 million.

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Since Congress last balanced the budget in 2001, revenues have grown at a robust annual average rate of 3.9 percent, which was higher than the average inflation rate since 2001, 2.5 percent, the Cato Institute's Chris Edwards pointed out in 2024. But spending has grown at a much faster pace, 5.5 percent annually, which has led to today's large deficits.

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52% of 1,905 tech decision-makers said their company’s average ransomware payment last year exceeded its annual cybersecurity budget

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A study of 657 institutions by the National Association of College and University Business Officers (Nacubo) with Commonfund showed their endowment withdrawals rose 11 per cent year on year in the 12 months to June 2025 — the sharpest increase since 2010.

The surge came as endowments funded an average of 15.2 per cent of universities’ operating expenses last year, up from 10.9 per cent in 2023.

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The population of monarch butterflies in Mexico increased 64% this winter, compared with the same period in 2025.

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In the fall of 2020, enrollment in US public schools decreased by 1.1 million.

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The US now imports more from Taiwan than from China.

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In recent months, the Houston independent school district approved a closure of 12 schools; Florida’s Broward County public schools approved a consolidation of six schools; the Cleveland metropolitan school district approved a closure of 29 schools; and Atlanta public schools decided to close or repurpose 16 schools

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Iran was once one of the key oil suppliers to the world. No longer. Its exports, constrained by sanctions, amount to less than 2 per cent of global supplies, most of which go to China at discounted prices.

A similar change has taken place in Venezuela. Once a star of world oil and one of the founding members of Opec, today it can hardly even be called a petrostate. It produces less oil than the US state of North Dakota and a quarter as much as neighbouring Brazil.

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Over the past 50 years, the average American has gotten richer. In 1974, the median household income was $72,339 in 2024 dollars. In 2024, median household income was $83,730—an increase in real annual income of over $11,000. Moreover, money isn't being redistributed to the 1 percent, but from them: The top 1 percent of income earners paid 40 percent of federal income taxes in 2022, and the top 10 percent were responsible for 72 percent of this revenue.
One can only wonder what will happen when the 5% wealth tax forces the liquidation of the rich's holdings,

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The U.S. power industry is embarking on an AI-driven expansion of the electric grid, a build-out that promises to be one of the most expensive since World War II.

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This got funded:
Places with heavier rap exposure didn’t experience higher crime, lower educational attainment or weaker labor-market outcomes relative to trends elsewhere..

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UK’s Triple Lock, which requires that UK pensions rise in line with whichever is highest: wages, inflation, or 2.5 percent.
The triple lock guarantees that pensioner incomes grow at the expense of everything else, and the mechanism bites hardest when the economy is weakest.

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Cesar Chavez, the founder of the United Farm Workers, has been accused of sexually assaulting, abusing, and grooming women and girls as young as 12 during his peak influence in the 1960s and 70s. Nearly 50 schools, as well as roads, monuments, and murals, have been named after him. Erasing him will be expensive.

 

SatStats

On this day:

44 BC
Casca, Cicero, and Cassius decided, in the night before the Assassination of Julius Caesar, that Mark Antony should stay alive.
1757
Admiral Sir John Byng is executed by firing squad aboard HMS Monarch for breach of the Articles of War.
1780
American Revolutionary War: Spanish forces capture Fort Charlotte in Mobile, Alabama, the last British frontier post capable of threatening New Orleans in Spanish Louisiana.
1942
Orvan Hess and John Bumstead became the first in the world to successfully treat a patient, Anne Miller, using penicillin.
1964
A jury in Dallas, Texas, finds Jack Ruby guilty of killing Lee Harvey Oswald, assumed assassin of John F. Kennedy

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Voltaire referred to Byng’s execution in his satirical novel Candide: “In this country, it is wise to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others.”

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"The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money," Trump said Thursday on his social media site.
It was only last month, in his State of the Union address, that Trump had bragged about gas prices at $2.30 a gallon, a figure that has since soared more than 50% to a national average of $3.60 a gallon, according to AAA.

It's wonderful to be in a country where both contradictory options are the greatest ever seen.

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Modern economic growth in its global form has done more for workers and the environment than any army of government inspectors, regulators, customs officers, or IRS accountants. We Americans are rich not because of unions or anti-trust or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, but because, on the whole, we have let capitalism work.--mccloskey

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SatStats

Only 1% of Americans identify as vegans, according to Gallup, while the same poll showed that 3% consider themselves vegetarian. Vegetarian restaurants have had a hard time of it.

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   Environment:

Contrary to the EPA 2009 predictions, there has been a decline in smog levels from 1980 to 2024.

There has been no trend in hurricane numbers or intensities since 1973. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finds no change in global flooding.

There has been no trend in the EPA heat wave index since 1895, except for the 1930s.

Several studies show a decline in net mortality from heat and cold.

U.S. wildfires have declined sharply since 1926, and global wildfire acreage declined 24% between 1998 and 2015.

Global droughts have declined about 0.5% per decade since 1950.

Global per capita food production has increased 40% since 1980.

And the latest peer-reviewed research reports no acceleration globally in sea-level rise.

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   Immigtation

15% of the population of Ireland entered the US between 1851 and 1860

9% of the population of Norway entered the US in the 1880s

6% of the population of Italy entered the US from about 1900-1910

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Re: California's proposed 5% wealth tax: “Over 100,000 simulations with varying discount rates, wealth tax revenues, and lost income tax revenues associated with departures, we find that 71% of scenarios in which the Act is instituted yields a negative [net present value], signaling the Act would generate a net cost to the state of California,” the researchers wrote in a Thursday Substack post. The “average across these draws,” they say, “is –$24.7 billion.”

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Iran is the size of Europe

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 Argentines have more than $250 billion in dollars stashed at home, along with offshore accounts and safe-deposit boxes—some six times the reserves of the central bank.

But two years into Milei’s government, Argentines are easing their grip on their precious dollars.

Dollars held in the country’s banks by private-sector investors hit a record at the end of last year of nearly $37 billion, up 160% since Milei took office in December 2023, according to central-bank data.

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People born in 1990 have double the risk of colon cancer and quadruple the risk of rectal cancer compared with people born in 1950

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Germany’s population is projected to shrink by nearly 5 per cent within 25 years — a significantly steeper decline than previously forecast, according to an Ifo study.

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In ten-generation world calibrations, Muslims become the largest tradition.

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In 2025, roughly 60,000 new swimming pools were built in the U.S. That's down about 40% from 2022 and approximately half the peak seen during the Covid-era boom.

SatStats

On this day:

321
Emperor Constantine I decrees that the dies Solis Invicti (sun-day) is the day of rest in the Empire.
1799
Napoleon Bonaparte captures Jaffa in Palestine and his troops proceed to kill more than 2,000 Albanian captives.
1850
Senator Daniel Webster gives his “Seventh of March” speech endorsing the Compromise of 1850 in order to prevent a possible civil war.
1876
Alexander Graham Bell is granted a patent for an invention he calls the telephone
1912
Roald Amundsen announces that his expedition had reached the South Pole on December 14, 1911.
1936
World War II (Prelude to): In violation of the Locarno Pact and the Treaty of Versailles, Germany reoccupies the Rhineland.
1945
World War II: American troops seize the Ludendorff Bridge over the Rhine River at Remagen.

1989
Iran and the United Kingdom break diplomatic relations after a row over Salman Rushdie and his controversial novel.
2007
The British House of Commons votes to make the upper chamber, the House of Lords, 100% elected.

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True capitalism is grounded in private property, competitive markets, voluntary exchange, and the rule of law. It treats individuals as decision-makers in their own lives — not subjects of top-down control. It decentralizes power, rewards value creation, and invites experimentation, allowing people to say “yes” to opportunity without asking permission from bureaucrats or politicians.--Ginn
Which is to say it is both an outgrowth and an expression of freedom.

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NYC First Lady Rama Duwaji showed support for far-left organizations applauding Hamas' Oct. 7th attacks.

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Berkshire was a net seller of stock in the fourth quarter, meaning it sold more stock than it purchased. The company has now been a net seller in 13 straight quarters, which suggests Buffett has struggled to find attractive investments in the current market environment.

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SatStats

The most landed-on property in Monopoly is Illinois Avenue. When players exit jail, the most common dice rolls (especially six to eight) funnel them there.

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Between now and 2036, the CBO projects $94.6 trillion in federal spending against $70.2 trillion in revenue, a decade-long deficit of $24.4 trillion. Outlays reached 23.1 percent of GDP in 2025, nearly two full percentage points above the 50-year average, meaning annual spending growth is outpacing the economy itself. Debt held by the public is projected to hit 101 percent of GDP this year, which will surpass the post-WWII record of 106 percent by 2030, and climb to 120 percent by 2036.

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Last week, Citrini Research projected a “human intelligence displacement spiral” caused by AI within two years.
But a recent survey of 6,000 chief executives across four countries found that they expect AI to cut employment by just 0.7 percent over the next three years

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Using transaction-level data on US congressional stock trades, we find that lawmakers who later ascend to leadership positions perform similarly to matched peers beforehand but outperform them by 47 percentage points annually after ascension.(study)

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As a percentage of total book pages, Adam Smith has the highest share at 6.69%, beating out Ricardo (5.22%), Mill (3.83%), and Marx (4.36%). Just over 32% of all textbooks allocated most of their pages to Adam Smith, followed by Marx with 18.6%, Mill with 13.95%, and Ricardo with 11.3%. While interesting as a history of economic thought project, such an exercise isn’t merely amusing pedantry; it can provide insight into the types of contributions, research questions, and methodologies that have had the most enduring impact in economics. It may also inform future authors of history of economic textbooks.

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Self-reported AI use at work: Democrats are consistently more likely than Republicans to report frequent use.

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The New York Central once ran forty-two daily passenger trains between Buffalo and Cleveland, with the 187-mile trip taking three hours. Today, Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited covers the same 187 miles in three and a half hours, if it’s on time, which it often isn’t. And the New York–Montreal run took nine hours in 1940; today’s Adirondack takes over thirteen.

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Pensions cost the Brazilian government 10% of GDP. If no reforms are made by 2050, Brazil will spend more on pensions as a share of GDP than many richer and greyer countries… Though Brazil’s share of young people is similar to that in Chile or Mexico, its pension spending is already at Japan’s level. That is despite a modest reform in 2019 that introduced a minimum retirement age. The population is ageing rapidly. Without reform, its social-security deficit, or the shortfall between contributions and payments, is set to rise from 2% of GDP today to over 16% by 2060.

Brazil’s courts cost 1.3% of GDP —the second-most expensive in the world—mostly because of generous pensions. The typical soldier retires before turning 55 on a pension equivalent to their full salary.

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Multiple studies have either shown that smartphone and social media use among teens has minimal effects on their mental health or none at all. As a 2024 review published by an American Psychological Association journal put it: “There is no evidence that time spent on social media is correlated with adolescent mental health problems.”

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Across specifications, a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage increases robot adoption by roughly 8 percent relative to the mean. 

Is the minimum wage a Robot Employment Act?

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Men and lesbians are vastly overrepresented in stand-up comedy.

SatStats

 

The tariffs have been ruled unconstitutional. Efficiency will not trump process yet. 

This will result in a wonderful boondoggle that will be mediated by a feeding frenzy of countless predatory lawyers and their predatory assistants.

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Is ICE itself a problem, or is it the power of the government and its efficiency and integrity in using that power?

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Over the last two seasons, Ke'Bryan Hayes is the only player to record at least 900 plate appearances and an OPS under .600.

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And beyond alignment, I think an additional strategy should be to work on modifying the constraints that AI faces, to minimize the degree to which humans and AIs are in actual, real competition over scarce resources.
One potential way to do this is to accelerate the development of outer space. Space is an inherently hostile environment for humans, but far less so for robots, or for the computers that form the physical substrate of AI; in fact, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and others are already trying to put data centers in space.--Noah Smith

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Pirate outfielder Jhostynxon Garcia's nickname is 'the password.'

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SatStats

Google Play Store has over 2.6 billion apps and games

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Bill Gates' total land holdings are widely estimated between roughly 242,000 and 270,000 acres nationwide, making him the largest private farmland owner in the U.S.

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By one estimate, almost 80% of Venezuela’s oil revenue is collected in stablecoins like tether, a local economist, Asdrúbal Oliveros, said on a recent podcast.

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Today, a simple vial of blood can be used to measure more than 13,000 different proteins; ten years ago, this was nearly zero.

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Superintelligent AI would be able to use all the water and energy and land and minerals in the world, so why would it let humanity have any for ourselves? Why wouldn’t it just take everything and let the rest of us starve?
But an AI that was able to rewrite its utility function would simply have no use for infinite water, energy, or land. If you can reengineer yourself to reach a bliss point, then local nonsatiation fails; you just don’t want to devour the Universe, because you don’t need to want that.

We can trust it to do the right thing.

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Among the cohort who began college in 2004, 38% never took economics. Among the 2012 cohort, only 26% took economics.

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Spending Distribution at the Federal Level:

From 1959 to 2024, the portion of federal government outlays that were spent on:
--national defense and veterans’ benefits declined from 55% to 17%.
--social programs—including healthcare, income security, education, housing, and recreation—rose from 20% to 60%.
--general government and debt service—including the executive & legislative branches, tax collection, financial management, and interest payments—rose from 17% to 25% and then declined to 18%.
--economic affairs—including transportation, general economic & labor affairs, agriculture, natural resources, energy, and space declined from 8% to 3%.
--public order and safety—including police, fire, law courts, prisons, and immigration enforcement—rose from 0.3% to 1.2%.

Regrettably, there is no section for theft.

SatStats

On this Day:

1497
The bonfire of the vanities occurs when supporters of Girolamo Savonarola burn thousands of objects like cosmetics, art, and books in Florence, Italy.
1898
Émile Zola is brought to trial for libel for publishing J'Accuse.
1900
Second Boer War: British troops fail in their third attempt to lift the Siege of Ladysmith.
1986
Twenty-eight years of one-family rule ends in Haiti when President Jean-Claude Duvalier flees the Caribbean nation.
1990
Dissolution of the Soviet Union: The Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party agrees to give up its monopoly on power.

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"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see."--Arthur Schopenhauer


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The Olympics promises respect we don't always see in popular competitive sports. Or competitive ideas.

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Vonn is said to have a plateau fracture, the support of the femur. Unbelievable risk at skiing force of up to 6 Gs.

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Benghazi's been avenged. Any plans for The Liberty?

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SatStats

Over the past century, the length of Oscar speeches has ballooned, peaking in the 2010s at almost 300 words per speech.

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Mammals and non-human primates follow a clear scaling of body mass to brain mass. Humanoids break that trend.

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People know whether or not they want to buy a house in just 27 minutes, but it takes 88 minutes to decide on a couch

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At Berkeley, as recently as 2015, white male hires accounted for 52.7 percent of new tenure-track faculty; in 2023, they accounted for 21.5 percent. UC Irvine has hired 64 tenure-track assistant professors in the humanities and social sciences since 2020. Just three (4.7 percent) are white men. Of the 59 Assistant Professors in Arts, Humanities and Social Science appointed at UC Santa Cruz between 2020-2024, only two were white men (3 percent).

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National Debt

A recent report from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget projects that interest payments on America’s national debt will surpass $1.5 trillion in 2032 and reach $1.8 trillion by 2035.

According to the Treasury Department, U.S. national debt now stands at $38.56 trillion — and it continues to grow as federal spending outpaces revenue.

So far in fiscal year 2026, the government has already spent about $602 billion more than it has collected.

The interest payments on the national debt exceed the military budget, which is $1 trillion.

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100 South Koreans will have an estimated 15 grandchildren

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Overall, our findings challenge popular narratives and suggest that pet ownership may support, rather than displace, fertility.---a paper

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Planning assistance caused municipalities to build 20% fewer housing units per decade over the 50 years that followed.

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At the end of 2025. Berkshire Hathaway's marketable equity portfolio was valued at about $320 billion, and the business has about $354 billion of cash to deploy on top of that.

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This is the toughest market for PhD economists in recent memory. JOE listings are down 20% from last year. Worse: they are 19% below COVID levels.