Year: 2025

Chill Quote

studies have found that educating people about “white privilege” does very little to change anyone’s attitudes or behaviors toward African Americans or other minorities. Instead, the training primarily leads white elites to hold poorer whites in even lower esteem–it convinces them that struggling whites deserve their suffering and are unworthy of help (apparently, for failing to make good use of their “privilege”).

We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite by Musa al-Gharbi

Chill Links

250MWh ‘Sand Battery’ to start construction in Finland, for both heating and ancillary services.

China’s BEV Trucks and the End of Diesel’s Dominance.

Physicists drive antihydrogen breakthrough at CERN with record trapping technique.

Secret behind Temple of Venus’s resilient construction uncovered.

How ‘Stranger Things’ Defined the Era of the Algorithm.

Russians Are Starting to Feel Real Economic Pain From Putin’s War.

Europe Fears It Can’t Catch Up in Great Power Competition.

How Sociotropic Aesthetic Judgments Drive Opposition to Housing Development.

A comprehensive list of 2025 tech layoffs.

We Can’t Diet and Exercise Our Way Out of the Next Pandemic.

Stress-induced sympathetic hyperactivation drives hair follicle necrosis to trigger autoimmunity. (In mice.)

The housing crisis is pushing Gen Z into crypto and economic nihilism.

Europe thinks the unthinkable: Retaliating against Russia. About damn time.

Git Up

Chill Annoying, Tech

I like open source, but if often spawns absolutely atrocious technology. For instance, Docker, Kubernetes and Git. All of them are poorly-designed and overly complex. None of them are all that well-suited for the use cases to which they are typically applied. Only Git works better than the tech that preceded it, and that’s only because it’s just shitty instead of incredibly shitty. The bar there was so low that anyone with reasonable coding skills and project management capabilities could exceed it.

These three technologies were adopted heavily because of their complexity, rather than in spite of it. That’s what developers are attracted to and that is who — largely — runs the tech world now. When it was more my type in charge (systems people), we gravitated to simpler, better-specified tech that was constrained, well-specified, focused and fast.

Those days are long gone now, and the world is much worse for it.

Chill Links

PPI Inflation Bounces Back.

Pentagon contractors want to blow up military right to repair. Evil.

Solar’s growth in US almost enough to offset rising energy use.

Dramatic irony.

OpenAI needs to raise at least $207bn by 2030 so it can continue to lose money, HSBC estimates.

53 Hours and No Wi-Fi: Why I Loved Amtrak’s Slow Train to San Francisco.

Germany’s Secret Plan for War With Russia.

The US is deregulating banks. Will the rest of the world follow? I hope not.

AI Ayo

Chill Political Economy, Tech

MIT report: AI can already replace nearly 12% of the U.S. workforce.

I agree with that assessment. No matter what you’ve read — particularly if you’re on the left and predisposed to hate tech and any form of knowledge advancement that doesn’t relate to a new, innovative gender — the newest AI models are quite good at many things. Certainly they could replace most of the juniors in my own field that I’ve worked with over the years and many of the mid-level folks too.

No one is reckoning with how quickly this fact is being weaponized by the MBA class or that it’s already demonstrably occurring. Predictably, economists are and will be in denial about this at least a decade after it is already happening.

Norm McDonot

Chill Annoying, Evil

When I try to use the internet like normies do — no adblock, no DNS filtering, no quality firewall — I’m like, “What the hell is going on? Why is all that crap flying around all over the screen? What is all that noise?”

I do not know how they do it. Couldn’t be me.