Day: May 17, 2026, 1:01 PM

The Claims

Chill Amusing, Annoying, Clowns

Ian Welsh (and his ilk) claim that strength is worthless and “just for show.”

But I just did a minor bit of home maintenance that I would not have been able to do when I was weak, and that my partner (though also quite strong) was not able to complete as she was not quite strong enough.

So I’ll take my “worthless” gym strength over being a feeble and wrong doofus any day of the week.

Chill Links

I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. Me too. And most got that clownishly wrong.

How the Bird Eye Was Pushed to an Evolutionary Extreme.

The amount of meth seized at the border is skyrocketing.

The Sigmoids Won’t Save You.

Throughout the 1950s, Los Alamos advanced both the science and the supply chain that took NMR from a physics curiosity to a cornerstone technique in chemistry, biology, and medicine.

Isostasy.

Southwest Airlines bans robots from traveling in cabin or as checked baggage.

Kioxia and Dell cram nearly 10PB of flash storage into a single 2U server.

A Russian ship sank in mysterious circumstances. It may have been carrying submarine nuclear reactors to North Korea.

CENTCOM Commander Dismisses Reports That Iran Retains Most Of Its Missile And Drone Arsenal. CENTCOM actual is correct. Those reports are clownish propaganda.

Europeans primarily trace their genetic ancestry to three main groups that migrated to the continent.

Both sides in the debate between people who say “race is a social construct” and those who say “race is biological” are at least somewhat correct. Right. It is both. Genetic evidence is much stronger now and there is an obvious genetic component that libs lied about for decades.

The creedal nation model could potentially work – if it were real. But it’s not. It being real would mean we deport people who don’t share the creed. And if you say “part of the creed is we don’t do that” then that creed is a suicide pact.

Most of what households buy is non-tradable: housing, healthcare, childcare, education. When American tech firms bid workers from haircutting to coding, American haircut wages rise. Germany has no growing tech sector to do the bidding, so German wages stay flat. Exactly. Krugman is way, way wrong. As usual these days.

Why birth rates are falling everywhere all at once.

On the Spanish experiment of mass migration with little investment, my friend Tano Santos (Columbia) writes me this.

The Politics of Jobless Prosperity.