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The road to gainful employment*

When I was in junior high and high school, I earned a little money babysitting and, during the summers, mowing lawns. As high school graduation loomed, my parents wanted me to get a better-paying summer job between high school and college. I ended up wandering around filling out job applications at fast food restaurants and retail stores. None of those generated a response.   I’m not sure what my parents were thinking. Maybe they thought jobs for teenagers with no connections or work histories were just lying around waiting for applicants. Eventually, the maid who cleaned once a week after my mom became a full-time grad student arranged with her son-in-law to get me a job pumping gas. The station was on the other side of the river, so when the station closed at 11 PM, I had to ride my bike home in the dark across a narrow bridge. This was the first clue that it helped to have connections if you’re looking for jobs. The next clue was when, a few days after I started at Bull Run Oil ...
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Where’s the beef?

Thanks to climate change, which the Trump Administration is actively promoting, and the Trump Administration defunding of USAID and   a project dedicated to monitoring and containing New World screwworm in Central America , screwworm is back in the US after decades of successful containment. What is screwworm? “ New World screwworm is a fly that lays its eggs in open wounds and body openings of warm-blooded animals. Infestations start when a female fly lays eggs on open wounds—wounds as small as a tick bite can attract a female fly to lay her eggs—or other parts of the body in live animals. Eggs hatch into maggots that feed on the living flesh for about 7 days before the larvae drop to the ground, burrow into the soil, and emerge as adult screwworm flies—starting the cycle again. Most infestations occur in animals, but they can occur in people. ” How does this affect beef prices? “ The United States eradicated screwworm in the 1960s through a massive   sterile fly program , bu...
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Quote of the day

National vanity is arguably dependent on the absence of national pride. To be proud of one’s country is, as Yeats says, not to disguise its faults but to want to believe that the country is capable of rising above them. The keynote of national pride is “We’re better than this.” National vanity, on the contrary, is indeed a form of disguise. It uses the mask of greatness to cover up a society’s complex realities. The dark parts of its history and the persistent stains of injustice must be erased. The dignity of self-knowledge is sacrificed to the willed ignorance of inflated self-esteem. Self-belief is replaced by self-delusion.   ~Fintan O’Toole
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Down the Tesla memory hole

To follow up on a previous post about Tesla autonomous driving vehicles: “Tesla has retroactively modified “Full Self-Driving” purchase agreements to add “supervised” language that did not exist when owners originally bought the product. In some cases, the original documents have been made entirely inaccessible.   “ Electrek   has confirmed the issue with multiple owners. The contracts in question were signed between 2016 and early 2024, when Tesla sold the package as “Full Self-Driving Capability” — with no mention of “supervised” and the implicit promise of unsupervised autonomy.” Will this deflate Tesla’s laughably inflated stock value? No, because stockholders are investing in Elon Musk, not cars. https://electrek.co/2026/06/03/tesla-retroactively-modified-fsd-contracts-supervised/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=bluesky
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Monetizing Genesis

One of the larger ongoing non-Trump grifts in the US today is the “Ark Encounter” in Williamstown, Kentucky. It’s been open for nearly ten years. I don’t know whether or not it’s hit its evangelistic benchmarks, but it has never met the financial benchmarks promised to Kentucky taxpayers. “When Creationist   Ken Ham   and his team at Answers in Genesis were looking for a location for their $100+ million attraction, they pitched it as a way to create jobs. One   projection   (from the state) said Ark Encounter was “expected to annually generate… a minimum of 3,000 new full-time equivalent jobs.”   *snip* “Besides that, the city of Williamstown, which desperately wanted to be the home of the Ark,   offered Ham’s team   $62 million in junk bonds if they built the “Ark” in their backyard. Grant County, which Williamstown is in, gave Ham’s team 98 acres of land for $1. “They also said that, over a 30-year period, 75% of Ark Encounter’s real estate taxes wou...
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Trump Administration proposes science commissars

The Office of Management and Budget is proposing a set of new rules that would put OMB officials in charge of all federal scientific grants, allowing them to overrule peer review panels. They can also cancel grants at any time for essentially any reason. This would end the current grant review mechanism and turn it into a kind of political patronage system. Any research or research institutions could immediately be cut off if they offend the Administration.  What’s being proposed here reminds me of political commissars of Stalin's USSR. In science, it brought about the imprisonment or death of eminent geneticists and the rise of Lysenkoism, which set Soviet agriculture back decades. For someone who grew up during the Cold War, the idea a Republican administration would embrace the practices of communism is a breathtaking inversion.   Or consider what happened to German and Italian physics during fascism. Many of the world’s best fled to the West and served in the development o...
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In praise of anachronistic technology

The world is a much-changed place since I was born. While that hasn’t always been for the better, there are technologies that I have embraced enthusiastically and wouldn’t want to retreat from: Word processing on computer: I learned touch typing on a typewriter. My parents gave me a portable manual typewriter as a high school graduation present. I used it all through college and made a little pocket change typing up assignments for friends. As I was finishing my PhD, my mentor got an Apple II, and I learned word processing with WordStar. Flash forward, and I write everything except grocery lists and checks using my laptop. I compose directly at the keyboard, without the intermediation of stylus and paper.  I would hate to go back to typewriters and paper. Calculators: I learned the basics of the slide rule in high school, but midway through my freshman year in college, cheap hand-held calculators appeared. I did my regressions for my dissertation on a hand-held calculator I bo...
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