(Source: Robert Reich, The Biggest Economic Lies We’re Told) There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning. – Warren Buffett (Source: Jon Schwarz, The Murder of the U.S. Middle Class Began 40 Years Ago This Week, The Intercept) A major reason Donald Trump narrowly won the presidency in 2016 was his skill at tapping into the very real and legitimate frustration and anger many Americans feel toward the rich and powerful, who seem to have hogged all the economic gains of the past fifty years for themselves....

9/4/23 update: I loved (despite its gore) Utopia. (The original 2013-14 BBC version, NOT the Prime Video remake, which has much worse viewer ratings.) I enjoyed Night Sky. Fabulous acting by Sissy Spacek and J.K. Simmons! I wanted to see the next season of both shows and am embittered that neither was green-lit for another season. 6/9/23 update: I’ve been loving these two series: Silo Battlestar Galactica (the 2004-2009 version) I watch far less television than most, but I’ve binge-watched some series in recent years that I enjoyed and recommend....

I enjoyed blogging till I fell hard for Twitter, circa 2010. I enjoyed many wonderful years on Twitter, learning a ton by following fascinating people and mostly re-sharing their great Tweets. Alas, in 2022, Elon Musk’s arrogant incompetence destroyed Twitter overnight, and now I’m back to blogging! I’m horrified the beautiful knowledge-sharing town square Twitter once was could so easily be bought and contorted into a corrupted shell of its former greatness....

Wasn’t The Internet Supposed to Unleash an Innovation Explosion? “One of the things that really separates us from the high primates is that we’re tool builders. I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. And, humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing, about a third of the way down the list. It was not too proud a showing for the crown of creation....

Essential Habits Sleep enough Exercise regularly Generally eat healthy foods Keep your weight down Avoid burnout Connect socially with other people Sufficient sleep You should wake up feeling fresh. Your body and mind require a good night’s sleep. If you deprive yourself sufficient sleep, you will suffer for it in both the short and long term: Why Do We Need Sleep?. Many of us aren’t getting enough sleep: 1 in 3 adults don’t get enough sleep (US Centers for Disease Control)...

Data obsolescence vs. laziness Years ago, I had a blog I enjoyed posting to. One day, something made the software I used to power my blog annoyingly hard to use. Most likely, something changed that required me to upgrade or update something else and I was too lazy to do so. The longer I waited to make the change, the harder the change became, and I just never bothered. Besides, my original posts still showed up....

When scientists are baffled by facts that contradict their strongest theories, science is likely on the cusp of new insights. That’s why I was saddened when scientists discovered the Higgs boson – or “god particle.” It meant CERN’s $20 quadrillion (or whatever) Large Hadron Collider did not uncover new facts that would force physicists to re-think their theories and provide clues how they might bend those theories closer to reality. It merely provided greater support for what physicists already believed....

Studying Latin in high school, I was perplexed by the phrase festina lente (“hurry up slowly”). On its face, it’s an oxymoron, but it became an aphorism – and has stuck in my head for a quarter century – because it expresses a profound truth. We should aspire to achieve our goals quickly but without moving so fast that we trip ourselves or drift off in the wrong direction. We must regularly adjust our course and run slowly enough that we don’t run off a cliff or twist an ankle stepping in a rabbit hole....

The founder of Atari has interesting thoughts on how to improve education and prepare students for the future: Nolan Bushnell once almost destroyed his family’s garage. As a youngster in Utah, he went tooling around with a liquid-fuel rocket on a roller skate and things went awry. He (and the garage) survived, and Bushnell went on to be a lifelong innovator — from Pong to Chuck E. Cheese’s…. “If you look at [Steve] Jobs and [Steve] Wozniak, they were makers,” Bushnell said in a phone interview with Wired....

I’m awed by the heroism of “the Fukushima fifty” – the brave men (and women?) working to prevent nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima Dai-Ichi. Their efforts may well prove too little, too late, but that’s no fault of the heroes who fought on, despite the high probability that doing so would kill them: “Five are believed to have already died and 15 are injured while others have said they know the radiation will kill them....