The first three chapters of my latest book are on the Amazon webpage. (Click on the ‘Look inside’ link.) The publisher’s webpage is here and you can also buy it from any major retailer. (Note: This will be the new top post for a while. Later posts are below.)
In an earlier post, I wrote about how I enjoyed sleeping. But clearly I am a mere piker in this regard. This article about a Hollywood director convicted of scamming Netflix out of $11 million shows that he must love sleeping much more than me.
Then came the lavish purchases, prosecutors said, with Rinsch buying five Rolls-Royces and one Ferrari, along with $652,000 on watches and clothes. He also bought two mattresses for about $638,000 and spent another $295,000 on luxury bedding and linens. In addition, he used some of the money to pay off about $1.8m in credit card bills, prosecutors said.
What? Two mattresses for $638,000? How can that be possible?
Rich people can be so strange. The fact that his purchase of five Rolls Royces was not the most ridiculous thing about him says something about the level of weirdness on display.
Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani upset the political establishment by winning the mayoralty of New York City but now comes along another upset, this time in the city of Miami in deep-red Florida.
Miami’s new mayor, Eileen Higgins, hailed it as “a new day” for the city after the Democrat ended three decades of Republican rule on Tuesday night in a stunning election triumph.
In reality, the result is more of a seismic shifting of sands given the magnitude of her victory over the Donald Trump-backed Republican candidate, Emilio González, in the most populous city in Miami-Dade county, which the president won in 2024 by 12%.
Higgins won the run-off with almost 60% of the vote, according to preliminary results reported Wednesday by the Miami Herald. More than just further evidence of a growing national backlash against Trump’s policies on the national stage, particularly immigration, her win has reset Miami’s political landscape in a manner not seen in some ways in 28 years, and in others not at all.
Higgins is the first woman to hold the office; the first Democrat to win it in 28 years; and the first non-Hispanic candidate since the 1990s. As if to bookend neatly the passing back of the Republican torch, the outgoing incumbent, Francis Suarez, is the son of the most recent Democratic Miami mayor, Xavier Suarez, who was elected in 1997.
…The swing back towards Democrats was notable given that Hispanic voters contributed to the red wave that last year saw Trump become the first Republican presidential candidate to win Miami-Dade county since 1988.
Commenter Dunc pointed me to a long but fascinating article by Edward Zitron titled The Era Of The Business Idiot where he brutally analyzes how US businesses seem to have been taken over by owners and a managerial class that he calls Business Idiots who have become alienated from the actual manufacturing process of whatever their company produces, and make decisions that tend to work against actual productivity and quality in favor of things that advance their own careers and income. (The thrust of the article is similar to Cory Doctorow’s evisceration of the internet that he calls enshittification and the extension of that idea more broadly to American power.)
The Business Idiot thrives on alienation — on distancing themselves from the customer and the thing they consume, and in many ways from society itself. Mark Zuckerberg wants us to have fake friends, Sam Altman wants us to have fake colleagues, and an increasingly loud group of executives salivate at the idea of replacing us with a fake version of us that will make a shittier version of what we make for a customer that said executive doesn’t fucking care about.
They’re building products for other people that don’t interact with the real world. We are no longer their customers, and so, we’re worth even less than before — which, as is the case in a world dominated by shareholder supremacy, not all that much.
They do not exist to make us better — the Business Idiot doesn’t really care about the real world, or what you do, or who you are, or anything other than your contribution to their power and wealth. This is why so many squealing little middle managers look up to the Musks and Altmans of the world, because they see in them the same kind of specious corporate authoritarian, someone above work, and thinking, and knowledge.
The fossil fuel industry likes to make out that it is a pipe dream to think that we can completely replace fossil fuels with alternative sustainable sources. But the example of Uruguay shows that it is not only possible but the transformation can be done in as short a time as five years.
By the early 2010s, Uruguay’s government realized that continuing to rely on imported fossil fuels was economically unsustainable. Méndez Galain, then a particle physicist with no formal experience in the energy sector, proposed a bold plan: to build a system that relied almost entirely on domestic renewable resources—wind, solar, and biomass—and do it in a way that was cheaper than fossil fuels.
The results speak for themselves. Today, Uruguay produces nearly 99% of its electricity from renewable sources, with only a small fraction—roughly 1%–3%—coming from flexible thermal plants, such as those powered by natural gas. They are used only when hydroelectric power cannot fully cover periods when wind and solar energy are low. The energy mix is diverse: while hydropower accounts for 45%, wind can contribute up to 35% of total electricity, and biomass—once considered a waste problem—now makes up 15%. Solar fills the gaps.
[Read more…]
Trump is using the power of presidential pardons not as they were intended to be used, to correct perceived miscarriages of justice or to reduce excessive sentences out of clemency, but as a reward for friends and those who serve his interests. To be sure, other presidents have also done this but Trump’s pardons blatantly violate norms, as he does in so many areas. The most egregious was the blanket pardoning of all his supporters involved in the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol following his loss in the 2020 election.
Another such pardon is that of Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former president of Honduras, who had been convicted in the US less than two years ago for involvement in a massive drug trafficking operation that moved tons of cocaine to the US. He had been sentenced to 45 years in prison.
In that case, prosecutors maintained that Hernández accepted $1m from former Mexican cartel kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán in 2013 while successfully running for his first Honduran presidential term. They also said that Hernández’s government set up Honduras to serve as a pivotal waypoint – or “superhighway” – of cocaine coming from South American nations including Colombia and Venezuela.
Hernández was extradited to the US to face the drug and related weapons charges in April 2022, roughly three months after finishing his second presidential term. A jury convicted him on 8 March 2024 after a three-week trial.
By now, I have become familiar with the signs that something that I receive via the phone or text or email is a scam but once in a while something new comes along that gets past my first layer of skepticism and gets me to go deeper.
This happened when I received an email that said that I had been nominated for an education award that would be presented at one of a series of conferences that are held twice a year. I looked into it and it seemed legitimate. The locations of the conferences were impressive, consisting of luxury hotels such as the Bellagio Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, the Intercontinental Hotel in Dubai, and the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore. The website for the organization Education 2.0 Conference that was behind these events was flashy. That was, however, a red flag that something was not quite right. Education academics (like me) are a stodgy lot and their conference websites reflect that ethos. They have static pages that feature the key speakers and topics and conference agenda. This website, however, had dynamic wallpaper showing floor shows and cabarets and the like. But it looked like these conferences had actually been held.
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The stories of brutality and violations of people rights by the thugs that now make up the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) forces keep appearing daily. It is now apparently the case that those groups are attractive to violence-prone individuals who relish the chance to throw their weight around while wearing masks and assault anyone they dislike knowing that what normally would have landed them in prison is now fully protected by the Thug-in-Chief in the White House and his minions who occupy most of the high levels of government, including the attorney general Pam Bondi
But even through this dense mass of what would be criminal behavior if done by anyone else, some news stories still stick out, like this one where an attack dog was used to deliberately injure someone.
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One of the messages of doom that were widely broadcast about what might happen should Zohran Mamdani win the mayoral election in New York City was that wealthy people might leave the city in droves because of the higher taxes he was promising to levy on them in order to fund some of the social programs that would benefit ordinary people. Such scare tactics to keep the wealthy happy are not uncommon. Some might view the departure of these people as not a bad thing, since wealthy people who begrudge paying more in taxes (which they can well afford) to benefit others are pests whom we would be better off without. Cristobal Young, a sociologist at Cornell University, and others have looked into this claim and find that this threat to move lacks evidence in support.
I research whether high earners actually move when their taxes go up. My colleagues and I have analyzed millionaire taxes in New Jersey and California, the migration of Forbes billionaires globally and decades of IRS data tracing where Americans with million-dollar incomes live.
Top earners are often thought of as “mobile millionaires” who are ever searching for lower-tax places to live. In reality, they’re often reluctant to leave the places where they built their careers and raised their families.
…The first fact is simple: Millionaires have low migration rates.
Mobility in America is highest among people who are still searching for their economic place in life. Workers who earn the lowest wages move across state lines at relatively high rates, about 4.5% per year, often in search of more affordable housing. People making $1 million-plus a year move only half as often: Just 2.4% of them pack up each year.
When millionaires do move, it rarely appears to be for tax reasons.
…Overall, only about 15% of millionaires who move end up with a lower tax bill. That shows the rich are willing and able to move for tax reasons. But because only about 2.4% of millionaires move each year – and only a fraction of those moves reduce their taxes – overall tax migration ends up being a small fraction of a small fraction. Not never, but not often.
Among my friends, many of them complain of problems with sleep, either falling asleep or getting up after sleeping for a short while and then being stubbornly awake for long periods. Given that we are repeatedly told that people need to get about eight hours sleep a night and that lack of adequate sleep can lead to various adverse health issues, they worry about their lack of sleep and exchange the many different strategies that are out there to combat this problem. But these have various levels of success in that some techniques work for some and not for others, and the same technique that worked for a while may stop being effective. Older people and post-menopausal women seem to be more prone to lack of adequate sleep.
During these discussions, I remain quiet. This is because I have never had any problems with sleep and it seems insensitive to tell others this when they are clearly concerned about their problem. I have a regular night time routine and I usually fall asleep within a few minutes. Now that I am older I do get up about once a night but can go back to sleep fairly quickly, waking up at around 7:30 the next day. I then luxuriate in bed for about 30 minutes before getting up. I even usually take a nap during the day, which some sleep-deprived people are recommended to not do, and it does not affect my night time sleep. Neither does taking caffeine before bedtime. I also enjoy a brief liminal period after waking, where one drifts in and out of short periods of sleep.
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Carmel (also known as Carmel-by-the-Sea) is a very wealthy small city (area one square mile, population 3,200) near where live. It has many quirks due to its origins as an artistic enclave a long time ago, the most noteworthy being the ban on numbering houses on its streets, something I have written about, as well as banning high heels in certain parts of the city. Efforts to require street numbers brought out fierce opposition from long-time residents despite the many drawbacks of not having numbers. After years and years of heated debate, the city council finally passed an ordinance requiring numbering. That seems to have settled that issue, at least for now.
But now Carmel has adopted an ordinance banning the sport of pickleball (due to its noisy nature) in its only public park, making it a misdemeanor to do so.
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