Maybe he has a large family?

The article I linked to yesterday about the potential AI bubble focused on Larry Ellison, founder and CEO of Oracle, who has invested much of his personal fortune and borrowed heavily in order to compete in the AI race. The opening sentence had a parenthetical remark that got my attention, which was was “Larry Ellison woke up in his 33-bedroom, 34-bathroom oceanfront mansion in Florida.” This is part of what has become known as real estate porn, where we are invited to vicariously experience how the rich and famous live. It is of course no secret that these people compete with each other for status symbols that display their wealth in the form of such mansions, luxury yachts, private jets, and even private islands.

But I began to wonder as to whether anyone would ever need so many bedrooms and bathrooms, other than to boast about them. The answer probably is that no one needs them, they just serve as wealth markers. But who stays in them on a regular basis? Are they mostly empty?

This got me thinking about the massive castles of Europe that likely serve as the inspiration for these modern day monstrosities, one of the most iconic being Buckingham Palace in London. It has 19 State Rooms, 52 Royal and guest bedrooms, 188 Staff bedrooms, 92 Offices, and 78 Bathrooms.
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The shaky business model behind AI

The New York Times Magazine has a very long article that asks the question, being posed in many quarters, as to whether we are in an AI bubble. The argument that we are hinges on the massive amounts of money that is being spent on data centers and computers estimated by Cory Doctorow to be currently running at about $1.4 trillion while the AI companies are getting revenues of only about $50 billion from subscriptions to their services. So where is the rest of the money coming from? From borrowing, as rich investors pour money into these AI companies in the belief that they will grow rapidly and be profitable at some point. This belief drives up the stock prices. As Doctorow says:

I’m pretty baffled that there’s people who say it’s not a bubble. Let’s just run the numbers again. Trillion dollars in expenditure this year, over $1.4 trillion total, $50 billion revenue. Seven companies, the magnificent seven that are 35% of the S&P 500. Six of them lose money on AI, and the seventh one makes money from the other six. [The ‘other six’ are Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, and Anthropic and the seventh is the chip maker Nvidia – MS]
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That’s Nvidia, yes. They’re all passing around the same hundred-billion-dollar IOU really fast and pretending it’s in all of their bank accounts at once. The assets depreciate really quickly. They amortize those data centers and the GPUs in them over five years. They actually replace them every two to three years. The replacements, pretty intense.
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GPUs, data centers, and the AI that runs on them, right? They’re saying that these things are going to last them about five years. The reason that matters is if you spend $1 trillion on stuff that’s only going to last five years, then in five years, you’re going to need another $1 trillion if you want to stay in business at least. Nvidia is actually doing some pretty amazing things with new generations of chips every year.

One of the ways they’re getting such performance out of these chips every year is they’re throwing away one of the principles that normally constrains new technology manufacturers, which is backwards compatibility. These new chips, they have really different heat dissipation, networking, power consumption, and often you can’t put them in the same building. You need to basically tear the data center down to the foundation’s lab and build another one for the next generation of chips.
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These are not durable assets in this model. A third of the stock market, their assets depreciating every three years. They’re spending $1 trillion a year. They’re making $50 billion a year.

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A fight that both people should lose

I cannot see how any event that calls upon participants to beat each other to a pulp can be called a sport and so am baffled that anyone would want to watch such things as boxing or kickboxing, or other mixed martial arts (MMA), which seem to have even fewer protections against injury than boxing. In the past we did have other dangerous contests such as duels but were able to ban them presumably because they had no redeeming value. But boxing and MMA do require some level of athletic prowess and thus seem to escape opprobrium. As long as the people in involved in MMA are consenting adults with full knowledge of the possible dangers involved, there seems to be little to be done other than look away

These things are bad enough when the combatants are ordinary people but what is one to make of a recent kickboxing event between two people like these?
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The real cost of the Iran war

We are now back to the US randomly bombing Iran again, even hitting a wedding, and Iran retaliating.

Iranian media said that the wedding ceremony was being held in a home in the city of Kuhestak, Hormozgan province, late on Tuesday when a US missile struck, with shrapnel and debris from the strike killing and injuring people.

Among the dead was a four-year-old child, Amir-Ali Karimi, and a 16-year-old, Mohammad Mollahi.
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A video of the aftermath shows colourful wedding streamers and decorations strewn across the ground, and shoes abandoned in the rush to escape the attack.

“You wicked people have attacked people’s homes and turned their wedding ceremony into a funeral,” said a man filming the aftermath of the strike, shared by Fars news agency.
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Iran responded by launching drones and missiles on US bases across the Middle East, including in Bahrain, Kuwait and the UAE. Iran’s military spokesperson, Lt Col Ebrahim Zolfaghari, vowed “heavier, broader, and more crushing and devestating” retaliation.
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In February, a strike on an elementary school killed at least 156 people, including more than 120 schoolchildren. Independent investigations concluded that the US likely carried out the strike with the assistance of AI, though the US government said the incident remained under investigation.

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The Facebook/Meta settlement

In a recent post, I discussed the book An Ugly Truth that looked at how Facebook/Meta valued engagement on the site as the most important goal because its profits depended upon having more and more users and having them spend more more and more time on the site. Racist, misogynistic, homophobic and other hateful posts had the effect of creating more engagement and so the company was reluctant to crack down on on them, doing so only when their was a massive public outcry.

Now Facebook/Meta has settled a lawsuit brought by various states alleging that, among other things, the company was cavalier with the harm done to young children.

Last Wednesday, Meta reached a settlement with the attorneys general of forty-seven states, who had sued it for illegally manipulating the attention of children. The settlement will cost the company, which didn’t acknowledge wrongdoing, up to seventeen billion dollars, a striking figure. Even more striking is a detail reported by the Wall Street Journal: during the second quarter of 2026 alone, Meta spent more than two billion dollars on its legal defense.

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Using the mantle of science to advance reactionary views

At the dawn of what is now called the New Atheist movement, I proudly called myself one, seeing myself as an ally in the fight against religious obscurantism. I now feel embarrassed by being identified with that label and distance myself from it. This is not because of what the label itself might signify. Labels (and language) are malleable and transitory and the meaning that I ascribed to it, that it meant that I believed that at a fundamental level, science was incompatible with anything at all supernatural which, inter alia, means that there are no gods of any kind, is something I still believe.

The problem is that New Atheists are now identified not by any definition but by a group of people who wrapped themselves with that label in the early days and thus is now associated with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, along with those who later chose to be aligned with them. Three of them (Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens) have been revealed to have deplorable political and social views unconnected to the ones that attracted me. I now feel that the New Atheist label cannot be reclaimed from those associations and so feel compelled to abandon it in order to avoid being grouped in with them and their views.

Dennett and Hitchens have since died but others have joined with Dawkins and Harris to become part of the culture wars, moving away from dealing just with science and religion and going on to attack postmodernism and so-called ‘woke’ ideologies that they attack in the name of science. In the process, they have started to espouse deeply reactionary views and seem to now be more at home with right wingers and even MAGA types, as can be seen by their vociferous opposition to what they consider to be censorship by the left and what they call ‘cancel culture’. Under the banner of defending free speech and science, they now defend those who have been condemned for their sexist, Islamophobic, racist, and transphobic views.
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‘Trump’s Folly’

So what has been happening to the Lincoln Pool?

What is clear is that repairs to fix the peeling paint liner are nowhere close to being completed. Trump may have tried to hide the disaster by erecting a fence around the pool to keep out observers but unfortunately for him, it turns out that there is a live cam feed from a camera atop the Washington Monument that is pointed directly at the pool so that anyone can see the status of the pool at any time. As you can see for yourself, as of today it is still empty of water and looks like a mess, with a gash in the paint lining running right down the middle for the length of the pool.

Meanwhile the administration is still pathetically clinging to the fiction that vandals are behind the problems.

Work to correct the cracking and flaking liner at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is underway, weeks after the government dropped charges against people accused of vandalizing the pool, citing instead the “botched” renovation efforts.
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Workers could be seen power washing the pool’s basin and using caulk applicators on the perimeter expansion joint. Some workers ripped up large sheets of damaged liner, and used leaf blowers and brooms to sweep up smaller pieces of liner debris.

Asked about the work, the Interior Department referred The Washington Post to new signage posted at the east end of the pool. Those signs said that the National Park Service and contractors are “repairing areas damaged by vandals and completing a historic effort to clean, fix, and beautify the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Memorial Pool.”

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Can Canada actually join the EU?

In response to my post wondering why Trump hates Canada and suggesting that that country may look elsewhere to trade and even join the EU or BRICS, there were some very informative comments about other options to those extreme steps. As result, I decided to look into this topic more closely and discovered that other serious commentators have explored various options

The short answer is that while it is theoretically possible for Canada to join the EU, it is also unlikely since it would have to surmount major obstacles, a major one of which is the long land border with the US that would require more stringent customs checks. (Recall the thorny issues with the much shorter Ireland-Northern Ireland border after Brexit took the UK out of the customs union (that allowed free transport of goods over national borders) while Ireland stayed in.)

Back in January 2025, just after Trump took office, an editorial from The Economist made the case for why Canada should join the EU, citing Trump’s openly expressed contempt for Canadian sovereignty and its then-prime minister Justin Trudeau. It argued that both Canada and the EU had much to gain from such a union, and that Trump’s recent jingoism and threats of tariffs have only made the case stronger.
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RFK Jr’s anti-vaccine crusade may have led to the deaths of 83 Samoans

RFK Jr has been a long-time vaccine skeptic. When he was up for his senate confirmation hearings for the post of secretary of health and human services, he downplayed that. But there was an incident in 2019 when he went to Samoa to spread his vaccine denial and afterwards there was a deadly outbreak of measles there. He had been chair and chief legal counsel of Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit group known for its anti-vaccine activism. In July 2018, two children died in Samoa even though they had been vaccinated and Kennedy and CHD exploited that tragedy to cast doubt on vaccines. It later turned out that the fault was not the MMR vaccine itself but that it had been improperly prepared and thus contaminated and two nurses were criminally charged and pleaded guilty to manslaughter.

When questioned about that during his senate conformation hearings, he said that his visit to Samoa had nothing to do with vaccines. But now a letter, obtained through lawsuit filed against the State Department by the AP and the Guardian with the aid of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, has surfaced that shows that the visit was all about vaccines.
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Why does Trump hate Canada?

Trying to find meaning in Trump’s actions is often futile since he seems to be driven by irrational impulses. But his antagonism towards Canada is particularly bizarre given that Canada is a neighbor with which the US shares a longer border and the two nations have been allies for so long, sharing so many cultural features that people can easily move back and forth across the border and unless one is very sensitive to linguistic nuances, one cannot tell if one is speaking to an American or Canadian.

And yet Trump seems particularly angry at that nation, periodically blowing up and the latest display came about when trade talks between the two nations ended abruptly. This article describes how the long-running trade talks between the two countries went from showing progress to suddenly collapsing late last Friday night.

A month of intense talks to stave off new U.S. tariffs on Canada and soften the ones previously imposed by the Trump administration had been yielding steady progress. But they collapsed suddenly, setting in motion an all-out trade war between the two nations.

The sticking points were many. In the last few hours, negotiators clashed over Canadian rules promoting French-language movies and shows online, as well as the Trump administration’s demands to dictate Canada’s steel tariffs on other countries. Canada, in turn, insisted on more generous treatment for its autos, electric vehicles and products made with metal — and ultimately backed away from its offer to cooperate on the Keystone XL pipeline that President Trump has long desired, people familiar with the negotiations said.

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