Life Since the Baby Boom

What is a Political Hire?

Albert Cory — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 18:23:45 GMT

The Administrative State: words that motivate the second Trump Presidency. His administration aims to get rid of all those unelected bureaucrats who feel they’re permanent and don’t need to follow directions from any President, who after all is just temporary.

How these bureaucrats get chosen has evolved. A Civil Service exam was instituted in 1883, but isn’t used much anymore, except in some state and local governments. You’ll find the 1885 questions below highly amusing, and I’ll bet you’d fail most of them. Finally, I will suggest some interview questions now that the entire government is consumed with politics.

Sir Humphrey in this classic BBC series, Yes, Prime Minister, is the quintessential civil servant, explaining to the hapless Bernard why local governments cannot be given any power.

That’s the Administrative State’s attitude: we know what’s best for you. The ministers or governors or Presidents are merely elected and they’ll be gone soon, but we’ll still be here. This sounded fine when the Civil Service acts were first passed. These people supposedly were experts, not political hacks getting a job in exchange for supporting the party.

The Beginning of Civil Service

It seems only fair to mention that the Chinese got there first. Starting with the Sui and Yang dynasties (581 - 609 AD) applicants were tested on Confucian classics, poetry, law, and history, and wrote policy essays. The aim was to hire people based on merit, rather than wealth, politics, or family connections. This system had a profound influence on Britain, America, and other countries.

Prior to 1883, civil servants in the US were hired based on the political leadership’s preferences. George Washington tended to hire based on merit, but Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson began identifying the party that the applicant belonged to. Jackson, especially, was outspoken about “to the victor belongs the spoils,” which begot the term “the spoils system.” Jackson believed that if you got elected, you had the right to fire people from the other party and appoint your own supporters. It was more than that: they didn’t just get a job, they had to keep working for him. And they might even have to donate a portion of their salaries!

There were about 10,000 federal employees when Jackson took office. He ended up firing about 20% of them, concentrating on the higher-level, politically sensitive positions. Lower level postal clerks or customs officials were not usually removed.

No one disputes that the President gets to fire the cabinet secretaries and appoint his own. The issue comes when we go below the level of political decision-making. We’ll come back to this.

When President James Garfield was assassinated by a disappointed office seeker,

public pressure, which had been building for decades, culminated in the Pendleton Act of 1883, which created a civil service exam and mandated competitive hiring.

Before we get deeper into that, let’s take a look at a more recent example of a more complete spoils system: the Chicago Democratic Machine under Mayor Daley.

The Chicago Machine Worked, Sort Of

Starting in the 1970’s, the Machine was largely dismantled by a series of court decisions, but when I was growing up there, it was just assumed that if you had a job with the city, you were a precinct captain and your job included bringing in the Democratic votes. Michelle Obama’s father, Fraser Robinson, was one of those precinct captains in her affluent South Shore neighborhood.

I lived in a somewhat independent ward, and my Dad was a registered Republican, so our captain mostly left us alone. I do recall once that he knocked on our door, handed us a leaflet, said, “Democratic Party!” and left. He did his job, I guess.

There were thousands of these patronage jobs. No Republican stood a chance against this paid army. We all grew up thinking Daley’s first name was “Mayor.” Here he is in his most infamous role at the 1968 Democratic Convention, yelling anti-Semitic insults at Sen. Abraham Ribicoff:

Was the Machine a terrible system? Well, the streets got cleaned, the garbage was picked up, and if you needed a pothole fixed or a job for your son, you went to your ward committeeman, not the official city department. Recent immigrants from Poland or Italy or Lithuania had a path to the middle class. It was old-style, Third World politics.

On the other hand, white people were favored over blacks, which caused tensions that exploded into riots in the 60’s. The black neighborhoods were kept in line by compliant Machine politicians, and what were the citizens going to do, anyway — vote Republican?

It was also incredibly inefficient, deeply corrupt, and it bred cynicism about the government, which is never a good thing. Since city employees could be fired for not bringing in the votes, they had a built-in incentive to cheat (we used to say, “Vote early. Vote often”). For a while the best civic entertainment was watching the latest Machine politician get indicted, convicted, and sent to prison. Four Illinois governors of the last seven have gone to prison (Kerner, Walker, Ryan, and Blagojevich).

Now, the corruption is gone, sort of. You have to ask, though: is Chicago better off now? Lori Lightfoot

and Brandon Johnson are not exactly poster children for Effective Government.

Federal Civil Service Exam in 1885

The prevalent dogma since the Pendleton Act is that hiring is based on merit. But what did that mean, originally? The candidate with the most merit was the one with the highest score on the test.

In 1883, civil servants didn’t use computers, typewriters, or adding machines. Just for grins, here are a couple questions from the original test:

Could you do that, even with a calculator? I’d bet a lot of people would still get it wrong.

Given that the government wanted people who could add up numbers or do bookkeeping, this probably did weed out most of the less-intelligent population.

This is so much fun. The test-taker might also have to take down dictation and be able to spell. Here are a few examples:

I’m 100% certain that almost no recent Ivy League graduate could spell all those words correctly.

Federal Civil Service Hiring Practices Now

Standardized exams are no longer used for most federal jobs. Instead, USA Hire employs “competency tests”, where you can assert competence via a resume, or take the test if you don’t choose to. Here are some practice questions:

Logical Reasoning Sample Question

Rick has lost his way in the woods and is trying to find his way out. If he learns that the below statements are factual, which of the response options also must be true?

The village is closer than the highway.
The railroad is closer than the river.
The river is farther than the highway.
The lake is farther than the railroad.

The railroad is the closest marker.
The village is closer than the river.
The railroad is farther than the village.
The river and lake are equidistant.
The highway is farther than the lake.

Explained Answer:
Based on the initial facts, the river is farther than the highway, and the highway is farther than the village. The highway is the key piece of information that allows for comparison of the river and village. With this information, the statement that the river is farther than the village is the correct choice (option B).

SJT Sample Question

You and your co-worker have to categorize and organize the paperwork by the end of the week. You have completed your share of work. Tomorrow it is time to report your team’s progress to your supervisor. Your co-worker soon informs you that he will not be able to complete her share of work on time. Which of the following would you be most likely to do?

Inform your supervisor about the situation as is.
Ask your co-worker to complete his share of work on time no matter what.
Submit your complete share of work along with your co-worker’s incomplete share of work.
Finish your co-worker’s share of work yourself.
Ask your supervisor to extend your deadline.

Explained Answer:
There can usually be no right or wrong answers when it comes to situational judgment assessments. Some response options, however, may speak better of you as a job candidate than other response options. In this case, response option A demonstrates stronger work ethic than the remaining response options.

What if You Want to be an FBI Agent?

Here’s a sample question for that:

Example situation: “You are assigned as a manager to oversee a complex project that involves seven different teams. Three of these teams are on schedule to meet their set deadlines. The other four teams have fallen behind and are at risk of missing their assigned deadlines due to unforeseen staffing issues. For the project to be a success, all work must meet the set deadlines and stay on schedule.”

Question: “What action would you take to make the project a success?”

Multiple choice answers:

“Talk to each of the teams that have fallen behind their scheduled deadline and find out what I can do to help get them back on track.”
“Request overtime for the four teams that fell behind their deadlines.”
“Inform upper management of the situation and that unforeseen staffing issues are causing setbacks in my project.”
“Reassign the team leaders for the groups that have fallen behind to get the project back on track and meet future deadlines.”

For a mere $89 you can get the Practice Pack for the FBI Special Agent Entrance Exam.

Political Hires and “Career” Hires

It was entertaining to compare the civil service exam from 1885 to hiring practices now, but let’s get back to reality: what does it all mean?

A customs inspector or post office clerk in 1885 didn’t have much, if any, policy-making responsibility. He probably didn’t get a degree in that specialty. He wasn’t looking to accomplish anything as an inspector or clerk; he just wanted a secure paycheck and a pension. It made sense to test him solely on his abilities. In Daley’s Chicago, though, a similar job would come with political responsibilities.

Civil Rights Attorneys

Now, though: how about an attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice? He or she went through law school, and maybe wrote for the law review and clerked for some important justice. Why would they choose to work in Civil Rights when almost any legal job in the federal government is open to them?

The answer is that they hoped to accomplish certain things important to them, under their particular definition of “civil rights.” In a more honest system, we’d just call them political appointees.

The incoming Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Harmeet Dhillon, had her own definition of civil rights: combating antisemitism, anti-Christian bias, voter fraud allegations, and opposing certain DEI/transgender policies. Around 250 attorneys (roughly 70% of the division’s lawyers) had left or announced departures within four months of Dhillon taking office.

What does this say about patronage and civil service? I think it says that these 250 attorneys were actually political hires and not mere functionaries (like customs clerks) who can work for either party. They would now have to vigorously fight antisemitism and voter fraud under Dhillon, and they weren’t willing to.

Environment Protection Attorneys

The new EPA Administrator, Lee Zeldin, has implemented a massive change in how the EPA conducts its business. Climate and Greenhouse Gas Rules have mostly been eliminated. The Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights was eliminated. Vehicle emissions standards were eliminated.

More than 4,000 employees left between January 2025 and January 2026, which was over 20% of the work force. They had a median of 30.3 years of service.

By any standard, these were political hires. Andrew Jackson would have fired them the day he took office. If they really were committed to only working for climate change and environmental justice, they should be working for an advocacy group, not for a government which, by law, represents everyone.

Testing for Non-Partiality

It’s a matter of law that civil servants must be non-partisan. In fact, that was the animating principle of the 1883 Pendleton Act and subsequent laws. The idea that the executive branch is a permanent institution staffed by “experts” who maintain continuity across elections has no basis in our Constitutional system.

In some cases, civil servants really are non-political experts: geologists with the USGS, visa and passport specialists with the Department of State, patent examiners with the Patent and Trademark Office. There is no reason to impose any special rules about those jobs.

What’s the best way to test this?

Applicants now must answer questions like:

How would you handle a situation where your supervisor asked you to complete a task you disagreed with?
Tell me about a time when you had to implement a policy or decision you personally disagreed with.

Although USA Jobs tests are not public, some applicants have also reported questions related to willingness to follow leadership direction. This is becoming a hot issue. But:

A question where you know the “correct” answer is not going to be very effective. Who’s going to say, “I’d sabotage it” or “I’d slow-walk it” to the question about a policy they disagreed with? For “a time when you had to implement a policy or decision you disagreed with,” any crafty applicant will pick a trivial issue they didn’t actually care about, and which won’t get them into trouble with their friends.

The Steel Man Argument

Most people know what a “straw man” argument is: that’s when you summarize your opponent’s position in a deeply unfair and inaccurate way, and then proceed to knock down that straw man.

A steel man is the opposite of that: it’s when you present the best possible form of their argument, in a way that they themselves would agree with. Christopher Hitchens (RIP) was famous for debates when he would first state the other side’s best argument, to their satisfaction, then proceed to dismantle it.

The PARC Solution

Bob Taylor (RIP), the director of the Xerox PARC lab which created much of modern computing, had a lab full of brilliant and highly opinionated scientists. It could easily have degenerated into hostile, warring camps, similar to modern American politics. Instead, he divided disagreements into two classes:

A Class One disagreement is characterized by misunderstanding, straw man arguments, and talking past each other. Personal animosity arises. Neither side can fairly state the other’s position.
A Class Two disagreement involves each side being capable of stating the other side’s position to their satisfaction. It doesn’t mean they agree with it.

Taylor said to Michael Hiltzik, the author of the excellent Dealers of Lightning:

I divide every disagreement into two classes. Class One is when two people disagree and neither can explain to the other person’s satisfaction that other person’s point of view. A Class Two disagreement is when each can explain to the other’s satisfaction the other’s point of view… Class One is destructive… Class Two disagreements enable people to work together even when they disagree.

In the early 70’s, a strong disagreement broke out in the PARC community: should they build a personal computer? Many of the researchers thought it would be a distraction, and they didn’t know how to build hardware anyway. Bob Taylor favored building one, but didn’t impose his decision. Instead, he insisted that they be able to state his position in a way that he was happy with.

It took the team a lot of time, but eventually they understood his arguments well enough to restate them, and the result was the groundbreaking Alto, which was what sold Steve Jobs on the graphical user interface on his famous visit to PARC in 1979.

OK, Argue This From Both Sides

This is test if you’re applying for a politically sensitive position and claim to be non-partisan. The actual test would use some current issue.

All these cases would be in the context of an interview, where the applicant can’t merely recite some memorized arguments, but must engage in a back-and-forth with the interviewers.

ICE Raids

Do both of these:

Argue, e.g. that ICE raids are perfectly proper and legal, and that the law is the law.
Argue that ICE raids are excessive, illegal, and frequently terrorize innocent, law-abiding civilians.

Voter ID

Argue that voter ID disenfranchises the poor and minorities, and violates their rights to equal justice under the law. It is just a Republican plot to depress turnout.
Argue that every country in the world has voter ID cards, and they are an essential tool against vote fraud.

Climate change

Argue that human-caused climate change is an existential danger to humanity, and no sacrifice is too great to avoid extinction. Fossil fuels must be eliminated whatever the cost.
Argue that climate models are a joke, China and India will completely swamp whatever the West does, and “net zero” will impose economics costs far beyond whatever benefit it has.

Obviously the candidate must do both of these with a straight face, and will be judged by someone who agrees with the position they’re taking.

What if you can’t?

If this sounds simple, I’ve tried it at work, asking people to summarize a position they don’t agree with. They would start, but then break down and say, “But that’s wrong!”

This is normal behavior for a lot of people. It takes a special person to put aside their own opinions and actually understand what the other side is saying, rather than demonizing them.

What if you don’t have it in you? That’s fine; you can be a political appointee (assuming your side wants you). You should expect to serve only as long as your side holds power.

Out With The Instant Pot

Albert Cory — Thu, 21 May 2026 17:17:12 GMT

Instant Pots are trendy. Pressure cooking is undeniably useful in cutting a six-hour simmer to twenty minutes or less. So I got one two years ago, using it at most once a week. And now, it’s out in the garage, waiting for its trip to the landfill.

Here’s what I’m using instead, a dorm room-sized rice cooker, placed next to the Instant Pot for comparison:

Weights:

Instant Pot: 15.6 pounds
Rice cooker: 2 pounds

Prices:
Instant Pot: $160
Rice cooker: $32

The weight does matter because I don’t have counter space for the Instant Pot, so lifting it in and out of a cabinet is part of the drill. I also don’t have cabinet space for both.

There is a huge population of Internet fanboys for the Instant Pot, including, naturally, a Subreddit. We’ll get to that.

In all the time I’ve had it, I’ve used it as a pressure cooker maybe five times, and as a slow cooker twice. Every other time was to cook rice. And let me tell you, the “Rice” setting produces lousy, sticky rice (yes, I do wash the rice first to get the starch off).

Even AI tells you not to use the Rice setting. The received wisdom is to pressure cook it for four minutes, then let the steam decrease naturally rather than using the steam release valve.

So I tried that, with 1:1 water:rice ratio. Eventually I got the “food burn” message. AI said to increase the ratio to 1.25:1. Same result.

I tried a 2:1 ratio. There was a lot of steam, and then “food burn.” What I conclude is that the gasket is shot, and the steam is escaping instead of building up pressure. When all the water is boiled off, then you get the “burn” message. Two years and it’s junk.

Naturally, there’s a Reddit thread on this. Plenty of Redditors will tell you you’re doing it wrong.

You know what? Screw it. Life is too short. For those rare occasions when pressure cooking would be useful, there’s GrubHub.

Run for Whatever

Albert Cory — Mon, 04 May 2026 19:03:24 GMT

Stories like this are reliable time-fillers for local TV news: Run for Breast Cancer! Run for Leukemia! Run for ALS! Breathless (literally) interviews with participants who are thrilled to be helping cure a horrible disease.

Do you ever wonder where the money goes, or is it just for good feelz (and exercise)? I watched a TV news segment about a run for ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) like this one:

and looked up the 2024 IRS form 990 for ALS Network, the charity that runs these events. Every charitable organization is required for file a 990.

Summary

Here’s the relevant part of the first page:

So they took in $13,015,478, made grants of $1,535,124 (we’ll look at these next), had salaries & benefits of $6,068,623, and had “other expenses” of $4,364,982.

Grants

On page 43 of the 990, we see what grants they made:

ALS Association San Diego Chapter 198,164 ALS Association Greater Sacramento Chapter 216,336 ALS Association Orange County Chapter 173,934 Univ. of California, Irvine 100,000 Faculty LLUSM * 100,000 Univ. of California, Dep’t of Neurosciences 100,000 Univ. of California, Davis ALS Clinic 100,000 Cedars Sinai Medical Center 100,000 Forbes Norris ALS Center 100,000 Univ. of California, San Francisco 100,000 Keck Medical of USC, ALS Clinic 100,000

LLUSM = Loma Linda University School of Medicine

Two of the grants are unrestricted grants (not tied to ALS): Irvine and SF. The grants to other ALS chapters: who knows what they did with it? Some probably went to research; some to salaries. So let’s only subtract out the unrestricted grants, and we’re left with $1,188,434 for ALS research and treatment (At most. Some of the money to the local chapters is also going to overhead).

Doing the math: 1,188,434 / 13,015,478, or 0.0913. So, 9.1% of your donation to ALS Network, or your fee for running in one of these events, actually goes to ALS causes.

Salaries

The 990 also discloses the charity’s compensation of its top employees (page 50)

Fred B. Fisher 411,567 Sheri Strahl 375,803 Cheryl Fluk 260,910 Jon Asher Garfinkel 167,572 Audra Hindes 158,984 Paul Willet 153,219

Your Money

There is an event in Newbury Park, CA on May 16. Here’s the page to sign up: $105 to ride 25 or 40 miles, or $70 to hike. If you ride in this, you’ve donated $9.59 to ALS causes. Doing the math on their gross revenue of $13,015,478, you’ve also donated $12.33 to Mr. Fisher, Garfinkel, and Willet and Ms. Strahl, Fluk, and Hines.

On the other hand, you could donate $5 to each of their grantees, $55 in total, and they’d be getting more than ALS Network pays them. Then you could just ride 40 miles with your friends and family, and use the $50 you save to buy lunch.

Medical Judgment and Your Dog

Albert Cory — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 22:05:34 GMT

On Tuesday I was meeting my friend Jack, a photographer, at the dog park. He took this fabulous photo of me & Ivy:

The Foxtail Episode

Ivy inhaled a foxtail, and began sneezing violently. This went on for 20 minutes or so, but fortunately not when Jack was taking the photos. The sneezing went on with much lower frequency the rest of the day. She didn’t sneeze all night, or the next morning.

Everyone at the dog park said to take her to the vet immediately. My regular vet said they didn’t have anyone who could deal with it that day, and to take her to the emergency vet. Everyone said to go to the emergency vet, since the foxtail could migrate to her brain or her lungs!

Full stop. I didn’t, and made an appointment with her regular vet for the next day.

Cutting to the chase: the vet extracted this from her nasal passages (I put the nickel next to it for size comparison) and now she’s fine. I had a lengthy consultation with the vet before she started, and she said she didn’t have the fancy scope that would let her be really sure of finding the foxtail, but she had a smaller one that would cover the whole nasal passage. She’d look as well as she could, and block off Ivy’s airways so she didn’t inhale any fluid and flush things out, so hopefully that would do the job. It did (I put the nickel there to show the size):

How Aggressive to Be?

I think this uncovers a major driver of our (human) health costs. There are some very sophisticated, very expensive treatments that you can get nowadays, and it’s all too easy to say, “I want the best!” In the old days, the doctor would feel your shoulder and say, “Yep, it feels like the tendon’s torn.” Nowadays, they send you for an MRI to be sure. They’d be guilty of malpractice if they didn’t.

Emergency vets have all the latest equipment, and they’re not at all loathe to use it and to charge you for it. I have pet insurance (Trupanion), so the money isn’t really a dealbreaker. So why not go there, get the best, and be sure? If I hadn’t had previous experiences with those people, I probably would have.

The Modern Hospital Experience

I actually took my previous dog, Ernie, to this chain, VEG. They are, in fact, very nice, very caring, and were willing to go the extra mile to save him, with emergency surgery at 2:00 am. He didn’t make it, dying in pre-op.

I had a second puppy, Jake, who got leukemia at four months, and had to be put down. I spent a lot of time at MedVet:

And MedVet, too, were also extremely nice and extremely competent. So I can’t fault them either. Still, that’s two dogs who are no longer with me. I cannot forget that.

Still. You walk into the ER, and there are lots of other dogs and cats in various states of emergency with various diseases. And the staff doesn’t know you: you’re just another patient. It’s like walking into a human ER, one of the unfavorite experiences of almost everyone:

Iatrogenic Illness

An iatrogenic illness is one that is caused by your treatment. In other words, you went to the doctor or hospital, and came out with a disease you wouldn’t have had otherwise.

The most famous iatrogenic disease is Thalidomide. Doctors gave it to pregnant women for morning sickness in the 1950s and 60s, and it caused horrendous birth defects.

Another one is MRSA:

This poor lady went into the hospital with a broken shoulder, and came out with MRSA.

Another iatrogenic illness that bears mentioning is steroid-induced osteoporosis. They give you prednisone for a long time, you taper off it as you’re supposed to, and you get brittle bones as a result. And there’s contrast-induced nephropathy, where you get an iodine contrast dye for a CT scan, and it causes acute kidney injury.

So going to the hospital, or the ER, is not risk-free, no matter what they tell you. You think it’s “the best” and “the standard” and it ends up killing you.

What If?

As I said, I waited until the next day to bring Ivy to her regular vet, who did fix the problem. But in the meantime I agonized:

what if the foxtail does migrate into her lungs or brain in the meantime?
what if she seems fine and I do nothing, but in a few days I come home and she’s unmistakably real sick? Or worse.
why not go to the ER, and be sure?

I wrestled with this. Disregarding what everyone tells you is tough. I did come down on the side of waiting, and it did turn out OK, but you can’t justify a decision by the results. You have to look at what you knew at the time.

It seemed like everyone told me to take her in immediately. But I thought waiting would be the safest course, overall. I’d do that again. That’s the conclusion.

Treating the Smartphone Addiction

Albert Cory — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 01:18:47 GMT

You can’t walk down the street without realizing that smartphones are an addiction, the way cigarettes used to be.

The Internet buzzes with arguments about whether staring at your phone is “addiction,” and then “what is ‘addiction’ anyway?” followed by “what’s the harm?” and “I can do whatever I want with my own device!”

I’m not going to engage on those; not that they aren’t real questions worth a debate, but others have done it and are doing it. The question I’ll address here is, “What could we do about it?”

I do have some specialized knowledge on this sort of thing, having worked in Google Ads and especially with YouTube. Not enough to get me employed as an expert witness in any of these trials, unfortunately. Those guys get good money.

First, let’s get on solid legal ground here. We now have a jury verdict that social media is addictive, and furthermore, it’s designed to be. Let’s look at those “addictive” features. You can argue about them, but a jury’s decided.

What Did The Los Angeles Jury Find Addictive?

Infinite Scroll

Let’s say you get on Instagram and start scrolling. You go through everything your friends have posted in the last 24 hours. So are you done?

NO, of course you’re not done! You’ll get “Suggested for you” postings, which you never asked for. Those will go on forever, as well as posts from friends of your friends, hence “infinite scroll.” Plus, who knows? while you’re going past all those suggested videos, one of your friends might post something new! You can stay there forever. Meta wants you to.

Autoplay & Personalized Recommendations

I use YouTube Premium quite a bit. This is not the same as YouTube TV. You don’t get any cable stations; you just don’t get ads inserted in the middle of your videos.

This would be a good place to mention that I had some limited contact with YouTube during my time in Google Ads. I spent two days at their office in San Bruno. I can’t add much to the court record, except that I distinctly recall them talking about “the lean back experience” which meant that, when you come to the end of your video, you’d just lean back and watch more, rather than leaving YouTube. At first, videos were limited to seven minutes.

When you finish a 10-minute Charli XCX video, what happens? Why, you get another video that’s chosen specifically for you, a Charli XCX fan. And then another, and another. Forever. YouTube wants you to stay there forever.

An internal employee communication cited in the trial read “[The] goal is not viewership, it’s viewer addiction.”

Tobacco Addiction

Tobacco companies deliberately added chemicals to their cigarettes to enhance the delivery of nicotine, and to make the smoke less harsh on young throats, as outlined here:

Ammonia allows nicotine to cross the blood-brain barrier significantly faster, giving a more instant hit.
Bronchodilators expand the lungs’ airways.
Sugars, menthol, and other flavorings make the smoke more tolerable.

Slot Machine Addiction

If you’ve ever been to a Las Vegas casino, you’ve seen lines of people at the slots, compulsively feeding in money:

Since slots are a major profit center, you can be certain that casinos have studied this compulsion very closely. There are billions of dollars riding on keeping Grandma at her slot. She wins occasionally, but she never knows when that will be. She gets partial payouts, which don’t equal what she put in, but still give her the feeling that she’s winning. She gets many “near misses” where two of the three dials matched, and if she just got that third one, she’d hit the jackpot. Keep trying; you’re so close.

And the social media companies haven’t missed that connection. One internal communication at the trial read:

[Social media’s draw is] similar to gambling with ‘reward tolerance’ getting so high that people ‘can’t feel reward anymore’... It’s kind of scary.

Teen Influencers

In the real world before the Internet, you were likely to ask someone you respected to help you find a doctor, pick a new car, or even find a spouse. This is, or was, inherently personal. Perhaps it was a relative, friend, or trusted news anchor or celebrity.

In 2010 in Google Ads, I was the main inventor of a patent on this idea. I won’t say anything more about it here, since it could conceivably be involved in litigation someday.

At any rate, now we have Influencers, which to me is one of the most disgusting aspects of social media. According to a recent poll, over half of GenZ’ers have a desire to be an influencer. This, all by itself, is reason enough to ban social media for children. What an utterly worthless ambition to have.

An internal document from Instagram brought out at the trial included this:

(“Whitelist” is marketing jargon. They just mean they will notify the “ambassadors.”)

If you’re not outraged by now, the tech companies probably wish you’d been on the jury.

How to Break the Addiction

Tobacco addiction, to the extent that it has been broken, was broken by a combination of factors. The massive settlement funds that the tobacco companies had to pay was part of it, but there were relentless campaigns, largely won now, to outlaw smoking in any indoor venue. Social disapproval was constant and has only grown. So we shouldn’t expect any single weapon to win the war.

Note that the campaign to stop tobacco was not limited to children. Adults have largely stopped smoking, too. The same should be true for cellphone addiction. There are legal and moral arguments for controlling them for everyone, which I’ll cover at the end, but we’ll start with children.

Tort Verdicts

The verdict in Los Angeles is only the beginning. There will be many more of those lawsuits, and we can expect social media companies to try to reach a global settlement like the tobacco companies did. Since this a legal matter, you can expect that process to last years, or decades.

Age Restrictions

This seems to be where we’re stuck at the moment. Australia has outlawed social media for anyone under 16. The European Union is headed that way. Several US states have banned cellphone usage at all for children during school hours.

Do age restrictions work? The evidence is mixed, and there’s good reason to think they don’t. When Florida instituted age restrictions for porn, there was a 1,150% increase in searches for Virtual Private Networks, according to Business Insider. The Electronic Frontier Foundation opposes them in principle, on free speech and privacy grounds. Democratic Governors in Colorado and Wisconsin have vetoed age verification bills.

Senator Brian Schatz released a report claiming that 40% of all kids aged 8 to 12 still use social media regularly.

Let’s Get Creative

Unlike alcohol and tobacco, which are purely personal, social media cannot exist without the Internet. Also unlike smoking a cigarette or buying drinks at a bar: all social media interaction is logged, or it could be.

The Internet is its selling point but also its weak spot. Let’s exploit it. All these are just ideas and clearly there’d be a lot of debate about them.

Slowing It Down

A big reason people are staring at their phones is that something might happen and FOMO (fear of missing out) compels them to keep looking.

So what if we mandated that no user contribution on a social media site (broadly defined to include gambling and gaming sites) can become visible to other users for at least one hour? Or two? Or twenty-four? This is trivially easy for a web site to enforce.

Voila, problem solved! If your friend Liked your Instagram post or replied to it, it’ll be an hour before you know about it. If it’s a school day, then you won’t know until school is out. This has no effect on free speech; it just decelerates it.

“All-access Social media” can be offered only to adults without criminal records. Since I mentioned logging: the decision to grant “all access” would have to be logged, along with the reasons for granting it. Those logs can be subject to discovery or subpoena in litigation or law enforcement.

Does this lose a lot of ad revenue for the sites? Undoubtedly, but they can charge for an all-access pass. Maybe a lot; more than most kids can afford.

Infinite Scrolling and Screen Time

It wouldn’t accomplish much to outlaw infinite scrolling, one of their proven addictive features. They would just have a “more” button at the bottom, like many sites have anyway.

But many parents nowadays enforce screen-time limits on their kids. Why would we not make “allowd to use for more than an hour a day” also something that requires an all-access pass?

Identifying an All-Access User

A store that sells liquor or cigarettes and rigorously checks ID still does not keep records of whom it sells to, and a teenager walking around with a cigarette is probably not going to be stopped by a policeman. At worst, the store might be investigated.

However, granting all-access would be logged, as I outlined above. In addition, any social media site operating under an all-access pass would have to advertise its name and the fact that it IS all-access, but not the user’s name, what they’re saying, or other personally-identifying-information, in such a way that an authorized user (teacher, policeman) could see it remotely (meaning, not encrypted).

Thus, Principle Skinner could have a device that he could walk down the halls with, and maybe say to a kid, “Hey, you’re using TikTok with all-access! You’re not 18.”

The Libertarian Argument

“I have the right to do whatever I want with my cellphone! Stop with this nanny-state nonsense!” That’s the argument we’d hear. Let’s contrast that with four other arguments:

Using heroin, methamphetamine, or any other substance should be a matter of individual choice. The state has no right to interfere.
Super-sized, sugary soft drinks are a cause of obesity, which leads to all sorts of public health problems. They should be outlawed (as former New York Mayor Bloomberg proposed).
Making me wear a seat belt in the car is an infringement on my rights. If I want to die in a car crash, it’s my choice. Same with wearing a helmet while on a motorcycle .
Allowing people to denigrate COVID vaccines in the midst of a pandemic is dangerous. It is misinformation.

You can’t really agree with all of those statements. The first is a rejection of all paternalism, while the second is hard paternalism. The third isn’t even controversial anymore. The last has been proven wrong, IMHO.

All of these proposals have been rejected, politically. States and countries that have decriminalized hard drug use for adults have retreated from those positions, while Mayor Bloomberg’s super-sized soda ban attracted almost universal ridicule. Everyone uses a seat belt now. Different states and different countries will come down differently on these issues.

Nonetheless, I think the notion of cognitive liberty can help out here. Cognitive liberty means that you are free to think whatever you want. However, if a product uses dark patterns, like Ambassadors, infinite scroll, or personalized recommendations; slot machine techniques; or the ammonia in tobacco; then you are not free. Your conscious mind is being bypassed.

It’s this argument that I think is the strongest one for regulating social media for adults. However, the argument is much stronger for children, whose minds are still developing and who are more vulnerable to peer pressure. For that reason, we should start with children first. They deserve a childhood like this:

not this:

Treating the Smartphone Addiction

Albert Cory — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 16:09:08 GMT

You can’t walk down the street without realizing that smartphones are an addiction, the way cigarettes used to be.

I do have some specialized knowledge on this sort of thing, having worked in Google Ads and especially with YouTube. Not enough to get me employed as an expert witness in any of these trials, unfortunately. Those guys get good money.

What Did The Los Angeles Jury Find Addictive?

Infinite Scroll

Let’s say you get on Instagram and start scrolling. You go through everything your friends have posted in the last 24 hours. So are you done?

Autoplay & Personalized Recommendations

I use YouTube Premium quite a bit. This is not the same as YouTube TV. You don’t get any cable stations; you just don’t get ads inserted in the middle of your videos.

This would be a good place to mention that I had some limited contact with YouTube during my time in Google Ads. I spent two days at their office in San Bruno. I can’t add much to the court record, except that I distinctly recall them talking about “the lean back experience” which meant that, when you come to the end of your video, you’d just lean back and watch more, rather than leaving YouTube. At first, videos were limited to seven minutes.

An internal employee communication cited in the trial read “[The] goal is not viewership, it’s viewer addiction.”

Tobacco Addiction

Tobacco companies deliberately added chemicals to their cigarettes to enhance the delivery of nicotine, and to make the smoke less harsh on young throats, as outlined here:

Ammonia allows nicotine to cross the blood-brain barrier significantly faster, giving a more instant hit.
Bronchodilators expand the lungs’ airways.
Sugars, menthol, and other flavorings make the smoke more tolerable.

Slot Machine Addiction

If you’ve ever been to a Las Vegas casino, you’ve seen lines of people at the slots, compulsively feeding in money:

And the social media companies haven’t missed that connection. One internal communication at the trial read:

[Social media’s draw is] similar to gambling with ‘reward tolerance’ getting so high that people ‘can’t feel reward anymore’... It’s kind of scary.

Teen Influencers

In 2010 in Google Ads, I was the main inventor of a patent on this idea. I won’t say anything more about it here, since it could conceivably be involved in litigation someday.

An internal document from Instagram brought out at the trial included this:

(“Whitelist” is marketing jargon. They just mean they will notify the “ambassadors.”)

If you’re not outraged by now, the tech companies probably wish you’d been on the jury.

How to Break the Addiction

Tort Verdicts

Age Restrictions

Senator Brian Schatz released a report claiming that 40% of all kids aged 8 to 12 still use social media regularly.

Let’s Get Creative

The Internet is its selling point but also its weak spot. Let’s exploit it. All these are just ideas and clearly there’d be a lot of debate about them.

Slowing It Down

A big reason people are staring at their phones is that something might happen and FOMO (fear of missing out) compels them to keep looking.

Does this lose a lot of ad revenue for the sites? Undoubtedly, but they can charge for an all-access pass. Maybe a lot; more than most kids can afford.

Infinite Scrolling and Screen Time

It wouldn’t accomplish much to outlaw infinite scrolling, one of their proven addictive features. They would just have a “more” button at the bottom, like many sites have anyway.

But many parents nowadays enforce screen-time limits on their kids. Why would we not make “allowd to use for more than an hour a day” also something that requires an all-access pass?

Identifying an All-Access User

Thus, Principle Skinner could have a device that he could walk down the halls with, and maybe say to a kid, “Hey, you’re using TikTok with all-access! You’re not 18.”

The Libertarian Argument

“I have the right to do whatever I want with my cellphone! Stop with this nanny-state nonsense!” That’s the argument we’d hear. Let’s contrast that with four other arguments:

Using heroin, methamphetamine, or any other substance should be a matter of individual choice. The state has no right to interfere.
Super-sized, sugary soft drinks are a cause of obesity, which leads to all sorts of public health problems. They should be outlawed (as former New York Mayor Bloomberg proposed).
Making me wear a seat belt in the car is an infringement on my rights. If I want to die in a car crash, it’s my choice. Same with wearing a helmet while on a motorcycle .
Allowing people to denigrate COVID vaccines in the midst of a pandemic is dangerous. It is misinformation.

not this:

How to Teach Your Dog Tricks

Albert Cory — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:52:44 GMT

Everyone teaches their dog the same tricks: sit, stay, shake hands, spin, etc. I wanted to do something different, so I taught Ivy “put it away.” She puts a toy away in the basket. I bet you haven’t seen that one before. Here she is as a little pup:

You can find zillions of “how to train your dog” videos and books, so what’s different about this article? It isn’t about getting rid of objectionable dog behaviors, which is what most people mean by “training.” This is about bonding with your dog.

It’s about your underlying attitude. And the dog’s. This is not a list of steps you must follow.

Now I’m going to summarize it for you. “You” are the owner of the dog, not a professional trainer and not an animal behaviorist. You can always find those people and pay them if you want to, but then, why are you reading this?

I will sometimes say “he” here. I’ve noticed that, in popular imagination, cats are always female and dogs are always male, so even though Ivy is female, I might still use the masculine.

Love

Your dog loves you, and you love him. If either of these isn’t true, then stop right here.

You can see Ivy’s tail wagging as she’s doing this. She likes learning her tricks and doing them for me. Your training time with the dog should be fun for both of you. If you hate it, then don’t do it.

I once knew a Korean guy who had a Shiba Inu named “Lucky.” Shibas are notorious for being the most cat-like of dog breeds. He once said, “Ernie (my dog then) loves you. After eleven years, I’m still not sure Lucky loves me.” Lucky would not be a good candidate for this method.

Motivation

You have to have something the dog wants. For a lot of dogs, it’s food, especially Labradors like Ivy. I’ve heard that some police and military trainers use brief playtime with their dog’s favorite toy. Regardless, without a motivator, you have nothing.

Fun

You have to realize that the dog doesn’t know the trick yet, and he’s not sure that what you’re doing to him is really going to be fun. Yes, he does want that treat, but he might just get frustrated if you get annoyed. And his attention span is pretty short.

So you show him the trick, or part of it (we’ll get to that), and if he doesn’t get it immediately, don’t be impatient. This is a process. You’re going to keep at it, a little each day. An hour’s training is not fun for a dog. For a professional trainer, that might be what they have to do, but you don’t. You have the dog all the time.

Animals like to work with their humans. They like to show off what they’ve learned. It’s not “work” for them. So be happy and show him you’re happy with him.

Repetition

I said “a little each day.” I worked on “put it away” with Ivy about five minutes every morning, for a few weeks. Neither of us were getting annoyed with the other.

Word or Gesture

Your dog doesn’t understand English. He knows the sounds of words, your tone of voice, and he recognizes hand gestures. Some trainers use a clicker (I’ve never done that and I don’t care for it).

So pick one word, like “sit” or “down” or “away” (in this case) and always use it. If you have a hand gesture, like twirling your hand for “spin around,” then always do that. Using a word and a hand gesture is good, too. Say that one word loudly and distinctly, not in a conversation tone of voice.

I’ll see dog owners who don’t seem to grasp this. Once at the dog park, one dog was being piled on by two other dogs. One of the owners yelled, “Hey. No two-on-one!”

Step by Step

There are some tricks that are more than just one action for the dog to learn. For “put it away” there was:

Hold the ball in your mouth
Drop it
Drop it IN the basket

For the longest time, she’d just drop it on the floor and wag her tail. This was not a “mistake,” this was “OK, that’s a start.”

I would pick it up and put it in the basket, saying “away.” Then give her the treat. Finally, one magical day, she picked it up off the floor and put it in the basket. You just never know when the dog’s mind is going to click.

So don’t insist he do it all at once. If he does anything close to what you want, work with that. Don’t say “no.” Keep refining it.

The "Bullet Train" - Where Does the Money Go?

Albert Cory — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 18:33:14 GMT

This is the text of a tweet, which I’ve copied here in case not everyone can see it. I’ve doublechecked that there’s no personal information.

There are facts here that I’ve never thought about and never seen in any Internet article, but they ring true. Especially about evicting the tenants, and maintaining the properties while that’s going on, at union wages. The flippant answer is, “It’s all fraud, and furthermore, it’s Newsom’s fault.”

The reality is much less worthy of clickbait. If the LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and San Jose Mercury-News were doing their jobs, you’d already know all this.

===========

Since my account is somewhat anonymous I’m going to disclose where some of the California high-speed rail money gets wasted.

99% of you don’t realize where giant chunks of the money is disappearing to.

The California high-speed rail authority, literally owns thousands of parcels of land that are in various stages continued litigation, tenant improvements, eviction, and constant maintenance.

For example, there are many homes and apartment complexes in the plant path that have been purchased years ahead of construction. Removing those tenants is a slow and expensive process. (let’s ignore the extra stress on housing that all of these destroyed properties are causing)

In some cases, these are low rent apartments with a lengthy eviction process
During that process, the state of California is the landlord and has to maintain the property codes the same as any other landlord. This means repairs, adding smoke detectors, fixing roofs, vegetation management, landscaping, paying off tenants to leave early, boarding up Windows, constant trash cleanups, towing vehicles etc.

But the High Speed Rail Authority doesn’t just have to maintain these properties at normal cost. Every single bit of that work has to be done at California prevailing wage rates. The work can only be done through qualified contractors that have passed through a long series of idiotic mazes to qualify to perform the work.

An average rate per hour (charge rate) for a worker to perform any service on these properties is approximately $200 an hour for labor only. The cost go up for specialized work, like electricians, plumbers, or machine operators.

Properties that are literally worthless are being maintained at huge expense just so the next round of homeless transients can break into the property and cause more damage. For reasons I can’t explain, the process to finally demo and remove the structures takes years.

I’m only mentioning the tip of the iceberg regarding my firsthand knowledge.

Completely separate from those outlandish costs are the inflation caused by the construction. The prevailing word on the street is that nothing is getting done.
The truth is that a lot is getting done and none of it efficiently.

The amount of concrete being poured daily and monthly to build gigantic overpasses for both the rail and roadways is not understood. In these work areas, every concrete mixing company is fully scheduled out and cannot offer building materials for other basic services such as building a house often times for weeks when the average lead time for many of these services used to be one day. And that’s just the schedule, never mind the huge cost increases from straining the supply chain and Labor pool.

The amount of concrete and steel that has gone into the structures so far is massive.

Dozens and dozens of new water wells have been dug just for dust control.
Thousands upon thousands of acres of highly productive tree fruits and nuts have been torn up and shredded.

Utility scale solar fields have been uprooted and sometimes relocated at extravagant costs.

Every type of business you can imagine has gone through either a closure, relocation, or a long-term tenant agreement with the rail authority. In some cases, it’s just a buyout where the business closes its doors forever. The owners get something all of the workers get nothing.

Don’t get me started on how thick the layers of bureaucracy are for these minute tasks that occur on all of these properties.

The inefficiency is far beyond your wildest dreams. In many cases, this is not related to fraud in any way it’s just absolute ignorance, red tape, and failed leadership.

I can go much deeper into specific examples, but I think that gives some of you an idea of what’s actually happening in California. If a rail is ever usable, some portions of the structures will be decades old and already in disrepair.

My Cousin Ron

Albert Cory — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 21:56:25 GMT

Ron Badowski was my cousin. He passed away this week, at the age of 82. I loved him and I’ll miss him forever. There are large sections of his life that I wasn’t in touch with him, so I won’t pretend this is a complete biography.

Here he is with his wife Jackie (who’s also left us) at our house in Chicago, in the mid-60’s, I’d guess. That’s probably the Sunday Chicago Tribune on the couch on his left.

Note the plastic covers on the couch! Yes, people really did that back then.

and here they are, much later, in Arizona with Uncle Larry:

My mom and Ron’s mom, Elizabeth, were sisters, from the Saldecki family. Here they are as children:

Mom’s in the chair and Liz is on her right. Uncle Larry is in front on her left (he’s the guy in the suit with Ron & Jackie above). Since Mom was the youngest, everyone called her Babe, and that name stuck with her for her entire life. I’ve met relatives who said they didn’t even know Aunt Babe’s real name was Martha.

Here’s the same five kids years later, after all of them had moved, one by one, to southern California. Mom and Dad were still only about a mile from Aunt Liz’s house.

Mom and Aunt Liz were very close. Our families lived only about a mile apart in Chicago, so I saw Ron all the time. I guess it’s not exaggerating to say I grew up with him. Aunt Liz (front, middle) was what her own mother called “high strung.” They didn’t have fancy psychiatric terms for that back then and I’m not going to make up one. Aunt Liz would spend, literally, days making Thanksgiving dinner and then not eat anything. Her furniture was covered in plastic, too.

Ron was planning to become a Catholic priest, and attended Quigley Prep for a few years, but he dropped out at some point (I’m not clear when or why) and went to college at night in Accountancy, while working at Tootsie Roll. He eventually got his degree and became a CPA.

He was always one of most pleasant people I’ve ever known. I remember my Mom saying about him, “Ron has such a pleasing personality!”

At the time, I heard that as, “Why can’t you be like that?”

Once in the 2010’s, Ron and I were going to a Cubs - White Sox spring training game near Phoenix, and he got into a lengthy conversation with a total stranger in the parking lot. That was his way.

Roller Skating

Ron became a competitive roller skater at the Swank Roller Rink around 111th and Western in Chicago:

and that’s where he met Jackie. The two of them were a competitive dance team.

Accordion

Ron also played the accordion, and quite well. When he was in his youth, he played in a polka band all over Chicago. Older people do tend to tell the same stories over and over again, and the one he always told was how, when he came home late from a gig and Jackie was asleep, he’d lay a bag of White Castle burgers on the pillow next to her, and the smell would wake her up.

Oddly enough, the week before he died, he was so deeply into dementia that he didn’t even recognize his own daughter half the time, and I remembered that story. I was musing about how smells trigger memories, and maybe we should bring him a bag of White Castle burgers (of course there aren’t any outlets in Tucson so they’d have to be the frozen ones heated up).

His band was a tight, long-lasting group, and he was so indispensable to it that the only way to quit was to move away! So that’s what he did.

Ron researched small towns that might need an accounting practice (I’m not sure if he restricted himself to Arizona or just wanted to escape Chicago winters), and found Wickenburg, AZ, a town of about 3,000 that’s 45 minutes northwest of Phoenix. It had one of the highest proportions of millionaires of any of the small towns he looked at, I guess. “Those rich people must need accountants!” he thought.

He bought a practice and moved his family to Wickenburg, where he joined every conceivable civic organization: the Rotary, the Kiwanis, the country club, … you name it. Eventually he built up the practice into a Wickenburg institution.

His daughter Michelle married another accountant, Dean White, and here’s one thing to remember about my whole extended family including Ron:

We’re cautious and we’re careful!

Ron thought he wanted to bring Dean into the business, but he had to check him out first. He gave Dean some tax returns to do, with the excuse that he needed some help to get everything done, and then he checked over Dean’s work. I guess it made the grade, because the business became “Badowski and White” (now closed).

Family

Ron and Jackie had three kids and ten grandkids. I thought I had a photo of everyone, but this one has all the grandkids, at least:

After my mom passed, I spent every Christmas with them for seven years, so I got to know them all. I guess you could call them my Family Of Choice, except they actually are family.

Politics

I mentioned that Ron was everywhere in Wickenburg, and so it came to pass that he became the Mayor. He quickly pissed off the “no government, no taxes, no growth, leave me alone” people who abound in small town Arizona, by trying to be pragmatic and get the town the funds it needed.

I wasn’t there, but the one issue I heard from him was the volunteer fire department. An all-volunteer department can work for a very small town, but when Wickenburg got to be 6,000 people, the department was handling a call almost every day, and it became time to hire full-time firefighters. He wanted to do this without raising anyone’s taxes or issuing bonds, which would be the normal politician thing to do. There was a country club just outside the boundaries of the city, and he came up with a plan to incorporate it into the city. Thus, all their sales tax revenue would flow to the city instead of the county or state, and Wickenburg’s finances would be healthy.

For some reason unknowable for a non-Wickenburg citizen like me, this plan encountered violent opposition, and Ron faced a recall election. I remember he was out in California and the returns were mostly in, with him winning, and I showed him how many precincts were still uncounted and how unlikely it was for all of them to vote against him. I was right and he survived. However, he was defeated for reelection.

While he was Mayor, the then-Governor, Janet Napolitano was on a tour of small Arizona towns, and her plane landed at Wickenburg’s tiny airport. Ron met her plane and played his accordion for her. The Governor was so taken with this that she and Ron became close colleagues, despite being from opposite parties. Ron and Jackie had her over for dinner, and Jackie said that the pork roast she served was extremely welcome for the Governor, since almost all political banquets serve chicken and she was sick to death of it.

Ron said he found the Governor and her office very helpful in getting State resources for Wickenburg. He endorsed her for reelection, a cross-party endorsement so unusual that it earned him a mention in the liberal blog The Daily Kos (which I unfortunately can’t find now).

Conclusion

I had 13 cousins, if I’m counting correctly, all on my mom’s side. Ron was the one that all of us would probably pick to be marooned on a desert island with. Or, to use another comparison, if I had to trust one of them with my life and my entire fortune, it would be Ron, no contest. I guess the good people of Wickenburg felt the same way, since they trusted him with their money.

Ron Badowski was always pleasant, always courteous, and always kind. All of his progeny can just remember, “Be like Grandpa Ron” and they’ll be OK. May his memory be a blessing forever.

Why I Don't Like Live Steely Dan

Albert Cory — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 16:49:42 GMT

I had more fun on this post than almost anything I’ve ever written. In another life, I’d be a sound engineer or a producer.

I love Steely Dan, and always have. I also usually prefer live recordings to studio efforts. But live Steely Dan? Not so much.

Last night I was watching one of the Dan’s 2000’s era live concerts on YouTube, and my ears got tired. I turned it off, but then I wondered:

Why don’t I like this stuff, whereas I do prefer live versions of the Allman Brothers, Little Feat, B. B. King, and lots of other artists to their studio efforts?

This turns out to be a deep question. The facile answer, “well, Steely Dan is just a studio group” does not suffice. Let’s think harder, and look at a couple bands that are not called “jam bands.” Often fans go to their concerts expecting to hear the hits more or less the way they’re accustomed to, although they’ll usually tolerate an extra long solo or two.

Note: I know that what we hear on YouTube is not what’s on the CD, not what you hear on Spotify with your AirPods, and not what the people in the hall heard. Multiple people have applied their mixing magic before it goes to your computer. We do what we can.

Primer on EQ

EQ, or equalization, has entire textbooks written about it, and I don’t pretend to be an expert, but here is a primer. And another one. When you see someone sitting at a soundboard in the back of a concert hall or church, running the equalizer is one of the things he or she is doing.

Electric Light Orchestra

Let’s consider Electric Light Orchestra’s Telephone Line at Wembley Stadium. ELO in the studio had a full layered sound, with orchestra and backing vocals, which at first glance would make them the classic studio band.

First the studio version:

Now the live version at Wembley Stadium:

I actually prefer the live version. ELO went to elaborate lengths to duplicate the studio sound in a big stadium, with strings and backup singers, but this is 40 years later, and it still beats the snot out of the studio version everyone knows.

Little Feat

The studio version of Oh, Atlanta:

The live version, from the same era (70’s):

The live version just has more life. The piano solos crackle, so do the guitar solos, and Lowell George’s vocal phrasing invites you in. It’s slightly longer (4:20 vs. 3:29) but this isn’t like Whipping Post (in which the Allmans jam for 20 minutes). No one’s ever called Little Feat a jam band, the way the Grateful Dead or Phish were.

We can’t chalk this difference up to 40 years of technological innovations, since they’re both from the same era. The live show is just great musicians who love the music, or at least giving a very good imitation of it.

But Now Steely Dan

The studio version of Kid Charlemagne that everyone knows:

and then the live version from 2006. That’s when I saw them, so this was probably the same show, and I came away from it vaguely dissatisfied.

Kid Charlemagne on the record was perfect already. It didn’t need horns. When I left the show in 2006, I felt like every song used every instrument, regardless of whether they added anything. It got tiresome.

The major thing that made my ears hurt, though, is that the sound just seemed too bright. Becker and Fagen were notorious for being studio perfectionists, and the studio version was perfectly balanced. 70’s sound equipment gave it a nice warm and rounded sound that is missing in a modern mix, especially with all those unnecessary horns.

I wondered if I could check my subjective feeling that it was “too bright,” so I ran both versions through Audacity and then had it plot the frequency spectrum (Analyze → Plot Spectrum). Here’s the studio version:

and now the live version:

Subjectively, they look almost the same. But let’s go deeper:

The Frequencies that “Hurt”

Watch the Dave Natale interview that I show at the end here. Dave and Rick refer to this range as the frequencies that hurt people. Dave almost zeroes them out on drums at a show.

If you look at the Live graph, the clusters between 3000Hz and 7000Hz appear slightly more “jagged.” Here’s the studio recording:

and here’s the live version:

There are more peaks in the live version, and remember that these graphs are averages, so the peaks represent brief intervals when those frequencies were louder. In the studio, those peaks are often limited, especially on analog tape.

If we look at professional advice for equalizing a snare drum:

Attack: This is the initial transient, the ‘snap’ or ‘crack’ of the snare. It generally lies in the higher frequency range (around 3kHz to 5kHz).

What about Donald Fagen’s voice, especially the sibilants? Gearspace has a number of opinions, one of which is:

Anywhere from 5k5 Hz to 10 kHz, and often worst around 6-8 kHz.

Sibilants are “sss” and “sh” sounds, which tend to stick out unless you equalize them out. Professionals doing EQ on singers watch for sibilants and lower them.

Even a 3dB to 5dB difference here can make a mix feel “harsh.” Maybe that’s what I felt.

In live recordings, the peaks are much sharper and more “pointy.” My ears, at least, perceive these sharp transients as “brightness” even if the average frequency distribution looks nearly identical to the studio version.

What do you see on stage? The first thing you notice watching the video is: Fagen and Becker have zero stage presence. In fact, Fagen probably has negative presence.

Neither does anyone else on stage do much to convey energy. The lead guitarist, Jon Herington, is an excellent player, but he might as well be standing in his living room. The horn players are also great, but they look like studio players doing a gig, which, in fact, is what they are. This isn’t a band like Little Feat; it’s a group of musicians doing what they’re told.

Also, Fagen sings the line, “On the hill the stuff was laced with kerosene” twice, but we can let that pass. People make mistakes in live performances.

But is This Unique to Steely Dan?

Maybe any modern live performance has these brightness issues. Is it just the arrangement that Steely Dan chose that I don’t like? After all, I did say I thought the horns were superfluous.

But let’s reconsider that ELO song Telephone Line. Maybe, just maybe, the live version is just as bright at Steely Dan’s, but I prefer it for other reasons? So let’s see. Here’s the spectrum for the original studio version:

and here’s the Wembley Stadium version, 40 years later:

If we isolate the 3,000-7,000 ranges, they’re almost the same.

These spectra are not quite the same overall, but I, at least, don’t perceive the live sound as harsh. The mix at Wembley is warm and lush: the full orchestra projects to fill the whole stadium. It’s intended to be epic.

Dave Natale

Who’s Dave Natale? He is a guy who’s done the live sound for five Super Bowls, as well as the Rolling Stones and almost every rock star around. He’s one of the most entertaining, down-to-earth interviews Rick ever did, and that’s saying something. Most of this interview is them geeking out about microphones and their placement, what things Dave and his crew do before setting up a show, and reverb. Only at the end do they get into equalization issues (below).

After the interview, Dave goes to the whiteboard and shows how he equalizes the drums. Note, especially, what he says about the frequencies that “hurt”: 2KHz, 2.5KHz 3.15KHz 4KHz. Rick refers to them as “the pain frequencies.” Maybe that’s what I didn’t like about the Steely Dan concert.

Conclusion

When you venture into an area where you’re not a recognized expert (or even if you are), someone out there is going to say you don’t know what you’re talking about. Okay. I can learn from that. Let’s hear what you have to say

Coda

Just for yucks, I did a spectrum analysis of a completely different genre: the 7th movement of Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem, the best piece of choral music ever written (some people would say it’s the Bach Mass in B Minor, but they’re wrong) and arguably one of the best pieces of music ever written.

Most classical concerts have very few microphones. The soloists might have individual mics, or they might not (there are no solos in the seventh movement). Being indoors, usually, there’s a ton of reverberation; so much so that in the chorus where I sang the Brahms Requiem, the conductor always had us replace quarter notes with a eighth note and an eighth rest, to let the reverberation die down.

It’s a great wash of sound, and it’s supposed to be.

Sopranos are under 1.5 KHz, the other vocal parts are lower, and the violin harmonics are 4.7 KHz or so, so this pretty well gives the upper limits of what you hear. The sounds around 10 KHz are probably just the very diminished higher harmonics.

When Reality Hits You Over the Head

Albert Cory — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 18:47:59 GMT

What’s an IYI?

“IYI” is a term coined by Nessim Nicholas Taleb, auther of the best selling book The Black Swan. It refers to people like Tom Friedman or Paul Krugman, who are famous for their ideas but nearly always wrong. Being right is not part of the IYI job description. We’ll let Taleb describe them (this is from Skin in the Game):

The IYI pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is his understanding that may be limited. He thinks people should act according to their best interests and he knows their interests, particularly if they are “rednecks” or from the English non-crisp-vowel class who voted for Brexit. When plebeians do something that makes sense to themselves, but not to him, the IYI uses the term “uneducated.” What we generally call participation in the political process, he calls by two distinct designations: “democracy” when it fits the IYI, and “populism” when plebeians dare to vote in a way that contradicts IYI preferences. While rich people believe in one tax dollar one vote, more humanistic ones in one man one vote, Monsanto in one lobbyist one vote, the IYI believes in one Ivy League degree one vote, with some equivalence for foreign elite schools and PhDs, as these are needed in the club.
They are what Nietzsche called Bildungsphilisters — educated philistines. Beware the slightly erudite who thinks he is an erudite, as well as the barber who decides to perform brain surgery

Roland Fryer

Glenn Youry, someone I respect, wrote a post celebrating Roland Fryer, a black economist at Harvard who has been embroiled in a sexual harassment case (I have no opinions to offer on that affair).

Loury says:

He was tenured at Harvard at the age of 30, he was awarded the American Economics Association’s John Bates Clark Medal, he received a MacArthur “Genius” grant, his publications appeared in some of the most distinguished journals in the field, and his scholarship was regularly covered in the mainstream media. His research upends many commonly held assumptions about race, discrimination, education, and police violence. It is tremendously creative, rigorous, and consequential scholarship, and it cannot be simply written off because it happens to challenge the status quo.

No, but it CAN be written off for recycling tired old tropes that are now disproven by hard experience. To an IYI, when the facts don’t fit your theories, the facts gotta go. And Fryer just ignores the results in places where his theories have been put into practice.

Sorry for the paywall, but this article appears in the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page::

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-economics-of-illegal-drugs-ae89f0fa

Here are some howlers:

When demand for a drug is inelastic—meaning users don’t reduce consumption much even as prices rise—supply-side enforcement doesn’t starve traffickers. It enriches them.

You would think a professional economist would know the meaning of “elastic”: when drugs are legalized, does demand go UP? Why yes, it does. Here’s a graph from the Cato Institute of pot use by state, in states that have legalized it:

Many consumers don’t want to risk their lives on the illegal side of town to buy their drugs, but if it’s socially acceptable and just requires a trip to the corner store or a click on a pot-delivery app: sure, why not?

The Becker-Murphy-Grossman framework prescribes an alternative to the war on drugs: legalize and tax. When demand is sufficiently inelastic, an excise tax on a legalized drug, they found, reduces consumption more than any “war” on the drug. With legalization, producers prefer paying the tax to going underground, and enforcement costs collapse.

The Intellectual Yet Idiot’s take on applying a tax is: “Hey, great, the government will make all this money, and we’ll drive the criminals out of business!”

The fact that smugglers have existed as long as taxes have is conveniently ignored. The Encyclopedia Brittanica tells us

In the 18th century, tea, tobacco, spices, silks, and spirits were smuggled into England in quantities exceeding those brought in legitimately.

A basic economic fact is that taxes tend to make the consumer prices higher, so there’s a built-in incentive to evade the taxes. Personally, if I were a pot grower, I’d rather stay legal and sleep well at night. But apparently that isn’t the way criminals think. Additionally, an existing illegal grower might find all the new government regulations, Pot Growers Association dues, and taxes to be so burdensome that staying an all-cash, illegal business is just easier.

Legalizing Marijuana

Many states now allow recreational use of pot. Is that working out as Dr. Fryer predicts? We should be seeing a big reduction in crime and a big increase in tax revenue for the state. It also ought to be driving the criminals out of business. Is it?

Crime

The City Journal wrote in 2019:

Legal-pot states are attracting international criminal cartels. Mexican drug gangs have smuggled illegals into Colorado to set up growing operations, former U.S. prosecutor Bob Troyer wrote last September, explaining why his office was stepping up enforcement. Rather than smuggle pot from Mexico, the cartels grow it in Colorado and smuggle it elsewhere—spurring violence. In 2017, seven homicides in Denver were directly connected to marijuana growers. “I would love to be able to shift some of my resources away from marijuana to other things,” Denver lieutenant Andrew Howard said last year. “But right now, the violence is marijuana or marijuana-related.”

The same is happening in Oregon, as we’ll see later. It’s legal to grow it, but the growers can make more money shipping it to places where it’s not.

California

Politico, hardly a right-wing outlet, tells us:

California’s cannabis market is booming nearly five years after voters legalized recreational weed. But there’s a catch: the vast majority of pot sales are still underground.
Rather than make cannabis a Main Street fixture, California’s strict regulations have led most industry operators to close shop, flee the state or sell in the state’s illegal market that approaches $8 billion annually, twice the volume of legal sales.

According to Dr. Fryer, people in the pot industry will flock to become tax-paying, Chamber of Commerce citizens, right?

California has just 823 licensed brick-and-mortar cannabis shops, but close to 3,000 retailers and delivery services operate in the state without a permit, a February 2020 market analysis by Marijuana Business Daily found.

New York

The New York Times tells us :

There are around 140 recreational dispensaries operating statewide — about one for every 148,000 New Yorkers. Instead of shopping legally, New Yorkers tend to get their weed from the illegal shops that now blanket the state. Estimates suggest that there are anywhere from 2,000 to 8,000 in New York City alone, with uncounted more from Ithaca to Oneonta. Recent crackdowns have temporarily sealed more than 400 stores — only a small fraction of the total in the city.
These shops undercut the legal stores, offering the same high at a fraction of the price. And they attract crime: There were 736 robbery complaints at unlicensed shops last year, according to the New York Police Department. Shootings are not uncommon, including the killing of a 36-year-old man captured on video last April.

Oregon

Oregon legalized recreational marijuana in 2014, so they have a lot of experience. There is now a huge oversupply of pot, which has depressed prices, and caused tax revenue to fall. Additionally, locally-grown pot is being diverted to other states where prices are higher.

Oregon’s experience shows us something else: when the government becomes dependent on consumption of a product, it also has to promote it.

The Oregon Journalism Project says:

Since 2022, the state’s cannabis taxes have paid for free behavioral health and addiction treatment for more than 35,000 Oregonians all across the state, a first-of-its-kind program.
But plummeting pot prices have resulted in a 38% decline in tax revenues since 2021, slashing funding for the Behavioral Health Resource Network and its clients.
The Oregon Health Authority, which manages the network of county programs, projects a $26.2 million shortfall for the next fiscal year.

Oregon recently ended its first-in-the-nation decriminalization of possession of other drugs. The reality was not quite as advertised.

Conclusion: Reality Beats Theory

An IYI considers real-world results just an annoyance, at best. It reminds one of the student leftists who confidently assert “real communism has never been tried.” You can find a lengthy discussion about that on Stack Exchange. Fryer almost echoes this juvenile claim:

No country has fully tested what the Becker-Murphy-Grossman model actually prescribes—legalization with an excise tax.

Fryer concludes:

At some point, a great nation must follow the evidence—even when the evidence leads somewhere politically inconvenient. Every administration for 50 years has exposed its citizens to more violence, more incarceration and more death rather than confront the basic economics of drug markets. The evidence isn’t wrong. Our policy is.

“Follow the evidence” : good idea, Dr. Fryer. You should try it.

Meditation Without the Woo-Woo

Albert Cory — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 22:12:15 GMT

Maybe you’ve read about meditation and mindfulness and you thought, “That’s not for me. Bunch of woo-woo nonsense.” It’s easy to get put off by all the mysticism and the talk about your “mantra” and how your guru can give it to you. Or you might think, “I can’t concentrate! My mind wanders all over the place!”

Maybe these yoga-like poses turn you off and you think you don’t have the right clothes:

But even the article with this picture says you don’t have to do that! It says,

Remember: you may think it looks really cool to sit cross-legged, but if you don’t have the flexibility it takes to do that then you’ll simply suffer! Make it easy on yourself. Choose a posture that is right for you.

I’m here to tell you that there’s nothing to study, nothing to buy, and nothing on which to compete, and all the people trying to tell you otherwise are just grifters. You don’t have to take a class or go to a workshop. There’s no religion you have to enroll in.

How It’s Done

I could make this long & complicated, but that would defeat the whole purpose here.

Sit, or slouch, in some comfortable position. Forget the fingertips-touching bit, unless you like that. Forget sitting up straight. If it’s your normal TV-watching pose, that’s fine, but I prefer it to be something different, just to signal to yourself that this is special. Lying down isn’t ideal because you might go to sleep.
Concentrate on your breath: every single aspect of it, including how the air feels going through your nostrils, how your chest feels, how your lower abdomen feels. You’re not trying to influence it, just observing it. This might seem strange at first, but do it.
When your mind wanders, which it will, just bring it back to your breath. Don’t berate yourself and think “I’m doing it wrong.” Everyone’s mind wanders. You will never be able to shut it off for a very long time.

The whole goal is to not think of anything, at least consciously. Your subconscious is still working, believe me.

Reciting a mantra: I’m not saying not to do that. If that helps you think of nothing, then go for it.

When You’re Not Meditating

This part might seem weird.

When you’re just going about your day, you’re probably planning tomorrow’s activities, or what to do after you get home, or that mean thing someone said to you yesterday. Let’s call it “monkey brain.”

“Mindfulness” is just concentrating on what you’re actually doing. Instead of thinking, “OK, I’m brushing my teeth, but that’s on auto-pilot. What should I do tomorrow at work?” you concentrate on feeling the bristles against your teeth, or your fingers around the brush. The Buddhists call this, “do what you are doing.” You can’t make the monkey brain go away, but you can do something different when it starts.

Here’s what’s going through your dog’s mind when you’re sitting with him: he’s thinking about what he’s doing right now.

Like I said: it sounds weird. But really, your plans for tomorrow are taking shape without any conscious thought on your part. You don’t need to be obsessing about it.

Breathing Exercises

Box Breathing

Imagine you’re a Navy Seal team leader, and you’re in the middle of hostile territory with enemy bullets flying. There is no help coming for at least a half hour. You need to make a plan to get your men to safety.

Anyone’s heart would be racing. But hyperventilating isn’t the way to make a rational decision. You need to get yourself under control or it’s all over.

These guys are the toughest soldiers in the world and they practice box breathing. So what’s stopping you?

4-7-8 Breathing

This is a variant that I use, and I actually got it from Andrew Weil. I’m not claiming it’s any better than Box Breathing. It’s just what I do.

Marty Supreme

Albert Cory — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 06:01:19 GMT

I finally went to see this yesterday, since Ivy

was spending the day at the dog sitter’s, so I had a little break.

There are two major things wrong with this movie, and they’re related:

It is not about anything. Marty just pursues his goal, no matter whom he hurts, and furthermore, we’re not even interested, let alone sympathetic.
The director, Josh Safdie, is a technician who’s exclusively concerned with flash and effect. The movie is loud, jarring, and ultimately off-putting (I walked out at the two-hour mark, after wanting to for almost the whole movie).

Realize here that I’m in the distinct minority on this movie. The critics loved it. Even the musical score, which is heavily 80’s-influenced and full of synthesizers, has drawn almost unanimous praise, but I hated it.

Moral Center

I happened to read this Substack post just after the movie, and it explained a lot.

Oversimplifying: In the 19th century, the moral framework of a novel was not even explained; it was just assumed. In Hemingway, and in Westerns, the code was still there but came entirely from within the individual rather than from the culture. Some more recent movies and novels feature an anti-hero, like Travis Bickle and Michael Corleone, but the anti-hero is still wrestling with a moral dilemma (how to save Jodie Foster or whether to take over the family crime business and kill people, respectively).

Marty is not wrestling with anything. Morality, if it even exists for him, died at Auschwitz. His motivation is not to prove himself to his father, get revenge for a murder (that standard plot device of kung-fu movies!), protect his family, or uphold standards. Those things might make him an interesting protagonist. Marty just wants to be the world’s best at ping-pong. I immediately didn’t care and that didn’t change over the course of the movie.

To banish a stereotype: I’m not merely saying I didn’t like Marty (although I didn’t). I’m saying I wasn’t interested in his quest. We don’t know why he wants to be the best, and we never see him actually working on his game, so how he got so good is a mystery.

Here’s an excerpt from that article on the moral imagination:

In the Western, the town is often weak, divided, or corrupt. The law may be compromised. The church may be absent. The community cannot be trusted to do what is right. Moral responsibility therefore collapses inward, onto a single figure willing to stand when others will not.

The sheriff who stays.
The gunman who won’t draw first.
The man who bears the cost alone.
This figure still follows the Hero’s Journey. There is a call. There is an ordeal. There is sacrifice. But the return is altered. The hero does not reenter a morally coherent community that shares his values. Often, he must leave, the traditional “rides off into the sunset” trope. Sometimes, he dies. The journey completes, but it does not restore the world that made it possible.
This is the Hero’s Journey under strain.

Marty isn’t a Hero or an Anti-Hero. He’s just a hustler.

Critics’ Reviews

The critics all obsess about the message that the film sends:

The Jewish Experience in America (that capitalization is as portentous as the phrase itself)
The Jewish hustler, who commands the world rather than being abused by it. In particular, they cite an earlier movie by the same director: Uncut Gems.

None of them talk about its quality as a movie.

Movie producer Samuel Goldwyn said something about message pictures. The “Quote Investigator” website says the actual quote occurred this way:

Finally in Goldwyn’s office, the second writer outlined his idea. “Mr. Goldwyn,” he said, “this is a wonderful opportunity to point out labor’s battle against capitalism. You have a chance here to bring a great message to the people.”
Goldwyn looked at him. “Messages, messages,” he said. “From Western Union you get messages. From me you get pictures.”

The New York Times review rattles on about Marty and what he means:

In fact, Marty’s very existence is a bit of magical thinking. The real-life versions of Marty — Jewish table-tennis stars like his namesake Marty Reisman — are footnotes in sports history. Marty Mauser may not achieve the greatness he longs for, but he is a representative of a generation of Jews whose dreams didn’t quite come true but who deserve recognition all the same.
That’s the big-picture version of what Safdie and his cohorts are doing with “Marty Supreme.” In the narrative, they dig deeper into the knotty reality of what it would have been like for a 23-year-old Jewish American man in 1952.

Technical Mastery

If you watch the director, Josh Safdie, talking about Marty, he focuses exclusively on style: on capturing the real-life feel of a ping-pong match, and his “direct cinema” goals.

Here he is with Sean Baker, the director of Anora (on the right)). In the first five minutes, they slobber all over each other, but then they geek out over the real business of movie making, much of which is legitimately fascinating: lenses, light, the order of filming (wide vs. closeup scenes), how you choose extras, picking clothes, how you set up an indoor shot, where onscreen period-authenticity is critical, etc. He went to extraordinary lengths to find some very rare anamorphic lenses which were created in the early 1950’s, to get that period look.

Nowhere in this interview is there anything about Safdie’s artistic goals, or any sense of humility. He just wanted to make something cool. The entire movie projects an air of “Look at me! I’m a hot director!” There is no room to breathe, and the action scenes just seem thrown in and over-the-top.

The Pace

The editing pace of the film is hyper-kinetic, as the jargon goes. Maybe you like that sort of thing. I don’t. It might work in a music video but it doesn’t fit with a movie about the 50’s.

The Score

And now we come to what really ruined the movie for me: the musical score. It is way too loud, too intrusive, and completely wrong for the period.

“But this is what Josh Safdie intended!” you say, superciliously.

I know it was. It was a deliberate choice, but unfortunately it was a dumb one. His reasons were apparently to show that Marty was way ahead of his time. His ambition was futuristic, supposedly. Safdie even had an alternate movie in mind where Marty comes back in the 80’s as a grandfather.

Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. This is viewing the past in terms of the present, which is the cardinal sin of historical drama. It’s like the “Regency picture” where the women are all feminists chafing against the male-dominated society, and talking like a bunch of woke college students. The past is the past. It wasn’t like now.

Conclusion

You might well be impressed by all the Oscar nominations and decide this is one you need to see. I’d say wait until you can watch it at home and turn the volume down.

Who are the Social Media Sites For?

Albert Cory — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 22:58:00 GMT

I was inspired by this recent Note from Hamish McKenzie, Co-Founder and Chief Writing Officer of Substack.

It reminded me of this classic Yes, Minister episode:

Night Train to Lisbon

Albert Cory — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 17:53:24 GMT

Do you ever love a book (and a movie) that everyone else seems to hate, at least in the English-speaking world? That’s Night Train to Lisbon for me. I don’t normally think of myself as a European in sensibility. But I loved the book and the movie. Your mileage may vary.

The book was a huge hit in Europe. As Amazon says:

A major hit in Germany that went on…

What the Elites Get Wrong About Immigration

Albert Cory — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 06:04:01 GMT

Here are the thoughts of two Harvard professors on immigration. They illustrate exactly why elites are so out of touch.

Michael Ignatieff published a post attacking President Trump’s National Security Strategy paper. If you don’t know who he is: he’s a former professor at Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, and the University of Toronto. He led the Liberal Party…

Parricide

Albert Cory — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 18:10:51 GMT

Rob Reiner & wife murdered by their son. Horrible.

One night in 2000, I was watching the nightly news, and it said, “There was a murder on xxxxx Drive in San Jose. I thought, “Holy shit! I wonder if I know those people!” I live on xxxxx Drive and it’s only two blocks long.

But it was the other end of the block, and I didn’t know anyone down there. I forgo…

Who'll Be the Next Walter Duranty?

Albert Cory — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 16:19:02 GMT

You know who Zohran Mamdani is, of course, since he’s now Mayor of New York City.

But who was Walter Duranty? As the New York Times’ Russian correspondent, he was a Pulitzer-winning Useful Idiot for Joseph Stalin in the 1930’s. We’d like to guess who will play that role now that Mamdani is the Mayor. But first, let’s see what Duranty did during the Holo…

The Future: Who Wants It?

Albert Cory — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 17:49:45 GMT

Transhuman! The ultimate one-upmanship: “I’m better than you are, because you’re just human! I’m a transhuman! And I’m going to be immortal!” The techbros couldn’t be more excited. Let’s turn over the rock and see what they’re saying to each other under there. It’s much, much scarier than you think.

AI Doom: Bring It On

The Wall Street Journal ran an arti…

The First Truck Drivin' Song

Albert Cory — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 16:03:12 GMT

Drivin’ a truck! What could be more country than that? I’m sure someone by now has done a song about a self-driving truck, sung by the guy whose truck left him.

YouTube has a playlist of the 50 biggest songs about driving a truck.