Sunday: Hili dialogue

August 10, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the Sabbath for gentile cats; it’s Sunday, August 10, 2025 and National S’Mores Day.  Here is one from Wikipedia. This treat is usually made by toasting the ingredients over a campfire (graham cracker, marshmallow, and Hershey Bar squares), but this one was made in a microwave. They were created about 1920, and within a decade they were already popular with Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts in the U.S. I love ’em!

Evan-Amos, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also National Lazy Day, Melon Day, and Smithsonian Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 10 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*President Zelensky of Ukraine is playing hardball now, rejecting any peace proposal in which Ukraine must cede territory to Russia (article archived here).

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Saturday flatly rejected the idea that Ukraine could cede land to Russia after President Trump suggested that a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia could include “some swapping of territories.”

“Ukrainians will not gift their land to the occupier,” Mr. Zelensky said in a video address from his office in Kyiv, several hours after Mr. Trump’s remarks, which appeared to overlook Ukraine’s role in the negotiations.

“Any decisions made against us, any decisions made without Ukraine, are at the same time decisions against peace,” Mr. Zelensky said. “They will bring nothing. These are dead decisions; they will never work.”

His blunt rejection risks angering Mr. Trump, who has made a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia one of his signature foreign policy goals, even if it means accepting terms that are unfavorable to Kyiv. In the past, Mr. Trump has criticized Ukraine for clinging to what he suggested were stubborn cease-fire demands and for being “not ready for peace.”

Mr. Trump said on Friday that he would meet with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Aug. 15 in Alaska to discuss a possible peace deal, with potential land swaps most likely on the agenda.

“We’re going to get some back, and we’re going to get some switched,” he said during an event at the White House. “There’ll be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both.”

Trump sees his legacy as that of The Great Peacemaker, but he isn’t doing very well (remember that he said he’d stop this war “on Day 1”?).  Why should Trump urge Zelensky to give up bits of Zelensky’s own country to stop the fighting? They already gave up Crimea! And when Trump says that “we’re going to get some [land] switched,” is he suggesting that Russia will give land to Ukraine? That, of course, won’t happen. What Trump means is that peace will come if Ukraine gives land to Russia unilaterally.  Good for Zelensky for saying “no” to that, but in the end Ukraine may be a wasteland still belonging to Russia, and there will be many dead on both sides.  This is a conundrum not quite as difficult as bringing peace in Gaza, but it’s still hard.

*A NYT op-ed by Sharon Waxman declares that wokeness in Hollywood is disappearing in an op-ed called, “Hollywood is ‘hot, horny and white’ again” (archived here).

If more evidence were needed that the progressive snowflake era of Hollywood has officially melted, “Basic Instinct,” a movie that cemented the ice-pick-wielding post-feminist man-slayer in the character of Sharon Stone’s Catherine Tramell, is back.

Amazon MGM just bought a spec script from Joe Eszterhas — yes, the man who brought the sexy in “Flashdance,” “Jade,” “Sliver” and “Showgirls” as well as “Basic Instinct” in the ’80s and ’90s — in a $2 million deal to write what he has called an “anti-woke” reboot.

“I don’t believe in woke and I don’t believe in being politically correct because I think it’s not the truth, and I like the truth spoken,” Mr. Eszterhas, who gets an additional $2 million if the film gets made, told me in a recent interview about the deal. As for how the movie will be “anti-woke,” he wouldn’t say a lot other than it would be “raunchy,” but I got the impression that he’d know it when he wrote it.

. . .No less an authority than “South Park” declared last month that “woke is dead” in the season premiere that went viral for featuring President Trump crawling naked through the desert in a fake public service announcement. In the same episode, Cartman loses hope after learning that “woke” has died. His once politically correct principal has suddenly embraced religion, inviting Jesus into their public school. (Cartman’s later bid to asphyxiate himself with the car running in the garage fails because it is an electric vehicle.)

And the furor over the actress Sydney Sweeney’s sexy ad for American Eagle in which she slithers on a couch while extolling her “jeans” (jeans/genes — you get it)? The right-wing outrage machine has revved up over a few critical comments that the ad somehow is code for white supremacy. But, surprise: It’s had no echo in Burbank or Beverly Hills, where not so long ago Ms. Sweeney might have had to apologize for her insensitivity and make a donation to the A.C.L.U.

Trends are sometimes hard to pinpoint, and “wokeism” itself is a loaded term. For the purpose of this essay, I will define it as the belief in progressive values aimed at correcting systemic injustices tied to race, gender and other marginalized traits.

It is no leap to say that Hollywood, an enclave of liberalism nonetheless largely run by white men, was generally aligned with these values for decades.

BUT Waxman describes a number of pictures and attitudes that are effacing the wokeness that pervaded Hollywood.

. . . . This shift had been coming well before Mr. Trump’s election in November. The entertainment industry is nothing if not finely attuned to the social and cultural signals that affect the box office, streaming subscriptions and the market. The pendulum that swung all the way left after the killing of George Floyd in 2020, with among other things the installation of D.E.I. leaders at the studios, started to go the other way in 2023.

. . . . So was “woke” all performative? Was it just a nod to a liberal orthodoxy that’s now rejected as bad for business?

Yes, and maybe. Hollywood itself is undergoing a moment of self-examination — or maybe just truthfulness — as prominent people like the megaproducer Brian Grazer step forward to admit that they voted for Mr. Trump. At Disney, movie after Pixar movie has been driven by themes that some might consider woke — acceptance of immigrants (“Turning Red,” “Elemental”), diverse ethnicity (“Coco,” “Soul”) and the experience of being “othered” (“Elio,” about a misfit boy mistaken by aliens as an ambassador for Earth). One top executive there admitted to me privately that the movies have come to seem one-note.

And maybe they are.

Yes, they are one-note.  One can hope that a greater diversity of views will be on display in the products of Hollywood. If I were to mention a bellwether in this change, it would be the insufferably woke Disney remake of Snow White. They couldn’t even use real dwarves!

*I had a discussion with a friend last night who maintained that Trump had never done ANYTHING beneficial. After I mentioned curbing illegal immigration and acting to prevent men from competing athletically against women, he changed his thesis and said “Well, if you weigh up the bad things against the good things, the formers are heavier.” And of course I agreed with him! Trump is a narcissistic  and erratic maniac. But it irritates me when people are so polarized that they can’t see that their political enemies have done anything good (if they have). Well, now Trump may be on the verge of doing something else beneficial: making marijuana less illegal:

President Trump is considering reclassifying marijuana as a less dangerous drug, according to people familiar with the matter, after pot companies have poured millions of dollars into Trump’s political groups.

At a $1 million-a-plate fundraiser at his New Jersey golf club earlier this month, Trump told attendees that he was interested in change, the people, who declined to be named, said. Such a shift, which the Biden administration started pursuing but didn’t enact before leaving office, would make it much easier to buy and sell pot and make the multibillion-dollar industry more profitable.

The guests at Trump’s fundraiser included Kim Rivers, the chief executive of one of the largest marijuana companies, Trulieve, who encouraged Trump to pursue the change and expand medical marijuana research, according to people present at the event.

Trump listened and said he was interested, according to three people in the room. He flagged it to staff members there, the people said.

Among the other guests: Pfizer’s CEO, cryptocurrency executives and political advisers close to Trump. The group also discussed New York politics, attendees said, and requests from other donors.

The fundraiser conversation was part of a campaign by cannabis companies to persuade Trump to pick up where the Biden team left off and reclassify the drug. The companies have contributed millions to the president’s political groups and hired some of the Washington’s top lobbyists and advisers to Trump. The companies went to Trump directly after failing to gain traction across other agencies in the government.

Now some of you are going to adduce evidence that, yes, weed can be harmful. But it’s not as harmful as alcohol or tobacco.!  Raise the taxes on those items if you want to make America healthier. At any rate, note that the campaign to make marijuana more legal was also pursued by Biden, and you can now buy it pretty much everywhere.  I think that’s a good thing, as it now ensures better purity of the drug and raises taxes, which illegal stuff didn’t do.  I thought I’d buy the stuff when it became more legal, but in the past five years I’ve had very little: just a few gummies.  The older I get, I guess, the more I want to see reality as it is rather than through the perception-altering drugs of cannabis and psychedelics.  I am glad I took them when I was younger, as you really need to experience how something like LSD can affect your perception, but my younger explorations seem to have been enough for me.  I sure wouldn’t deny them to anyone else, though.  (I am not encouraging wanton drug use, but legal drug use; there are places where you can take psychedelics legally, and under supervision.)

I’m a consequentialist, so I judge results, not presumed motivations.

*Here’s a WSJ op-ed that is actually informative—and worrisome: it’s about the one aspect of American life that really has undergone a seriously harmful price rise. And it’s by Elisabeth Rosenthal, who knows her stuff.

Wary of inflation, Americans have been watching the prices of everyday items such as eggs and gasoline. A less-noticed expense should cause greater alarm: rising premiums for health insurance. They have been trending upward for years and are now rising faster than ever.

Consider that, from 2000 to 2020, egg prices fluctuated between just under $1 and about $3 a dozen; they reached $6.23 in March but then fell to $3.77 in June. Average gas prices, after seesawing between $2 and $4 a gallon for more than a decade starting in 2005, peaked at $4.93 in 2022, and are now back to just over $3.\

Meanwhile, since 1999, health insurance premiums for people with employer-provided coverage have more than quadrupled. From 2023 to 2024 alone, they rose more than 6 percent for both individuals and family coverage — a steeper increase than that of wages and overall inflation.

For many people who have the kind of insurance plans created by the Affordable Care Act (because they work for small companies or insure themselves), rates have probably risen even more drastically. In this market, state regulators scrutinize insurers’ proposed rate increases, but only if they exceed 15 percent.

. . . . And the situation is about to get worse: For 2026, ACA marketplace insurers have proposed eye-popping new prices: In New York, UnitedHealthcare has proposed a 66.4 percent rise. HMO Colorado has asked for an increase of more than 33 percent in that state. In Washington, the average proposed increase across all insurers is 21.2 percent, and in Rhode Island it’s 23.7 percent.

According to Business Group on Health, a consortium of major employers, “actual health care costs have grown a cumulative 50% since 2017.” In a recent survey, 87 percent of companies said that in the next five to 10 years, the cost of providing health insurance for their workers would become “unsustainable.”

We need to fix this. If you’re poor and have Medicaid or old and have Medicare, your worries are fewer, but insurance regulators have limited power to stop price rises of private insurance, and Rosenthal estimates that 16 million American will lose health insurance that year.  We really need to do something about this, but again it seems like an insoluble problem.  Government healthcare for all is one solution, but it doesn’t seem to have worked (I know some readers will say it’s great in Canada and the UK, but I’ve heard too many horror stories from those countries, and why do they have private helathcare if things are owrking well?).

*Finally, let’s have some humor instead of Nooz. Here’s a post from the FB site Laughter Guy.  I think it’s for real, and be sure to read the text at the bottom:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is optimistic:

Hili: We are gaining momentum.
Andrzej: Yes, but the whole of August will still be very difficult.

In Polish:

Hili: Nabieramy rozpędu.
Ja: Tak, ale cały sierpień będzie nadal bardzo trudny.

*******************

From The Language Nerds:

From CinEmma:

From Wholesome Memes:

Masih is quiet again, so we go to her substitute, J. K. Rowling. Here Rowling pushes back not just against the anonymous “X” person, but against those who misunderstand Simone de Beauvoir’s statement that “One is not born, but becomes a woman.”  That is about conforming to stereotypes of femininity, not about developing into one’s sex. But I digress; read JKR’s whole statement, which is gametocentric.

From Malcolm, who says, “Only in Japan”:

From Luana: grade inflation at Harvard. Even Steve Pinker has admitted he had to inflate his grades. The average grade is 3.8 out of 4! Is there any way to stop this?

Two from my feed. First, a playful and adorable baby gorilla:

A cruel man (and a good job of editing):

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

Two from Dr. Cobb. If you’re of a certain age, like me, you’ll get this one:

Mathematicians get their kicks on 8.1240384

— Moose Allain (@mooseallain.bsky.social) 2025-08-08T11:32:20.152Z

I’ve been to Istanbul twice, and I can’t believe I never heard of this museum (but I did see a lot of cats):

This morning we visited the Istanbul cat museum (Mx 61 insisted). 15 lovely cats live there, one temporarily adopted Master 61, and a kitten decided she had a thing for my shoes. Also, they did great coffee.

— The Man in Seat 61 (@seatsixtyone.bsky.social) 2025-08-08T12:21:03.254Z

36 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

  1. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
    I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success… Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything. -Nikola Tesla, electrical engineer and inventor (10 Jul 1856-1943)

  2. Canada doesn’t allow private health care financing. All medically necessary services provided by doctors or in hospitals must be paid by the tax-funded single-payer regime in each province. You can’t even pay out of pocket for services the government covers (to get seen faster, say.) Private insurance schemes can operate only to pay for other services like drugs, dentistry, physiotherapy, psychology, etc. If you don’t have this insurance, which is usually provided only to employee groups where enrolment is compulsory to protect the insurer from adverse selection, you pay out of pocket or do without. Employers don’t have to provide what we call “extended” health care insurance and if it gets too expensive, driven by skyrocketing drug costs, they will discontinue it and let the employees have the cash as wages instead. (All health insurance is paid by employees who take it instead of cash. It comes out of the compensation budget, not out of profits.)

    I suspect that what is happening in the U.S. comes from adverse selection. The Affordable Care Act required insurance companies to offer insurance to all comers without exclusion or underwriting for pre-existing conditions, and the IRS decided not to enforce the penalty for declining to buy insurance. Together this means that only people with expensive pre-existing conditions will buy insurance, unless compelled to by their employers. This is a recipe for rapidly rising premiums as only the people with the most expensive pre-existing conditions buy the insurance, until the system collapses.

    There are good policy reasons why private payment for medically necessary services should be be banned in countries with single-payer tax-funded schemes. Canada is the only OECD country that actually does this, though.

    You are probably right that it is an insoluble problem.

    1. One remaining scheme that some if not all employer insurance providers in Canada engage in, is that they offer “discount” insurance continuation after end of employment. But this scheme comes with strings attached. In my case it was a package deal: could not drop the most expensive part, the dental insurance. So I found it necessary to switch to another provider, which then refused coverage for medication for the one and only condition that I actually needed coverage for. So basically, between these two providers, they successfully forced me off the plan with full coverage, and the second company then refused coverage due to (now) pre-existing condition. What a neat scheme to trick people to lose coverage!

      Fortunately, we have provincial medication plan that took over. As of recently, there is also federal dental coverage for people who don’t have a private plan. I hear it’s not perfect but consider the price!

      I think the very term “medical insurance” is based on the false idea that medical conditions are an accident that does not have to happen. This is a bare-faced lie. True, sometimes the body breaks, and doctors can remedy the problem. But end of life usually means progressive loss of health. That’s a reality people don’t want to think about but they should. Few people past 60 don’t have any pre-existing conditions.

      IMO calling medical services a “business” that has to operate on the basis of competition and exclusion of externalities is an invitation to visit disaster on individuals. In this “business” supply is easily restricted, but demand is set by human desperation and pain. So how could offering medical services for money be called a fair transaction?

      The problem for countries that offer state-run insurance is the loss of funding, due to international competition to offer lowest possible taxes. If not for that race-to-the-bottom, state-run medical services would not have the problems of access and wait lists that are frequently presented as the their downside.

      1. “Socialised medicine” has been good to me in my older age. The brute fact that healthcare needs to be rationed in some manner (price being one obvious way) can not be “solved”. People don’t like the words “rationed” or “restricted”, but reality doesn’t care. I think your economic analysis is too shallow — there is NO solution to finite supply + unlimited possible demand. We all die, and some die too early if the particular system of rationing is unfavourable to them.

        This is a collective-action problem, and absent a realistic social consensus it is an insoluble one.

        Of course the US is particularly dire, since a needlessly-large fraction of the total cost goes to various sorts of ticket-clipping and economic rent. (I don’t have the stats handy.)

  3. US health care is insanely expensive. If I, as a Norwegian (65 years old), should buy travel insurance(price per month):

    World excluding USA: 196 USD
    World including USA: 386 USD

  4. Regarding grade inflation: I think that it may have been a Larry Summers op-ed a couple of years ago that pointed out that Harvard (and other top tier universities) had basically kept their entering class size constant while the application pool had increased significantly….and that he felt that that was not fair. The flip side of that situation is that maybe the entering classes are, on average, brighter and more capable than was my class from a smaller pool in 1966. So maybe the average grade should rise to some extent. On the other hand, professors might see the possibility of teaching and requiring deeper material and thought to get the same grade as for past, less able on average classes. A “B” student in freshman psych in 2025 would know more than a “B” student in that class in 1966. Just a maybe I thought I would mention.

    1. It’s a structural problem. Careers depend partly on student evaluations, which (on average) depend on the reward/effort ratio. I was unpopular for my grading system, but not being a career academic I didn’t care too much (even though the HoD did have some words with me).

  5. The hungry dog meme is one of my all time favorites. And kinda like how I live here with my dog “Aussie”!
    An aside – he’s older than Joe Biden now, 15, so I bought him a stroller (not unusual here) which, when I let him out of downstairs, he adores chasing and shepherding around. Treat time!

    D.A.
    NYC

  6. That getting their kicks reminds me of the floating point number of the beast being 665.99998

      1. I have to admit it took me a minute or two until I considered the root/route pun and mentally muliplied 8 by 8 🙂

    2. Moose confuses mathematicians with engineers. No self-respecting mathematician would tolerate such an approximation.

  7. “I’ve heard too many horror stories from those countries, and why do they have private [healthcare] if things are [working] well?”

    There’s nothing wrong with having two types of health care. The NHS is fine for many people, but some operations have delays due to demand, so people can choose to opt out and go private. The NHS has strict limits on cosmetic surgery, and a private system gives people the option to buy that care.

    I chose to go private for dental care because I wanted implants, which aren’t available on the NHS.

    The system certainly isn’t perfect, but I hear far more horror stories from the USA about people who can’t afford healthcare, or insulin, or a cancer operation that would save their life. You pay 8 times more for insulin than it costs the NHS. There’s no reason for that, apart from profiteering.

    US private healthcare is dominated by making money from sick people. Most of the ‘surgeons’ doing gender surgery in the USA care more about making money than health. If they cared about health, they wouldn’t be mutilating children and leaving them intellectually, emotionally & sexually stunted for life.

    I’ve paid more money into the NHS through my taxes than I have taken out of it, but I’m OK with that, because it means that others can get the care they need to stay healthy and work rather than becoming a drain on society.

    1. Lots of Americans don’t understand there are more healthcare options than Canada’s, the NHS and Cuba.

      Australia’s Medicare (paid for by a tax) does (did?) a good job of providing for catastrophes (no medical bankruptcies) but many buy private also. (Can’t vouch for these days though).

      Japan’s works well also – so much so there’s scandal now about health tourists from abroad abusing the system. When I lived there, decades ago, it worked well.

      I’ve read both Singapore and Switzerland have excellent public/private systems.

      Point is, its not just Canada and UK out there. I can’t remember anybody ever talking about other systems.

      D.A.
      NYC

      1. I haven’t heard much about non European countries apart from the USA and Canada as I have traveled there.

        There are many options for health care. Even within the NHS we have four separate NHS systems with different policies. NHS Scotland seems to be a better than the others, although it too is now having problems. Scotland tends to be more left wing than England so we are not selling off chunks of our healthcare to private healthcare firms. We keep it under our government control. The majority want it like that, even if we have to pay a bit more tax to keep it under our control.

        I read about patients down south not being able to be taken from an ambulance into A&E because of a queue. At the time that was happening, my mum was taken out of an ambulance and put and in front of an A&E doctor in 6 minutes. My niece is a doctor in England and is often given care of patients on trolleys in the corridor.

        We need to think carefully about healthcare provision because there will be more and more financial pressure as people live longer and new technology needs to be bought.

  8. That Japanese rocket launch is ridiculous.

    And so are insurance rates. And it’s not only health insurance. Car and homeowner’s insurance rates have been creeping up. And earthquake insurance, too. These are expenditures that are required for life on that part of Earth called the United States of America. You simply have to pay. There’s no workaround. It’s scary, and where will it end? Or, will it end?

  9. With regard to Trump’s diplomatic efforts to engage with Putin to end the war in Ukraine: it is the official position of Zelenskyy and of the Ukrainian government that the war will continue until the Crimea, as well as all other Ukrainian territories, are again part of Ukraine. Everyone probably recalls that Russia took over the Crimea in 2014 without firing a shot under the Obama administration…I guess I should say Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Barack Obama….and the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world took the absorption of Crimea by Russia with apparent indifference at the time. But now it is a war aim by Ukraine to get it back, and it is without question Ukraine’s privilege to take that position. It is, however, entirely up to us whether we want to support that delusional war aim with American blood, weapons, and treasure.

    1. Via my source (Reporting from Ukraine), Russia is faltering. Ukraine just destroyed about 15% of their oil refining capacity, they just received a $7B+ judgement against Russian oil companies that they will apparently be able to collect, Russian tank production is down to about 1/day, And Russia’s big summer assaults have had any traction. Also Russian allies like Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Armenia are severing ties and building them with the West, so this would seem to be a good time for Ukraine to keep it up.

      1. Admittedly I am a lot less sanguine than your source in Ukraine, and I see “keeping it up” as at best a continuation of the last three years of World War I level stalemate/slaughter, with the added component of their cities being leveled behind the lines. But as said I agree that this is a choice for Ukraine to make. My point, somewhat narrower, was that it is not incumbent on the U.S. to support whatever strategic goals Ukraine may have, however unrealistic. The realistic “peace” settlement for Ukraine will not be at all palatable to any of us, just better than the alternative. And nothing is forever.
        As an aside if you’d like to meet a passel of young Ukrainian military age guys, I’ll take you around to some restaurants up and down Richmond Road and introduce you to the bartenders.

        1. The US has stopped funding Ukraine. The US is still providing weapons, but the EU is paying for them. This is a new Trump policy.

        2. I was listening to a report from the front in Ukraine and the drone operators the reporter was there with were in their 50’s, resolute and focused according to the journo. There was no way in hell they were about to back off… they were his dad’s age, he was glad his dad was just on the other side of the border to Ukraine.
          The US could be learning from this “new” way of conducting a war, the intel would be extremely valuable and adding I would say the US armenant industry have been making good coin and stand to make more. The hypocrisy of Trump and narcissism makes the Ukrainian on the ground very wary of anything has has to say. As for trusting Putin on any peace deal… I wouldn’t put it that way.

        3. Mike –
          I imagine that one of the first phrases in Virginian that your Ukrainian friends learned is Sic Semper Tyrannis. Growing up with that, maybe it’s why I’m so riveted to this conflict.

          In any event, here’s a key paragraph from RfU’s latest posting. The print version is by subscription only, but some postings are put up free on YT. I haven’t checked if this one is, but the situation is that Ukraine has taken out a very important gas pipeline via drone attack:

          In a bold escalation of its long-range strike campaign, Ukraine has struck one of the most critical arteries of Russia’s gas infrastructure, the Central Asia Center pipeline. Explosions rocked the Volgograd region, knocking the pipeline out of service and forcing an indefinite shutdown. This strategic attack, confirmed by Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate, not only disrupted the gas transit but also directly affected energy supplies to multiple key military-industrial facilities across Russia, dependent on energy plants that fully receive their gas from this pipeline. Among those impacted are the Demikhovsky Machine-Building Plant, MiG Aircraft Corporation, and the Magnum-K ammunition factory, central players in Russia’s war machine.

          And here’s the video version.

  10. Warren G Harding took a summer trip to Alaska in 1923. Maybe O’Julius’ trek will work out the same way.

    1. Re “We’re going to get some back, and we’re going to get some switched”, Russia has a possible historic claim to Alaska, so maybe iDJT could offer Putin to switch some of that. Or maybe some piece of US Antarctica.

  11. Trump the peacemaker? India/Pakistan, Rwanda/Congo, Cambodia/Thailand, Armenia/Azerbaijan.

  12. Hate to be a killjoy on the (old) plane toilet joke, but BA stopped using 747s in 2020. Sadly there are not a lot of these old jets left in passenger service I am trying to remember the last time I flew on one. UPS has one of the largest currently operational fleets.

    On another issue, re Pinker’s comment. I don’t understand why all grading isn’t curved. It was when I was in school (60s and 70s England) and nobody ever considered complaining about it. If everyone gets an A and downstream users know that, then essentially nobody got an A and all you are being judged on is your ability to get into the school in question. A friend compared his experience (now some years ago) at Cornell as an undergrad and Harvard as a medical school as “Cornell spent four years trying to fail everyone and Harvard spent four years trying to pass everyone.”

    1. Lufthansa still has a number of 747s in its passenger fleet, going against the prevailing wisdom that says “two engines good, four engines bad”. This fascinating video explains the reasons why they still make money from their passenger 747s:

      https://youtu.be/luYPeUe_4mA

    1. The three benefits of legalisation: Quality and unadulterated product is a better alternative to unregulated street crud. Removing the economic benefit to criminal gangs will reduce crime. Recreational users would no longer be guilty of victimless crimes – also reducing crime.

      2. Legalizing marijuana in California has not eliminated the black market because the price is too high. A friend tells me, in California a gram from the dispensary is about $9.50/gram which includes $1.81 excise tax and $0.96 sales tax. Previously, the excise tax was 15%, but a law triggered the increase due to declining tax revenues. Meanwhile, at the corner down the street the cost is $3.30/gram.

  14. Regarding Pixar, I’ve actually seen a few videos complaining that the films since 2020 or so seem to have fallen into a rut in regards the art style. The term being used is ‘Bean Mouth Style’.

    1. I liked “Elemental” very much, both for its traditional Disney fairy-tale love story and the ground-breaking CGI. YMMV.

      Oh, and I’m impressed that the writers seemed to use the Ledenfrost effect. I forgive them the unrealistic city planning 🙂.

  15. “Trump sees his legacy as that of The Great Peacemaker, but he isn’t doing very well…”
    Let’s see – the Abraham Accords; Rwanda/Congo peace deal; Azerbaijan/Armenia peace deal; possibly Ukraine/Russia peace deal.
    How many other U.S. Presidents can boast that kind of track record?

Comments are closed.