Today's Water Cooler 2026-06-11

Don’t Miss These

(1) Festival of Platner: “Did the Democrats Ratf*ck Sabotage Graham Platner?” • Of course they did.

(2) “Social Security is Facing a Political Crisis” • Here we go again…

(3) “Exporting the Abraham Accords: The Hidden Network Converging on Albania’s Shoreline” • An exceptionally nasty ownership structure.

(4) “My Students Can’t Read” • Teaching to the test…

Birdsong of the Day

Moar mimidae:

California, United States (1956). Fourteen minutes! Grab a cup of coffee….

“Birdwatching Is Having a Moment - And We Need to Talk About It” [Easy by Nature]. “The numbers tell the story: Nearly 100 million Americans now watch birds—more than double the number from just eight years ago. The Merlin Bird ID app has seen a 500% increase in users since 2020. Birders in the United States now spend over $107 billion annually.” • And then the paywall. But interesting true facts!

Politics

Festival of Platner

“Did the Democrats Sabotage Graham Platner?” [Freddie deBoer, TruthDig]. A friend notes the URL: did-the-democrats-ratfck-graham-platner.” Because of course they did. More: “When a faction wants a candidate gone but can’t beat him at the ballot box, the incentive to remove him by other means is obvious. That’s the soil in which ratfucking grows. (That might be a mixed metaphor, idk.) … [L]et’s examine the sourcing, the single most damning element. The most destructive blows against Platner didn’t come from Susan Collins or the National Republican Senatorial Committee or conservative media. Of course not! Populist left Dems are never killed by the right; they don’t need to be, given how relentlessly their own party establishment works to defeat them. And indeed the really damaging hits against Platner have come from inside his own party.” See Water Cooler here on Genevieve McDonald. More: “A campaign’s own oppo research, flagged internally, leaking to the national press thanks to vague and unattributed ‘rumors’ at the decisive moment … these are the textbook signature of sabotage from within. It’s ratfucking, folks.” And: “And we should take care not to give short shrift to the timing, which is everything. Ratfucking lives and dies by the calendar. The pattern here isn’t the random arrival of inconvenient truths but a metronomic sequence engineered for cumulative effect — what worried Democrats themselves call a “drip, drip, drip” dynamic. (Again, quintessential ratfucking.) The inflammatory Reddit posts surfaced just a few days after Mills announced she was running … precisely when the establishment most wanted to hurt Platner. The texts, known about internally since 2025, broke in the final days before the June 9 primary. The oppo sat dormant for the better part of a year, then erupted at the one moment calculated to inflict maximum harm while denying voters time to absorb it. Do you really think that just … happens?” • This is a really excellent piece from deBoer, well worth a read. And fifty lashes with a wet noodle for lambert, missing the ratfucking forest for the local detail trees (that said, local detail counts; Genevieve McDonald is an important figure, and the reactions of the locals to all-too-typical liberal Democrat betrayal are useful as well (“Numerous attendees said they felt stories about Platner’s past were establishment attempts to smear him that won’t work on voters here. Some empathized with his past struggles and said they’re more focused on his message”).

”Is he Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump? Protest vote complicates Graham Platner’s victory” [Guardian]. “It was over the moment he received the endorsement of Maine’s most famous resident: Stephen King, the master of horror, who announced on Tuesday that he voted for Graham Platner.” I doubt it. More: “More than 100,000 Democrats in Maine agreed, making Platner, a marine veteran and oyster farmer, their nominee for the US Senate against the Republican incumbent, Susan Collins, in November. But many others did not, with Platner’s rival Janet Mills, who backed out of the race earlier this year after struggling to raise enough funds, seemingly on course to receive nearly one in five votes without even campaigning. That protest vote should set off alarm bells about the damage done to Platner by a steady drip of scandal over several months.” As above, “drip, drip, drip.” But Platner: “[Collins] got elected promising to protect Roe v Wade, only to turn around and put a justice on the supreme court who overturned it. She lied to us.” Platner is poised to remind voters this is their first chance to hold Collins accountable for ending the constitutional right to the procedure. Platner has faced withering public scrutiny over his personal conduct towards women. Now Collins can expect a reckoning over her political conduct towards women. ‘Remember what Susan Collins did to us!’ a female voter could be heard saying at Platner’s watch party.” • Not bad argument!

“Democrats Make a Huge Bet on Platner in Maine, Which Could Decide the Senate” [New York Times]. “He must pivot from being a left-wing insurgent — Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has been one of his fiercest champions — to winning over general-election voters in Maine. And he must dispel the concerns of the nearly 30 percent of primary voters who, according to incomplete results on Tuesday night, cast ballots for other Democratic candidates.” • Same argument as above.

Trump Administration

“SSA hasn’t marked living people as dead in database, commissioner says” [FedScoop]. “A plan reportedly hatched by DOGE and the Department of Homeland Security to add millions of living individuals to the Death Master File hasn’t materialized at the Social Security Administration, its commissioner told lawmakers Wednesday. A whistleblower complaint from a former SSA career official detailed discussions led by DOGE and DHS to target undocumented immigrants by marking 2.7 million people as dead in the SSA database of death records. During a House Ways and Means Joint Social Security and Work & Welfare Subcommittee hearing, Rep. Ron Estes, R-Kan., asked SSA chief Frank Bisignano if the agency has “knowingly” added living individuals to the Death Master File. ‘We are not, and from the day I’ve been here, we haven’t added people to [the] Death Master File who are living,’ Bisignano said.”• Hopefully Bisignano’s not lying, and DOGE didn’t install some kind of workaround we don’t know about.

“A long-running federal river program delivers real returns, but now it’s on the chopping block” [Federal News Network]. ’ little background on the Sustainable Rivers Program. It’s an initiative of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to look at the way the Corps operates its 700+ dams in the U.S., to see if we can get more efficiencies and deliver more benefits for Americans. And the Sustainable Rivers Program has worked at about over 100 of those Army Corps dams, 65 different rivers, and basically trying to figure out can we provide more balance to this system. A lot of these dams were built in the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, really before we understood the impacts that they can have on river systems and local communities. And so what SRP, the Sustainable Rivers Program does is says, okay, can we still meet this dam’s mission of providing flood risk management or navigation or hydropower, but also provide more environmental benefits for communities? And the answer is clearly, yes, we can, we can do both. And that’s what SRP does, working with local communities and the Corps.” But: “The program has been zeroed out in the administration’s proposed budget for the coming year. The good news, though, is that the House Appropriations Committee in May has restored funding to the program to $5 million.” • A $5 million… You add up the Ballroom bunker, the reflecting pool, the UFC mishegoss…

* * *

“Social Security is Facing a Political Crisis” [Paul Krugman]. “Whatever you may have heard, Social Security isn’t in danger of going bankrupt. What we’re facing, instead, is potential political crisis. Congress and the White House could easily take action to sustain America’s retirement system. But given the current state of our politics, there’s no guarantee that they will. There is a widespread misunderstanding of how Social Security works. While Social Security was designed to look like a pension fund, it isn’t. A pension fund pays benefits out of a stock of assets it has accumulated over time. In contrast, Social Security operates as a government transfer program, like food stamps or Medicaid. Now, unlike food stamps — but like the highway trust fund — Social Security is on paper supported by a dedicated tax, the payroll tax, that is assigned to that program. But I say “on paper” because from an economic point of view assigning the payroll tax to Social Security is just an accounting convention.” But: “There is, however, a legislative issue. As long as the Social Security Administration can pay benefits out of payroll taxes and its cash reserve, there’s no need for Congress to vote each year to authorize benefits — they just keep going out until further notice. However, once those resources become insufficient, benefits will fall —by 17 percent according to the Trustees — unless Congress passes new legislation that ‘tops up’ Social Security’s finances. sYet the current administration and Republican party are such extremists that there is a real risk that Social Security will be held hostage on behalf of their goals.” • Such extremists. That’s not wrong, but the only thing that stopped Bill Clinton from gutting Social Security was Monica Lewinsky (thank you, Monica). Obama, too, tried for a Grand Bargain. Then came Sanders (thank you, Bernie). So guess Clinton and Obama were extremists too (and from the standpoint of those dependent on Social Security checks, they most certainly were).

“Social Security benefits and costs are perfectly reasonable — no case exists for massive cuts” [Alicia H. Munnel, MarketWatch]. “The U.S. has a wide range in earnings, and workers’ earnings are strongly correlated with life expectancy.” Oh. More: “A situation where low earners die early and high earners live much longer undermines many of the progressive aspects of the benefit design. The challenge in putting together a solvency package for Social Security is to correct a structure that increasingly benefits higher earners.” • Well worth a read.

Geopolitics

“Trump Says U.S. Will Hit Iran Again Tonight, Eyes Control of Its Oil Sector” [OliPrice.com]. “Trump threatened on Truth Social to seize Kharg Island — the hub for roughly 90% of Iran’s crude exports — and take ‘total control’s of Iran’s oil and gas markets, drawing an explicit comparison to the U.S. operation in Venezuela. The post followed a fresh round of U.S. strikes Wednesday and Iran declaring the Strait of Hormuz closed; Trump told Fox News the U.S. would strike Iran ‘very hard tonight’ if Tehran does not sign a peace deal. Oil markets were largely unmoved, with Brent and WTI both down about 0.6% on the day — a sign traders are still pricing in a deal, even as the ceasefire continues to erode.” • I think Mr. Market is right on that one.

“Exporting the Abraham Accords: The Hidden Network Converging on Albania’s Shoreline” [21st Century Wire]. “A quiet stretch of Albania’s Adriatic coast is being reshaped by two luxury tourism projects: a vast resort planned on the Zvërnec peninsula south of Vlorë, and a 1.4-billion-euro island complex backed by Jared Kushner on nearby Sazan Island. One site lies inside a protected wetland landscape, the other on a decommissioned military island tied to the same coastal ecosystem and tourism frontier, and together they have turned a once obscure corner of the country into a test case for how much of Albania’s coastline can be handed to strategic investors.” But: “Zvërnec and Sazan are sold as separate developments with different land questions and different legal treatment. The paperwork points elsewhere: the same Dutch layer, the same partially hidden Albanian participation, overlapping foreign partners and, on the Sazan side, the Albanian state itself.” More: “The 2026 Zvërnec protests began as local resistance in the villages of Zvërnec and Nartë and widened into a national issue after clashes near the project site drew country-wide attention. Demonstrators in Tirana rallied under the slogan “Albania is not for sale,” marching to the prime minister’s office and casting the fight as a defence of public coastline and protected landscape rather than a narrow dispute over property titles.” But: “Foreign policy also runs through the projects. Albania has deepened ties with Israel in recent years… Kushner’s presence sits inside that wider shift.” • Sounds like a test bed for Gaza, but also similar to what Trump had in mind for Kim Il Sung….

Business Sentiment

“The Lay of the Land” [Dean Baker, Real World Economics]. “The US economy has had two major bubbles in the last three decades. There are signs that we are in the midst of a third…. In the late 1990s there was a tech bubble, driven to a large extent by excitement over the potential of the Internet…. The collapse of the bubble was a huge hit to the economy and the labor market. Measured by output, the recession that took place in 2001 due to the collapse was relatively mild, but measured by employment, it was huge. Job growth turned negative in March of 2001…. The recovery from the collapse of the tech bubble was driven by the growth of a massive housing bubble, as inflation-adjusted house prices rose by 70 percent from 1996 to 2006, after being roughly flat for the prior century. Over the years from 2007 to 2010, most of this increase was reversed…. The unemployment rate peaked at 10.0 percent in October of 2009. Job growth for 2008-10 was more than 12 million below projections. Millions of people also lost their homes.” Thanks, Obama! More: “This recent history is important to keep in mind as we look at the AI bubble. The bubble is arguably even larger relative to the economy than the tech bubble when it peaked in 2000.” And: “It is impossible to know the timing for when a bubble will collapse. A quarter of a century later, it is still not possible to identify any event that caused the 1990s tech bubble to collapse. It’s also not clear what caused the housing bubble to stop growing and start deflating.” • It’s almost like capital is too important to be left to capitalists.

“Why has youth unemployment risen so dramatically? It may not be AI” [HR Dive]. “Remote work may explain up to 64% of the recent rise in unemployment among recent college graduates, according to an analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Researchers compared unemployment rates among younger and experienced workers in ‘remotable’ jobs — those that can easily be done remotely — and ‘non-remotable’ jobs, finding that younger workers’ unemployment rate went up one percentage point in remotable jobs, while older workers’ unemployment rate in those jobs slightly declined. Younger workers’ unemployment rate fared better in non-remotable occupations, researchers found. The dynamics at play suggest the rise in remote work has hurt younger workers by making training and mentorship more difficult.” • Hmm.

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 27 Neutral (previous close: 27 Fear) [CNN]. One week ago: 53 (Greed). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). • Still dropping! This with all these ginormous IPOs coming up?

Business: AI

“Chatbots Keep Telling Stories About Lighthouse Keeper ‘Elias Thorne’. We Might Know Why” [404 Media]. “Depending on which chatbot you ask, Elias Thorne might be a clockmaker, a lighthouse keeper, or a librarian. But if you ask ChatGPT or any of the other popular large language models to tell you a story, there’s a good chance he’ll appear, unbidden. And Elias’s stories are flooding the self-published AI generated book market, Youtube, and fake news sites.” More: “In late May, researchers Sil Hamilton and David Mimno at Cornell University’s Department of Information Science published their paper, “Elias in the Lighthouse, Again?” on the preprint repository arXiv. They sampled 20,000 total stories from OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini, and the Allen Institute for AI’s chatbot using five prompts, and found that the same 11 words—names like Elias, Mara, and Elara, and occupations like lighthouse keeper, clockmaker, and librarian—appear in more than 88% of generated stories, with little difference between models. Unite.ai1 covered the study shortly after it was published.” And: “ ‘Model development today is like a big family tree. Most models are related to each other because developers synthesize a lot of training data with models even from different companies,’ Hamilton told me in an email. He, Mimno, and their colleague Rebecca M. M. Hicke found this in a 2025 paper where they looked at specific words used across models. OpenAI’s first ChatGPT model, GPT-3.5, is the root of the family tree because it was used to make WildChat, a training set that’s since been used to make other training sets. ‘WildChat contains 1 million real conversations with ChatGPT, and 166 of these contain the name ‘Elias’ like here and here,’ Hamilton added. ‘These are written in that familiar ‘lighthouse’ style. Models trained on WildChat copied this style, and developers unwittingly replicated it when using those models to generate newer datasets. It’s like a virus.’” • It’s not like a virus at all. It’s like autocoprophagy (eating your own sh*it). And a million conversations isn’t a large number at all (as 166 skewing the entire AI universe toward a monoculture of lighthouses proves).

Not only is AI is selling hundred dollar bills for five bucks, like Ed Zitron said: You can’t even make back the five bucks!

“Your Search Results Are Getting Sloptimized” [The Atlantic]. “Because AI tools serve you answers instead of sending you to other sites, they choke off clicks to the rest of the web. When a Google search triggers an AI response, other sites get about half the traffic of a traditional search result, Tom Critchlow, a former executive vice president at the online-ad network Raptive, told me. Links from ChatGPT account for less than 0.5 percent of traffic across Raptive’s network of 6,500 independent publishers. Sites that rely on search traffic, such as blogs and news outlets, are especially suffering.” • That’s one reason reverting to blogging c. 2003 is important. “If your business depends on a platform, you don’t have a business.”

“Synthetic identity fraud surges as criminals weaponize AI: study” [CFO Dive]. “Synthetic identity fraud, in which criminals build fake identities using a mix of real and fabricated data, is emerging as a major driver of financial crime as generative artificial intelligence accelerates its scale and sophistication, according to a new report from Mitek and Datos Insights. U.S. unsecured credit losses tied to synthetic identity fraud are projected to exceed $3.1 billion in 2026, up from $1.8 billion in 2020, according to the research, which describes the trend as a ‘defining strategic threat for financial institutions.’ The losses are largely driven by application fraud, in which synthetic identities are used to open credit cards, personal loans and other lending products not backed by collateral.”

The Gallery

“The tedious power of storytelling” [Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic]. “For [Brian] Eno, art is ‘everything you don’t have to do.’ You have to wear clothes to protect yourself from the elements, but you don’t need to adorn those clothes. You need to speak to make yourself understood by the people around you, but you don’t have to sing or write poetry or make up stories. This is a really critical point, and I think it can be further refined by this: ‘Art is intended to make other people feel something.’ This distinguishes ‘art’ from ‘beauty.’ A sunset can be beautiful, but no one intends anything by it. An artist who takes a photo or paints a picture of a sunset does so in the hopes that it will make you feel something, but the sun and the atmosphere and the Earth’s curvature and rotation don’t hope anything, because they are inanimate. This distinction has lately become far more significant, thanks to the rise of images and words that have the seeming of intent, but who don’t have an intender.” And: “So when the AI expands the three sentences in your prompt into 100,000 words or 1,000,000 pixels, it isn’t adding any of its intention to the finished work, it’s diluting the intention you fed to it. Three sentences divided by one million pixels yields an image that has an average intentionality that’s so low that it’s practically homeopathic.” • Ouch!

I love a garden path:

The Conservatory

“Massive Attack stage graphic creates ‘illusion of data being harvested’ from audience” [Dezeen]. Pretty neat:

Just for grins, an old favorite (hat tip Mark Ames, IIRC):

More prophetic than ever!

Photo Book

“17 down, 27 more to go” [Manuel Moreale]. A photo walk: “The trail goes through the buildings, neat! So many old and abandoned buildings. Makes me kinda sad. But I get it, life up here ain’t exactly easy, or practical”:

An interesting genre, a photowalk. Perhaps readers have done one?

Climate

“The ominous sign a SUPER El Niño is inching closer: Satellite image reveals how large areas of the Atlantic Ocean are 5°C hotter than usual – suggesting the unusual climate event could be imminent” [Daily Mail]. “Large areas of the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea are currently 5°C (9°F) hotter than usual, amid warnings a Super El Niño is imminent. Satellite images show an ongoing marine heatwave off the northern and western coasts of France, the southern coast of Spain and in the sea off Monaco. The waters off the coast of Dover, Eastbourne and Brighton are also significantly warmer than usual, with areas of dark red indicating soaring temperatures. And it comes amid warnings that a ‘Super El Niño’ – marked by sustained warm temperatures across the Pacific Ocean – is inching closer. Experts from the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) recently predicted there is an 80 per cent likelihood of the weather phenomenon occurring during June–August 2026. Current signs point to this year being one of the strongest El Niño patterns ever recorded.” • But at the same time—

“Mysterious North Atlantic ‘cold blob’ signals growing risk of major ocean current collapse: What’s happening?” [WION]. “Scientists have discovered a strange anomaly in the North Atlantic, situated south of Greenland, where a ‘cold blob’ of ocean and air is cooling down while the rest of the world is experiencing a rise in temperature. Researchers used satellite data, multiple reanalysis records, and ocean heat content data extending back to 1955, in order to figure out the driving forces behind the blob.” More: “Up to this point, scientists have long debated two possible causes behind the Atlantic Ocean’s “cold blob”: either reduced heat transport into the region by ocean currents or increased heat loss from the ocean surface. The latest findings support the former theory, suggesting results support the first explanation, and they conclude that we’re now very close to a dangerous tipping point.” And: ” A complete collapse of the [Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation] could trigger far-reaching impacts, including much colder, harsher winters, with significant changes in global weather patterns, ecosystems, and food security across Europe.” • Good thing Europe will have to use expensive American gas for heating!

“UK Court Recognizes Climate Migration as a Human Right: FA v. the Secretary of State for the Home Department (2025)” [Climate Law]. “In November 2025, one of the first climate-related asylum appeals was reviewed in the UK, by the UK’s First-tier Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber) and approved on human rights grounds. In FA v Secretary of State for the Home Department (SSHD), the appellant (FA) argued that climate-related hardship, poor mental health relating to the loss of his house to a typhoon, and family (partner) separation would constitute a violation of his human rights if he were returned to the Philippines, particularly the right to private and family life (Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)). The Tribunal Judge determined that the individual would be allowed to remain in the UK, preventing his removal back to his home country, the Philippines.” • Hmm.

Groves of Academe

“My Students Can’t Read” [Chronicle of Higher Education]. “ix weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it. When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them. Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires. In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem ‘intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.’ Crucially, he added that this is ‘not a matter of laziness on the part of the students’ but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build. The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400.” Maybe I should pivot to video. This is especially important because when the Jackpot does hit, and digital access suddenly becomes a luxury, most of the world’s knowledge will be locked up in paper books, some of great length.” Causes? Smartphones. generative AI. And: “the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling ‘evidence’ from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on ‘finding the main idea’ in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning.” And finally: “A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.” • Yiles

Class Warfare

“She Was One of Obama’s Top Lawyers. How Did She Get Tangled Up With Epstein?” [New York Times]. “One of the ways Jeffrey Epstein infiltrated America’s elite was by giving important people what they wanted — private plane travel for Bill Clinton, research funding for Harvard professors and donations for the leaders of world-renowned museums. He drew them into his orbit using the gravitational pull of his wealth and rarefied social network. They reciprocated not necessarily because they liked him, but because it was their business to know people like him. In theory, Kathy Ruemmler — the top lawyer at Goldman Sachs and a White House counsel under President Barack Obama — should have been the last person to fall for Mr. Epstein’s charms. She had prosecuted white-collar criminals, risen to the highest levels of the Justice Department and built a sterling reputation as a defense lawyer in the private sector.” But: “The Epstein files, however, paint a damning picture of their relationship. Among their emails were elliptical messages about ‘girls’ (‘careful i will renew an old habit,’ he once wrote [Yikes!!]), sharp criticisms of the lawyers representing Mr. Epstein’s accusers (‘Victim’s rights, my ass’) and discordant terms of endearment (‘sweetie,’ [(!)] ‘Uncle Jeffrey’ [(!!)]). He gave her gifts, including luxury handbags and a fur coat, and offered her career advice. At one point Mr. Epstein designated her as the backup executor of his will.” And: “Ms. Ruemmler has been criticized by politicians and commentators for consorting with Mr. Epstein, but outside of the media spotlight (and off the record), most white-collar lawyers I know have been unwilling to condemn her. That is not because they are sympathetic to Mr. Epstein or friendly with Ms. Ruemmler, but because doing business with Mr. Epstein, and people like him [Oh? “Like him” in what way, exactly?], was business as usual for the top ranks of the legal profession. It most likely remains so to this day.” • It really is like “Murder on the Orient Express.” They’re all in on it.

“Mapped: Where the World’s Ultra-Rich Live in 2026” [Visual Capitalist]. “This [table] shows where the world’s ultra-rich live in 2026, based on data from the Knight Frank’s Wealth Report 2026. The report defines ultra-high-net-worth individuals as those with at least $30 million in net assets.” • That’s all? The numbers for billionaires are, therefore, much much smaller (Elon’s net worth is $782 billion-with-a-b). “There are not very many of the Shing.”

• Of course, at a certain level of accumulation, your “country,” where “you live,” is just a flag of convenience. Witness Thiel skedaddling for Argentina.

“Why Do Butlers Wear White Gloves?’ [Mental Floss]. “Few motifs signal old money quite like a pair of spotless white gloves presenting a polished silver tray. Whether you’re watching Downton Abbey or checking into a five-star hotel, it’s the exact look we all associate with luxury.” However: “Because footmen [not butlers!] did the heavy lifting—like carrying hot trays and washing dishes—the fabric protected their hands from burns while simultaneously concealing unsightly marks of manual labor from guests.” But: “So, when did the head of the household staff finally put on the gloves? Like many sudden societal shifts, it happened during a deadly global pandemic…. Following the Spanish flu outbreak of 1918, wealthy homeowners became obsessed with hygiene. To quell the anxieties of the upper crust, butlers gave into the gloves, finally pulling them on as a silent promise that no bare fingers were touching the silverware.” • The wealthy, apparently, believe deeply in fomite transmission. Still true today!

News of the Wired

“CrankGPT is a fully offline and off-the-grid AI box” [CrankGPT]. “There’s no battery or cloud. Just a hand crank, a little computer, and a small stack of speech and language models running locally. Provided the electronics are kept dry and at a reasonable temperature, there’s no reason this thing won’t still work in a thousand years.” • I don’t know how to display *.mp4 (or even whether I want to). But there is a cute image on the site.

NOTES

1 Use the ChatBot, Luddite:

Plantidote of the Day

Via The Beeman:

The Beeman writes: “Hi Lambert - this is Dog the Cat sitting in our strawberry patch under the grape vine. The only thing keeping us sane these days is working the garden. The strawberries and grape vine ‘took off like a rocket’ a month or so ago…..” • Mixing our genres here….

Kind readers, I am running short! Send your plantidotes as attachments to lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [AT] protonmail [DOT] com. And if you put “Plant” or “Plantidote” in the subject line, I’ll be less likely to lose it. Gardens are fine. Gardening season approaches, at least in the Northeast! Fungi and lichen are honorary plants.