From Redfin:
U.S. Luxury Home Prices Jump 5.5% in October, Triple the Pace of Non-Luxury Homes
U.S. luxury home sale prices rose 5.5% year over year to a median $1.28 million, a record high for the month of October. Luxury home prices are growing roughly three times faster than non-luxury prices, which rose 1.8% to a median of $373,249.
That’s according to an analysis of home sales from August through October 2025. Redfin defines luxury homes as those estimated to be in the top 5% of their metro area’s price range, while non-luxury homes fall into the middle 35th–65th percentile. All figures are based on rolling three-month periods and are subject to revision.
Price growth at the high end outpaced the middle of the market again in October, a trend that has persisted for much of the past two years. The difference in price growth between luxury and non-luxury homes underscores how differently wealthy buyers are behaving compared with typical move-up or first-time buyers.
“Luxury buyers are still able to move forward in ways that many typical buyers can’t right now, whether that’s because they’re paying in cash, benefiting from stock-market gains, or taking out smaller loans,” said Redfin Senior Economist Sheharyar Bokhari. “Those advantages make them less sensitive to high mortgage rates, which helps keep demand at the top of the market steadier. In contrast, a lot of middle-income buyers are holding off until monthly payments come down or their financial outlook improves.”
Closed sales in both the luxury and non-luxury segments rose from a year earlier, but remain close to their lowest October levels over the past decade. Luxury home sales were up 2.9% year over year and non-luxury sales rose 0.7%, but both increases are off historically low baselines as higher mortgage rates and elevated prices continue to suppress overall activity.
“The luxury market has been a little more protected over the past year, compared to non-luxury or starter homes,” said Jonathan Buch, a Redfin Premier Agent in West Palm Beach, FL. “Affordability challenges have made it more difficult to sell homes priced under $800,000, but high-end properties are still moving.”
Did the Mamdani meeting happen after MTG resigned? Because it sure feels like Trump put on that whole show out of spite to the MAGA party. Or did I have that backwards, and she resigned out of spite?
Nice to see Trump crossing the aisle, building bridges. Wonder if he is going to have tea with AOC next? Maybe he will, and we’d see a few more resignations.
Glad I don’t live in the US right now. No starter homes here. You buy your first house and then live with it.
MGT gonna align with Tucker Carlson and make a presidential run.
The youth like him. I hear them.
Women are very attracted to pensions.
The only reason she’s stepping down on January 5, 2026 is because January 3, 2026 she’ll be vested and receive a lifetime pension. That’s not working for the people that’s called working the system. It’s no wonder the American public are disgusted with congress.
Because it sure feels like Trump put on that whole show out of spite to the MAGA party.
Remember what Don Corleone said? Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. 1) Show the world you’ll “work with the guy” and meet him in the middle while sticking it up MSNBC and CNN’s @ss. 2) Prop the guy up and let him hang himself, not before he’s confirmed as the supreme head of the democrat party. 3) When Mondany’s plans crash or never get off the ground, remind the world that commun1sm and more importantly, the democrat party is a losing proposition. He painted the guy into a corner. Checkmate.
Or did I have that backwards, and she resigned out of spite?
She announced her resignation on the 21st; the commun1st asked for a meeting with Trump on the 17th.
Free Palestine! My Eggs!! My 401K! Me toooo!! Fasc1sts!! Rac1sts! H1tler!! Release the Epsteen chronicles!! Black Lives Matter! They/them/thou/me/his/her/is/am/are/were/be/being/been/bam/bang/boom!!
The party of misf1ts.
Dark: She was only in office for approximately 5 years, it won’t be huge, but a nice annuity. Meanwhile we have Republicans and Democrats who have been in office for years will be collecting big pensions. And of course Nancy Pelosi and her stock portfolio.
I’m way past it, but the young women I work with are livid at Trump and the republicans over being told they aren’t professionals by him and his cohorts.
I don’t think any women I work with now will ever vote republican.
Riverton the 400-acre development in no man’s land just over the Parkway bridge in Sayerville, is starting to finally take shape.
The Bass Pro Shops store is up should be opening soon.
https://www.facebook.com/watch?v=2013820422744007
Trump and his cohorts have messed with their ability to increase their education.
They were chatting like crazy about it. Another finger, another hornet’s nest.
Guess that is how you get more Mickie Sherrills into positions of power.
3b
MTG did pretty well herself as a Congresscritter. Net worth of 700K to 25 million in less than 5 years. I’m sure its all on the up and up.
Huges – She owns 50% stake in her family’s construction business. That on paper increased, how does it become worth $25 million on paper? That is allot of remodeling work.
Taylor Commercial, Inc., a family-run construction business
Residential – Ceilings, Countertops, Finish Carpentry, Flooring, Metals, Painting and Coatings, Plaster and Gypsum Board, Plastic Composite Fabrications, Tile, Wall Finishes
Happy Holidays.
Two of New Jersey’s largest pharmaceutical companies have announced more layoffs for the start of 2026.
Bristol Myers Squibb and Merck and Co. submitted notices to the New Jersey Department of Labor that they will be cutting more than 300 jobs between January and mid-May.
I guess she should have pulled herself up by her bootstraps. Some are greedy for money, others are greedy for food.
A 14-year-old girl was allegedly kept locked in her bedroom with surveillance cameras and starved for at least two years by her morbidly obese family who ordered ‘multiple daily grocery deliveries.’
The youngster weighed just 35lbs and was on the brink of death when police found her at home in Wisconsin after a 911 call from her father.
She was taken to hospital where she told staff she believed the last time she had gone outside the home was when she was either ten or 12 years old, according to a criminal complaint
Dark: Dedicated to women
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10156217768525282&vanity=henryhanger
Chicago,
That video. Is that something spreading amongst the republican community where they have banned abortion?
NJ baby
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtiqA4ifbro
Hughes: I never said it was, but if it’s not, then she is as brilliant in stock trading as Nancy Pelosi, excuse me Nancy Pelosi s husband. I am sure Nancy’s position had nothing to do with the success. All on the up and up according to Nancy.
40 percent of the Amazon announced layoffs are engineering positions.
Actual reason for its second major mass layoffs in just two years??
H-1B? Last five years it’s been approved for 40k+ NEW H-1B visas, more than any other U.S. company.
https://x.com/PlanetOfMemes/status/1991993469804720134?s=20
Here is the Amazon Data for the last five years of H-1B Applications.
States of Washington and Virgina only.
They have replaced a large chunk of American workers with H-1B. They are the largest H-1B sponsor.
https://ibb.co/MybSg0m4
Juice: Thought it would be Apple before Amazon. Trump says we need these visa s because there is no talent in the USA. What a guy, so much for America and Americans first. Of course the Democrats are no better.
Can’t help yourself. Criticize democrats, end of sentence. Criticize republicans, but also have to criticize democrats.
No visible bias
Some One: What is your point? I have been criticizing both for years. I end on criticizing the Democrats to emphasize they are no better, as some believe they are . You on the other hand never criticize the Democratic, so it’s obvious I do in fact need to emphasize the Democrats are no better. It makes perfect sense.
THE STUPID ISSUE (From The Atlantic)
A Theory of Dumb
It’s not just screens or COVID or too-strong weed. Maybe the culprit of our cognitive decline is unfettered access to each other.
This article was featured in New York’s One Great Story newsletter.
Experts were sure that the 20th century would make us stupid. Never before had culture and technology reshaped daily life so quickly, and every new invention brought with it a panic over the damage it was surely causing to our fragile, defenseless brains. Lightbulbs, radio, comic books, movies, TV, rock and roll, video games, calculators, pornography on demand, dial-up internet, the Joel Schumacher Batmans — all of these things, we were plausibly warned, would turn us into drooling idiots.
The test results told a different story. In the 1930s, in the U.S. and across much of the developed world, IQ scores started creeping upward — and they kept on going, rising on average by roughly three points per decade. These gains accumulated such that even an unexceptional bozo from the turn of the millennium would, on paper, look like a genius compared to his Depression-era ancestors. This phenomenon came to be known as the Flynn effect, after the late James Flynn, the social scientist who noticed it in the 1980s.
Because these leaps appeared over just a few generations, Flynn ruled out genetics as their cause. Evolutionary change takes hundreds of thousands of years, and the humans of 1900 and 2000 were running on the same basic mental hardware. Instead, he posited that there had been a kind of software update, uploaded to the collective mind by modern life itself. Better education trained students to reason with hypotheticals instead of just memorizing facts. Office and industrial jobs required workers to grapple with ideas rather than physical objects. Mass media exposed audiences to unfamiliar places and perspectives. People got better at classifying, generalizing, and thinking beyond their own daily experience, which are some of the basic skills IQ tests are designed to measure. Flynn liked to illustrate this shift from literalism toward abstraction with the example that, a century ago, if you asked someone what dogs and rabbits have in common, they might answer “Dogs hunt rabbits,” not “They’re both mammals.”
Maybe, then, all the noise and novelty wasn’t rotting our minds but upgrading them. (Studies suggest that better nutrition and reduced exposure to lead may have also helped.) In any case, the Flynn effect held steady for so long and through so many apparent threats that there was no reason to believe it wouldn’t last forever, even if, someday, somebody invented a chatbot that could do homework or Theo Von started podcasting.
Or so thought Elizabeth Dworak, now an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s medical school, when she chose the topic of her 2023 master’s thesis. She decided to analyze the results of 394,378 IQ tests taken in the U.S. between 2006 and 2018 to see if they exhibited the same climb. “I had all this cognitive data and thought, Hey, there’s probably a Flynn effect in there,” she says. But when she ran the numbers, “I felt like I was in Don’t Look Up,” the movie in which an astronomy grad student played by Jennifer Lawrence discovers a comet speeding toward Earth. “I spent weeks going back through all the code. I thought I’d messed something up and would have to delay submitting. But then I showed my adviser, and he said, ‘Nope, your math is right.’”
The math showed declines in three important testing categories, including matrix reasoning (abstract visual puzzles), letter and number series (pattern recognition), and verbal reasoning (language-based problem-solving). The first two, in which losses were deepest, measure what psychologists call fluid intelligence, or the power to adapt to new situations and think on the fly. The drops showed up across age, gender, and education level but were most dramatic among 18-to-22-year-olds and those with the least amount of schooling.
Dworak knows what her findings suggest, but as a scientist, she’s required to add a few caveats. First, scores weren’t down in every category. They rose in spatial reasoning, or the ability to mentally rotate 3-D objects, which is crucial for playing Fortnite. Second, her data came from voluntary unproctored online tests. “This wasn’t like an SAT. Somebody could have been taking it on a bus,” she says. “But I did have almost 400,000 data points.” Third and most important, “we can’t exactly say that people are getting dumber, just that scores in these categories are going down.” IQ has always been a rough proxy for intelligence, less a direct gauge than a reflection of certain mental habits that society rewards. Its scales are renormalized every decade or so and its meaning constantly debated among statisticians, some of whom still wonder if both the original Flynn effect and its reversal might owe more to inconsistent methodology than to real cognitive change.
“So I spoke with reviewers who were really well established in the field, and I got great feedback, and I was able to add some wonderful nuance so I wasn’t just publishing clickbait,” says Dworak. “And then after the paper came out, it was funny. Most of the reaction among both academics and laymen was like, ‘Oh, IQ scores are down? I could have told you that.’”
The world is dumber, and we all know it. Lately, it feels like that culturewide upgrade to our mental operating systems has been rolled back to an older and buggier version.
Stupidity, like intelligence, is a nebulous thing, hard to define but easy to spot in the wild. It’s not just that children have been bombing their standardized tests (ACT scores are at their lowest in more than 30 years, and high-school seniors’ average math scores in a national exam were the lowest since 2005) or that more than a quarter of U.S. adults now read at the lowest proficiency level. It’s also that in nearly all aspects of life, we’re opting for routines, entertainment, and entire belief systems that ask less and less of our brains. The stigma that was once attached to ignorance has disappeared, and the loudest and least informed voices now shape the conversation, forcing everyone else to learn to speak their language.
For example, polls suggest as much as a quarter of the electorate is now composed of so-called low-information voters — the type who can’t name their representatives and get most of their news from memes but tend to be more persuadable than their better-informed neighbors. That makes them all-powerful in swing elections, provided campaigns can reach them with a message simple and arousing enough to resonate with what little else they know.
In finance, economic fundamentals have become meaningless as investors have adopted the Dada-esque illogic of crypto, treating the stock market like a Ouija board and moving their money wherever they assume the stupidest among them will. The latest result is a Ponzi-shaped AI bubble that almost nobody can justify with a straight face. Yet when Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, the premier AI stock, was recently photographed eating at a Korean-fried-chicken restaurant, shares of unrelated Korean-fried-chicken companies jumped up to 30 percent, which, by the rules of the current market, seems perfectly rational.
It’s tempting to blame all this on the pandemic, an unprecedented stress test on human minds. We emerged blinking into the daylight after spending years on our couches, staring into screens, and repeatedly catching a virus with neurological side effects only to find that our attention spans had been chopped in half, our kids’ grades had cratered, and all of our friends had spent their lockdowns woodshedding some pretty wild theories about 5G and pasteurized milk. But while that lost stretch surely did damage, the brain fog we stumbled into had been gathering for years. The trend lines were in place well before 2020.
This probably isn’t evolution, either. We’re not living in an Idiocracy-style scenario where the dumbest people are just having more babies. A 2018 study of Norwegian families found that both the long rise and the recent decline in IQ scores have been observed within families; children were scoring higher or lower than their parents in ways that matched broader trends. So if, as James Flynn argued, the IQ surge of the 20th century was caused by environmental factors, its reversal almost certainly is too.
Those environmental factors could include anything from changes in education, nutrition, family structure, and economic pressures to a cocktail of potentially brain-damaging exposures — microplastics, antidepressants, wildfire smoke. But in 2025, the consensus is that the factor to blame is the thing in our pockets.
For most of us, our phone has become both an external hard drive, storing everything we used to remember, and a portable Las Vegas, ensuring we never have to suffer a boring minute. It feels like it must be frying some cognitive circuitry, but proving that in a lab has been harder than expected. The brain is a noisy, high-variance organ, and most of the research on it is observational. A 2022 analysis in Nature found that many of the studies of the past two decades linking behavior to brain structure or function were too small to be trusted, usually based on just a couple dozen participants. To detect real effects with confidence, you’d need a sample size into the thousands. (This hasn’t stopped papers from generating splashy headlines about how smartphones and their apps are allegedly “rewiring our brains.”) Even the entrenched idea that social media floods our reward centers with dopamine — similar to drugs, sex, or gambling — is on shaky ground. “I’m not aware of any within-person study that shows dopamine levels modulate as a function of social-media consumption,” says Scott Marek, a researcher at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and a co-author of the 2022 Nature paper.
But even if our phones aren’t literally resculpting our gray matter, most of us assume they must be contributing to some kind of cognitive atrophy by distracting us from more mentally demanding activities. That idea agrees with some of the data — including a recent poll showing that the number of Americans who read for pleasure has fallen by 40 percent over the past two decades — but it might also be a bit self-flattering. It’s not as if, before the release of the iPhone, we were all sitting around doing recreational calculus or working our way through Finnegans Wake. If you dig into that poll, it turns out that only 28 percent of Americans say they were reading books for fun back in 2004, and that year most of them were probably just reading The Da Vinci Code.
A lot of today’s thinking on our digitally addled state leans heavily on Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, the hepcat media theorists who taught us, in the decades before the internet, that every new medium changes the way we think. They weren’t wrong — and it’s a shame neither of them lived long enough to warn society about video podcasts — but they were operating in a world where the big leap was from books to TV, a gentle transition compared to what came later. As a result, much of the current commentary still fixates on devices and apps, as if the physical delivery mechanism were the whole story. But the deepest transformation might be less technological than social: the volume of human noise we’re now wired into.
Maybe it’s not that our cognitive software has been downgraded so much as we’ve turned off our firewalls. Everybody in the developed world now has Airdrop access to everyone else’s mind. If we are getting dumber, there’s a good chance we made each other that way.
The human brain reached something like its modern form at least 10,000 years ago, by the end of the Upper Paleolithic period, when people lived in tribes of between 20 and 50 and rarely ran into anyone else. We were programmed by evolution to process the faces, feelings, and gossip of small groups. Even as recently as the 1990s, most people interacted with only their relatives, co-workers, and friends each day, plus maybe their local news anchor on TV. Now, though, those same Paleolithic brains are being bombarded with the thoughts of hundreds of strangers every hour. Modern communication in all its forms has put us in contact with more minds than we were built to handle, and our own seem to be wilting under the load.
Not so long ago, the dolts among us were free to think their thoughts quietly to themselves with no easy way to share them. At worst, a person would usually just embarrass himself in front of his own family or bowling team. Bad ideas had a harder time scaling and reproducing, so lots of stupidity stayed local, and everyone else could happily overestimate the average person’s intelligence because they saw less of it. But then we connected everyone on the planet and gave them each the equivalent of their own printing press, radio station, and TV network. Now, even those with nothing useful to say can tell the whole world exactly, or more often vaguely, what they think.
To be clear, this isn’t nostalgia for a time when fewer voices were heard. The widening of the conversation has been, in some ways, a good thing: more perspectives, more accountability, the Rizzler’s TikToks. But the downside is that we can see the full distribution of human thought in one infinite scroll, and it turns out the median is lower than we ever could’ve imagined. In theory, this is the democratization of expression. In practice, it feels like a crowdsourced lobotomy.
You’re too old and blind to remember or notice things correctly. Someone, pun intended, has been posting without the hyphen. You don’t even know who you are responding to.
But let’s get back to your brilliant logic. Some people here, long time posters who love calling people names, believe Republicans are better. Where’s your concern with that?
What did you say the other day? Oh I remember. You thought people calling others names was rude and should stop. But then it changed to it’s okay as long as it’s not directed at you.
The problem isn’t any one device or platform or influencer, and you can’t escape it just by quitting Instagram or unsubscribing from all your paid newsletters. The unavoidable reality is that a massive decentralized swarm of people is now talking, arguing, and opining all at once, everywhere, all the time. And if you want to say anything, or simply understand what’s going on, you have to pass through them. The medium is still the message, but the medium, today, is the mob.
This might seem like something that’s been happening for a while, and it has been, but some recent shifts suggest we’ve crossed a kind of threshold. In June, the Reuters Institute reported that social media is now Americans’ main source of news, surpassing legacy outlets for the first time. TikTok is a trusted news source for 17 percent of people worldwide. And even those numbers undersell how dramatic the transition has been and how weird our informational ecosystem has become. The shrinking ranks of traditional media have hidden themselves behind paywalls, and changes to the recommendation engines at Google, Facebook, and X have made it harder than ever for readers to even find their work, assuming anyone cares to when their feeds are already overflowing with entertainment, nonsense, and infinite subgenres of increasingly specific pornography. And layered on top of all that is President Trump’s ongoing embrace of Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” strategy, which fills every channel with static and then cranks up the volume.
To push any nutritional information through the noise, what you need isn’t expertise or reporting or original thought; it’s compression. The winners are the people who can boil complicated phenomena down to the smallest units: a podcaster summarizing a secondhand anecdote, a TikToker explaining geopolitics in 23 seconds, a quote tweet of a screenshot of an excerpt, a top Reddit comment, a YouTube essay plagiarizing that Reddit comment, a bar chart that somehow encapsulates everything about the moment we’re living in. Our first point of contact with most information is rarely the information itself but some lossily compressed derivative that’s already been processed and strained through a dozen layers of reinterpretation.
As a consumer, it’s hard to escape this cycle, since in their fight for survival, traditional outlets have themselves joined the race to compress themselves and reprocess. There’s less reporting and more commentary about reporting, and sometimes just commentary about that commentary. What used to be a pyramid of original reporting topped by a layer of interpretation has flipped upside down into a wide base of takes wobbling on a shrinking nub of facts.
Not all of this summarizing is bad, and plenty of it is necessary. But when each filter compresses and distorts what came before it, the compressions and distortions add up. Try to follow anything — a scientific paper, a celebrity quote, a breaking-news headline — as it moves through the internet’s intestines, and you’ll see its meaning disintegrate. Each leap between one aggregator and the next and across different platforms results in new mutations and misunderstandings.
Ask Dworak. When her paper on the reverse Flynn effect was published in 2023, it was picked up by the parenting website Fatherly, which, to its credit, at least tried to preserve some of her nuance. The site’s blog post explained that a decline in IQ scores doesn’t necessarily mean people are becoming less intelligent, but it ran under a slightly confusing curiosity-gap headline, “American IQs Are Dropping. Here’s Why It Might Not Be a Bad Thing.” Then, Dworak says, “Tucker Carlson, who was still on Fox News at the time, did a segment about the study and cited the Fatherly article.” Somehow viewers took Dworak to be claiming it was good that IQ scores were falling — “so I got a bunch of tweets calling me despicable.”
We’ve become so accustomed to this churn that much of what we know, or think we know, now consists of confabulations that have built up over years. The collective knowledge base has been overwritten with received wisdom, fourth-hand opinions, and counterintuitive pop social science that flatters our cleverness while sparing us the effort of understanding anything deeply. In an increasingly complex world, the metaphors we use to explain it keep getting cruder. Any process that turns anything to crap is “enshittification.” Every aesthetic is a “core.” The ad-driven, data-powered personalization system that rules our lives is “the algorithm.” Anything that can’t be explained via one of the above is simply “vibes.”
All of this TL;DR compression is about to be made even worse by the “slop” — another overly broad classifier — disgorged by AI large language models. But in the meantime, the technology, which also absorbs giant quantities of the internet’s excreta and tries to think with it, might offer a clue to how this environment is affecting us. We don’t yet know how similar LLMs are to the human brain; maybe the only thing they truly have in common is that we don’t fully understand how either works. But even if they don’t think like us, they seem to degrade like us.
This year, a team of researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M, and Purdue University fed LLMs months’ worth of popular or low-quality tweets — including ones categorized as “conspiracy theories, exaggerated claims, unsupported assertions” or composed in a style that does “not encourage in-depth thinking” — and found that it induced a form of what they called “brain rot.” The models exhibited “worse reasoning, poorer long-context understanding, diminished ethical norms, and emergent socially undesirable personalities.” They began to “skip thoughts,” jumping to conclusions without going through the reasoning steps that got them there. Even their algebra skills got worse. As Junyuan Hong, one of the study’s authors, explains, this “is not really what you learn from Twitter.”
Another experiment with possible implications for our brain rot was conducted by Ilia Shumailov, an AI-security scientist and former senior research scientist at Google DeepMind, who set out to understand what would happen if LLMs huffed too much of their own exhaust. Shumailov had been thinking about a Catch-22 of artificial intelligence, which goes like this: LLMs require massive amounts of high-quality human-created text to train on, which AI companies collect by scraping the internet, often indiscriminately. Now, though, a growing share of the web’s data is itself generated by AI; by one recent count, about half of the articles and listicles posted online in 2025 were written by chatbots. This means future LLMs will learn by ingesting the compressed and degraded knowledge produced by their predecessors and their own regurgitations will, in turn, train the models that follow. Over time, this feedback loop could rot the foundation of the original training data as traces of human thinking are diluted by machine-spun drivel.
To see what that might look like, Shumailov ran an experiment in which he taught ten generations of LLMs almost exclusively on text produced by their predecessors. Unsurprisingly, they got worse with each cycle. Imagine visiting a library where all the books had been replaced by high-schoolers’ book reports and then the next day finding only summaries of those reports written by raccoons. Shumailov’s models gradually lost touch with the logic of their original training data, each inheriting and amplifying the errors of the one before it. As their corpus of knowledge thinned and warped, the models became “overfit,” an AI term for when a model becomes so fixated on its narrow education that it loses the ability to generalize, like a student who can memorize the answers to a practice test but is helpless on the real one. (A separate 2021 study argued that the human brain, like an LLM, can become overfit to the repetitive specifics of daily life, making it harder to handle unfamiliar situations — so our dreams may be nature’s way of injecting some surrealist noise into our datasets to keep our cognitive machinery limber.) Eventually, they just belched out nonsense — and did so with increasing confidence. In a paper published last year, Shumailov called this “model collapse,” a process by which an AI system becomes, in his words, “poisoned with its own projection of reality.”
I floated to Shumailov my theory that humans may be in a state of model collapse; that they, too, are poisoning themselves. He says he needs to see more data. “There is definitely a lot more communication happening online, but whether the information being produced is lower quality is a question we should measure precisely, because without using the scientific method, I think it’s very hard to hypothesize,” he says. At the same time, he did find that, as his work made its way across the internet, some of its original meaning was lost. “There are as many opinions as there are people, and yes, some folks did misunderstand.”
Shumailov’s paper went viral, or at least as viral as an academic study about tainted AI-training data can go. It also became mildly controversial. Some researchers argued that his experiment was an oversimplification: After all, it’s unlikely that real human data will ever disappear completely, and big AI companies already guard against that possibility by screening their training sets for AI-generated text and weighing higher-quality sources more heavily. A different research team later ran a similar experiment but slipped a copy of the original human data into every training round, a tweak that easily prevented collapse. So for most LLMs, the danger of model collapse might be more theoretical than existential, but the irony is hard to miss. Some of the very same companies that so vigilantly protect their own LLMs from junk inputs — Google, Meta, and X, say — seem much less worried about the junk they’re feeding human users.
So maybe all the stupidity we’re feeling right now is a matter of training data. Last century’s popular media forms — books, films, TV, newspapers — demanded our attention and imagination. They made the world feel larger and more complicated than the version inside our heads. In effect, they were teaching the very abstract-reasoning skills that IQ tests measure. Today’s media does almost the opposite. Instead of expanding our sense of the world, it shrinks it down, placing each of us at the center of our own private universe, surrounded by voices that insist everything is simpler than it really is.
Then again, who cares? It feels a little quaint to worry about this stuff right now, just as all of society seems to be downgrading its view of intelligence. “My friends and I were joking about how being smart isn’t as sexy as it used to be,” Dworak tells me. “Now people just care more about things like how many subscribers you have on Twitch.”
If the Flynn effect was partly a story about society encouraging and rewarding certain cognitive habits — abstraction, analysis, sustained attention — those rewards are now disappearing. AI is encroaching on high-paying knowledge work: It is already stealing jobs from entry-level coders with doctors, lawyers, and bankers likely next. Tenured posts in academia are disappearing as schools adjunctify and research funding dries up. Anti-elitism has turned wonkishness and expertise into a political liability, which is bad news for the Democrats’ crowded bench of professorial Obama impersonators. If you’d invested a few hundred dollars into Dogecoin instead of the S&P ten years ago, you could have retired by now.
Perhaps the 21st century is teaching us to a different test. Despite what I just finished saying, there is one compressionary artifact from the internet that may perfectly encapsulate everything about our present moment: the “midwit” meme. It’s a three-panel bell curve in which a simpleton on the left makes a facile, confident claim and a serene, galaxy-brained monk on the right makes a distilled version of the same claim — while the anxious try-hard in the middle ties himself in knots pedantically explaining why the simple version is actually wrong. Who wants to be that guy?
Interesting read above.
So, what did everyone do today? Did y’all do chores, exercise, be productive? Did you look presentable while running errands? Did you stop to let someone cross? Hold a door for someone at Trader Joes? Eat healthy? Besides chores, I did a seven mile bike ride. At road crossings, only one person stopped to let me go. At one double yellow road by a bike shop, I walked the bike practically to the middle of the street as a car was approaching; they didn’t stop. He went INTO THE OTHER LANE to keep going. One more me, me, skinny, selfish d0uche bag hogging oxygen. We live in s0ciety full of selfish, fucking slobs.
I walked the bike practically to the middle of the street as a car was approaching; they didn’t stop. He went INTO THE OTHER LANE to keep going. One more me, me, skinny, selfish d0uche bag hogging oxygen. We live in s0ciety full of selfish, fucking slobs.
I was waiting at work for someone like you with broken bones to arrive. Being productive, and not riding around on a bike. Sooner or later you will end up at a facility where you will need the help of someone in my profession, that your “turd” of a leader, thinks isn’t a professional. Maybe you might just get one that isn’t. Or all of them. Why act like one when your leader says you aren’t one?
Eddie
Not wishing you harm. Just wishing your dear leader would not insult all of my colleages like this.
Oh, and that taxpayers wouln’t have to pay for things like this. Take it from their penson funds.
Firefighter sues for $25 million after surveillance video was released showing a white firefighter knotting a rope into a noose and handing it to him
Flo Rida Judge releases this one. Guess if you have a BMW, you can afford to be released after cutting someone.
Miami has “Liberal” judges?
It’s a REd state. WTH.
The woman had ended their year-and-a-half relationship after discovering Aliakseyeu was married to another woman in Pennsylvania, police wrote in the arrest report. After she relocated to Florida, she told officers he “somehow…contacted her” on Thursday, July 24, 2025, telling her to come outside the Lazul Apartments on Northeast 164th Street, where he claimed he was waiting.
When she entered the SUV, Aliakseyeu “brandished a knife and put it to her throat,” repeating the threat before overpowering her, cutting her right forearm, and pressing his knee into her throat, investigators wrote. He then pulled out an electric clipper and “began to shave off parts of her hair,” the affidavit states.
She told officers he continued punching her until she managed to escape and run back into the apartment complex. Aliakseyeu fled “in an unknown direction.”
he State of Florida filed the case on Nov. 20.
A judge found probable cause and set bond amounts totaling $16,000 on four felony counts, while the felony strangulation charge resulted in release on recognizance. Two misdemeanor counts each carried a $500 bond. A stay-away order was issued the same day.
Defense attorney Ama-Mariya Hoffenden filed a Notice of Appearance, Written Plea of Not Guilty, Waiver of Arraignment, and Request for Jury Trial, e-filed on Thursday, Nov. 20.
Aliakseyeu is charged with:
Felony Assault Aggravated With A Deadly Weapon.
Felony Aggravated Battery Causing Bodily Harm With A Weapon.
Felony False Imprisonment With A Deadly Weapon.
Felony Domestic Battery By Strangulation.
Misdemeanor Battery.
Misdemeanor Assault.
Aliakseyeu later bonded out and was released, court filings show.
Someone: Looks like you have a bug up your ass with me that’s ok. Then you get drop the I am too old to remember comment. Nice on your part but certainly not surprising. Then you put words in my mouth which is typical. I do my best not to engage in name calling and only decided to go that route after years of one person doing it because he had a problem with people having a different opinion. There is only one person on the right here who engages in name calling, to those who disagree with him, and it’s only sporadically, as in not every day as opposed to a number of those on the left who engage in it amost every day, and all day. So feel free to ignore my posts and not comment, as I will do with you. It makes for a more pleasant environment.
What did I say that was wrong? You don’t like being called out because you can’t defend yourself because you know you’re wrong.
At road crossings, only one person stopped to let me go. At one double yellow road by a bike shop, I walked the bike practically to the middle of the street as a car was approaching; they didn’t stop.
Were you riding on the sidewalk, or the road?
If you are walking your bike through the crosswalk, expect NJ drivers to completely ignore the law that says they must stop for pedestrians in crosswalks.
On the other hand, if you are riding your bike in the road and following the traffic laws, you can expect NJ drivers to completely ignore the law that says they must maintain a MINIMUM distance of 4 feet when passing you.
That’s why I switched to mountain biking.
I love road biking, but share the displeasure of foolish motorists and oxygen thieves.
You certainly take a risk anytime you are on the road on any type of two-wheeled vehicle. There are some great rising trails around here and an emphasis on (much maligned) bike lanes. :).
Today was the Stanford vs Berkley Football game. It was a perfect fall day here with a nice bright sun and a fresh cool breeze. Many kids wandering around Palo Alto in packs supporting their teams and lots of tailgating. I myself met up with my daughter and we went back to our place where she, her mom, and I enjoyed some excellent Thai food.
In thinking about differences between the East and West coasts especially for kids, I would surmise that the youth culture on both coasts varies widely. The West seems to value “vibes” over other things. Feelings that arise from the way someone appears or seems to be. I think the East coast tends to be a more in-your-face culture that encourages a more assertive character and rewards that. The West tends to encourage more of a consensus and a regard for one’s fellow human beings, while the East is more about the individual.
That being said when looking at towns like Palo Alto you’ll find extremely competitive and pressured youth. Those kids that end up in schools like Berkley and Stanford are usually there after some pretty intense years in school. In that I think you will find an East/West overlap. The intensity of the top level students and their ability to handle pressure.
What I have found is that to be a kid on the West Coast is a kinder, gentler experience than you’ll find out East. Just factoring in the weather it is just an easier lifestyle. Taking really awful weather out of the mix, I find it’s just more leisurely out here. Living in a ‘cold’ climate where you have to get around in demanding circumstances creates a layer of discomfort that isn’t present out here. Life is just a lot mellower as a result.
Ex, my experience with family and friends living on the west coast seems to indicate otherwise. There is this constant pressure to keep up with the Joneses. Of course, a lot depends on how the kid and parents handle things.
Cold climates are correlated with higher GDP.
Poverty increases as you get closer to the equator (luxury outposts excluded of course).
Fat Eddie,
You can’t have it both ways. You are a proud cheerleader of Ayn Rand. She was the ultimate promoter of ideas that create a “We live in s0ciety full of selfish, fucking slobs.”
I, concur with Dark Phoenix in his feelings about the king. That move by the king’s Dept Of Education just killed the physician extender pathways of PA- Physician Assistants APN-Advanced Practice Nurse / NP-Nurse Practioner and Ph.D in Nursing. Who do you think staffs all those Urgent Care centers?
One part that I do agree that the last 30yrs of massive immigration made worse is social cohesion. When you have people from countries that are hierarchical with minimal empathetic skills or tradition and you throw them into an individualistic culture like ours, their worse tendency are exponentially amplified.
You can see it in Real Estate. The housing issue is not so much a lack of supply as much as high demand by speculators that are using the financing and tax code created to aid the middle class to achieve their speculators goals.
If you want to fix housing. Copy Singapore, which no one can say has anything to do with socialism, except in housing. They manage to separate housing from speculators. 85% of housing is government created. You can only own one property, can sell it only to a Singaporean citizen or resident.
Elon Musk’s social media site X has rolled out a new feature in an effort to increase transparency—and unwittingly revealed that many of the site’s top MAGA influencers are actually foreign actors.
The new “About This Account” feature, which became available to X users on Friday, allows others to see where an account is based, when they joined the platform, how often they have changed their username, and how they downloaded the X app.
Upon rollout, rival factions began to inspect just where their online adversaries were really based on the combative social platform—with dozens of major MAGA and right-wing influencer accounts revealed to be originating from overseas.
“This is easily one of the greatest days on this platform,” wrote Democratic influencer Harry Sisson.
“Seeing all of these MAGA accounts get exposed as foreign actors trying to destroy the United States is a complete vindication of Democrats, like myself and many on here, who have been warning about this”.
Dozens of major accounts masquerading as “America First” or “MAGA” proponents have been identified as originating in places like Russia, India, and Nigeria.
In one example, the account MAGANationX—with its nearly 400,000 followers and a bio reading “Patriot Voice for We The People”—is actually based in Eastern Europe.
Some: Nothing I said was wrong. You just don’t like what I said.
She was the ultimate promoter of ideas that create a “We live in s0ciety full of selfish, fucking slobs.”
The one car that stopped to let me cross was an older dude. At another double yellow crossing, my side stopped, the other side didn’t. Three cars passed, right to left as the one lane paused. The message from the oncoming lane was, “fuck you, I ain’t stopping.” I waved to the guy who stopped to go ahead as I backed up. I wasn’t going to hold him up and the two cars behind him to cross.
So. you’re wrong, as usual. We were a more obligated and responsible society vs. the “fuck you, me first” entitled and lesser informed, weed weary society of today. Tats, bloated tummies, school shootings, glass-touching addictions and ready-made meals have all contributed to meek muppets.
Thanks for your wasted words, you can now return to your safe room and edible crayons.
Btw, when the weather is cooperating, I’ll ride the bike. I need to keep my 375 lb. body in tip top shape so a 7-mile daily stretch usually does the trick. I’ll probably put up some Christmas lights, too. What do liberal lunatics generally do on a Sunday morning as the holidays approach? Do they decorate their “Free Palestine”, “BLM” and “In This House We Believe” rainbow-colored lawn signs? I’d recommend pulling in your American Flags for the winter but liberals don’t display American Flags.
I dunno. Flying a flag then celebrating violating Americans’ basic rights is simply bullshit. Brah.
The one car that stopped to let me cross was an older dude.
Retired.
With Pension.
Lifetime Health insurance.
Bought house at 25 for 42k.
All the young girls I work with? They realized again (repubs want them barefoot and pregnant) that now either they are worthless and unprofessional according to Trump and repubs, or if they want to advance themselves to work on old goats like you they are still “unprofessional.”
It’s money, but mostly, its OPTICS, you dumb azz President. Like telling your kids they suck and will never amount to anything. Women don’t like it. Me, I don’t care, nothing coming out of the last two demented beasts matters to me.
But this eejit just lit a fire. Women hate him, and you can see, even MGT and a few of her cohorts turned on him and made him release the Epstein files. And if that dark circle eyed heathen Bondi is even 2 percent female, she is going to forget to delete a few documents she was ordered to “omit.”
Now, despite all of what I just wrote, I despise the Dems just as much.
They will lie to you as well, and send you down the river.
Watched a show on farmers. Many are going bankrupt again.
Who is gonna buy them for cheap?
We are too chicken to sell to the Chinese now. They are the “bad’ guys, along with the Russians (you always have to have a villain) even though the only time a Russian has been at war against you has been in like every war movie for so long most Americans still think there are nuclear (see I can spell it Bush) missiles in Cuba.
So maybe the Saudis can get some farmland with their 1T DonnyDonation?
Or mabye our generous benefactor of Blue circle of death wants to add to his portfolio of farmland, so he can own another empire.
Or Mr I sold books at one time. Or the META nerd-he thinks he is a godlike creature.
Or maybe the “consortium” of all of these devils, wrapped up in a “you don’t know who I am” (cause we DONT, not allowed to) Venture capitalist Satan group.
Please Chinese, Russian, or NK hackers.
Please publish a list of who are the “you don’t know who I am” investors in the shadows of American money and politics.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant Mr Trump. Oh and you too Biden, if you are awake yet.
The truth shall set you free
(repubs want them barefoot and pregnant)
As long as all their flesh is covered up and there are adequate slit openings for the eyes, this is acceptable according to article 8, section 10.3.
You’re right. It’s just one right-leaning poster who loves name calling. Fast Eddie never does it.
3b says:
November 23, 2025 at 9:25 am
Some: Nothing I said was wrong. You just don’t like what I said.
Some-one.
Oh yeah? I know you are but what am I? Ur nuttin’ butta four-eyed, freckled face, skinny geek! So there!
Guy dies, and those who are supposed to enforce the law suddenly don’t understand the constitution and how it affects consent?
No jail time for her. She got lucky cause someone forgot the basics. Or just felt like they didn’t apply.
Law is interesting. Guess this family didn’t get “Liberty, and Justice, for all.”
Almodovar tested positive for THC — a chemical found in marijuana — and a cocaine metabolite, and had alcohol in her system, according to prosecutors.
Her blood alcohol concentration did not reach the legal intoxication threshold of 0.08%, attorneys said during the sentencing hearing.
The prosecution argued that she used cocaine and marijuana on the day of the crash, but Almodovar’s attorney argued that she wasn’t impaired by any of the substances at the time of the crash.
During the hearing, defense attorney Vincent Campo said that an issue with an officer failing to get consent meant that toxicology evidence would likely not have been admissible at trial. He said the plea deal was reached before a judge would have ruled on that issue.
“I understand that the reason we’re here today is because of a technical issue where an officer didn’t comply with the strictures of the constitutional requirements for consent,” Campo said.
I heard you calling on the megaphone
You wanna see me all alone
As legend has it, you are quite the pyro
You light the match to watch it blow
And if you’d never come for me
I might’ve drowned in the melancholy
I swore my loyalty to me (Me), myself (Myself), and I (I)
Right before you lit my sky up
All that time
I sat alone in my tower
You were just honing your powers
Now I can see it all (See it all)
Late one night
You dug me out of my grave and
Saved my heart from the fate of
Ophelia (Ophеlia)
Keep it one hundred on the land (Land), thе sea (Sea), the sky
Pledge allegiance to your hands, your team, your vibes
Don’t care where the hell you’ve been (Been) ’cause now (Now) you’re mine
It’s ’bout to be the sleepless night you’ve been dreaming of
The fate of Ophelia
The eldest daughter of a nobleman
Ophelia lived in fantasy
But love was a cold bed full of scorpions
The venom stole her sanity
What NVIDIA’s chips are being used for. Add some more nuclear plants.
Ladies, don’t look. You won’t like this.
I guess this is what Making America Great Again is supposed to look like?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdA_fZm93DY
My son talks about the NoCal & SoCal kids in Ithaca.
He says two things about them.
#1 they have this big whiff of superiority; they act as if they are morally superior and their opinions are more well informed
#2 they never show you who they are; the can be polite and friendly, but it is always in a distant way. You never know where you stand.
Ex says:
November 23, 2025 at 12:43 am
In thinking about differences between the East and West coasts especially for kids, I would surmise that the youth culture on both coasts varies widely. The West seems to value “vibes” over other things. Feelings that arise from the way someone appears or seems to be. I think the East coast tends to be a more in-your-face culture that encourages a more assertive character and rewards that. The West tends to encourage more of a consensus and a regard for one’s fellow human beings, while the East is more about the individual.
12:24 I can see that. Probably just a facade. The French call it: “ Insouciance “ has roots in the French in, meaning “not,” and se soucier, meaning “to care,” giving the English word its “uncaring” meaning. See: Laissez-faire
Someone: Interesting how you feel the need to define my political leanings, but certainly not surprising. As for name calling on the blog, there is only one person that I call names.
The day before Thanksgiving is the the most profitable for legal weed sellers, apparel people stock up on weed to get through the Thanksgiving holiday with family. Weed retailers call it Green Wednesday.
lol when did I define your political leanings?
Someone: Fair enough. I misread your comment at 10:41. My mistake.
Plumbers call the Friday after Thanksgiving brown Friday. Lots of service calls.
Dude. Weed is a staple. Like milk & bread. Yo
No doubt they are cutting. Just how much. I think .50 is a real possibility.
Fed’s Waller: “People said tariffs are going to cause a bunch of inflation. It ain’t happening. It should have already happened… So start giving me a lot better reasons for not cutting rates.”
I knew this whole chit was a fake out. Hope you bought the dip.
Goldman: “We expect another Fed cut in December, followed by two more moves in March and June 2026 that take the funds rate to 3-3.25%.”
Like I said earlier this week. So many going to get left behind waiting for 50-75k btc. It never fails. Instead of buying cheap BTC at 82k they want cheaper….meanwhile a month earlier they would have died for that bid.
Grab Deez Nuts and Hold On!!!! It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.