estimated drop in new international enrollment to american universities this fall: -30/40% (!)
contributing to a 15 percent drop in overall enrollment
– nafsa: association of international educators pic.twitter.com/gezz1Ip1tn
— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) August 7, 2025
Dang. Brutal, and bad for all of us. Of course, I wouldn’t come here as a student or even as a tourist for any reason either.
I went a little too hard on my eugenics yesterday in the heat and was sick for a bit after.
Still did 33 pull-ups in only three sets.
Gonna be interesting to see what happens to the economy when the inevitable AI crash occurs. The economy is already exceedingly weak and teetering on the edge of or already in recession.
The AI bubble bursting will probably usher in the depression that’s on the way.
Weather Service is now hiring back hundreds of positions that got cut in the DOGE chaos
Huh, turns you actually cannot pray the gay weather away.
Fancy that.
Does the majority of people believe piracy is morally okay?
Piracy is not only morally okay, it is a moral obligation. It is the only way to preserve or own anything these days. If you aren’t pirating it, someone at any time could alter the media without your knowledge or remove access to it altogether. And you’d have no recourse.
And yes, it does happen.
Piracy is the only moral and correct action in the current corporate climate and cultural environment. Anything else is unethical and against human flourishing.
Do some people honestly never cook?
Yes. I knew a woman in Seattle who never cooked. Or at least she had not in fifteen years. She used the microwave sometimes. All the rest of her food consumption was takeout and restaurants.
Not that unusual actually in large cities.
I’m not of the Right or the Left. Nor am I a centrist. I don’t think they make words yet for what I am.
But from my perspective, both the contemporary Right and Left seem to be accidental death cults advocating for the end of their own civilizations. Since the activists and fanatics are now de facto in charge of both groups, well, that descent into madness came along as a kind of fait accompli. The Left worships radical Islam and venerates Hamas (et alia) and believes that everyone in the third world should immediately be moved to the US or Europe (as if that would solve anything). In the case of radical Islamicists and Hamas, both groups of course would slaughter the clowns and throw them in a dumpster as they did with Shani in Gaza. And all this along with the insanity they proclaim about the vast different non-differences between not-distinguishable enormously varied not-men/women who have 37 genders even though gender doesn’t matter and is not real.
As for the Right. Well, damn. What a fucking basket case. They believe science is some plot against them, think the weather is a gay conspiracy, loathe any form of energy production that doesn’t give them lung cancer or emphysema, and love to watch their children die of preventable diseases. They somehow manage to be even worse than the dipshit liberals — and that’s a mighty feat, considerin’.
Death cults, as I said; both got too comfortable in a civilization they took for granted, do not understand and contribute little to. Now both sides are eagerly poised to destroy it.
And I’m not about any of those things, but the direction and intent is pretty clear.
It’s a weird idea that what you visit and view is what you necessarily support and believe, isn’t it? How did so many liberals arrive at that asinine and clownishly clueless conclusion?
I read everything from very far-left actual communists to extremely right-wing RETVRN types. And none of those do I support. Part of it is that I just like getting a broad range of views. Otherwise, you are stunting yourself intellectually. Part is that you have no idea what’s going on in the world if you don’t come out of your turtle shell and look around. And another part is that I am merely curious.
Because I don’t have an ideology or philosophy of any human alive now (perhaps someone from 10,000 years in the future) I like to see if anyone else out there is emerging with the same thoughts, the same spirit. So far, no, not really, but if I don’t dive into the zeitgeist and the particular weltanschauung (to get crazy with the German Cheez-Whiz) of various little sub-cultures, how would I ever know?
There’s little worse than a person who believes you should be punished or shunned because you happen to read something they disagree with it. Not support it — that never seems to be the criterion. Just reading it is enough to bring about the sanctioning.
I won’t live that way.
New tariffs snap into effect, raising import taxes to highest level since Great Depression.
The good news is, we’re getting another one of those too! Great Depressions, that is.
Some lore about me.
I tend to do the “impossible” accidentally due to social cluelessness and lack of awareness of what others think is normal. In this case, some years ago my journey into the impossible occurred as I was taking classes at a community college. I showed up, took an exam, then went outside to wait for the next one. These tests could’ve been scheduled on any day of the week (including weekends) but for ease of commuting I chose to sit for all four of them back to back. Just seemed normal to me.
As I was resting at a picnic table watching the birds, a girl I knew from one of my classes came up to me and asked, “So, which exam are you taking today?”
I said without thinking about it, “All of them.”
She looked confused for a moment and then said, “What do you mean, ‘All of them?'”
“I mean, I scheduled all four of them so I don’t have to drive here on four different days.”
“But why in the world would you do that?” she said.
It didn’t even occur to me — not even vaguely — that scheduling four fairly difficult exams back to back on the same day would be unusual or something to be remarked upon. There was not the first thought in my head about that until that moment. I mumbled something again about it being easier and quickly changed the subject.
I got As on all four, by the way. Wasn’t even a problem.
Ozempic Shows Anti-Aging Effects in First Clinical Trial, Reversing Biological Age by 3.1 Years. Considering that Ozempic is already known to work on the markers of bio-age, not too surprising.
Scientific fraud has become an ‘industry,’ alarming analysis finds.
The AI bubble is so big it’s propping up the US economy (for now).
Trump Administration Moves to Destroy Satellite That Monitors Greenhouse Gases. As usual, moronic beyond any words.
US tech rules the European market.
There’s something icky about LLM-generated text when you think it’s written by a human.
Germany’s identity crisis: The trains no longer run on time.
Where does your weather forecast come from? All the places Trump’s goons are destroying in their quest against facts
Reverse engineering the mysterious Up-Data Link Test Set from Apollo.
Google’s AI Is Destroying Search, the Internet, and Your Brain.
Reddit is one of the last thriving islands of the old web. Can it survive AI? Probably not.
Donald Trump goes nuclear in the GOP’s war on science. What an incredible waste.
I have a dark horse candidate: Latin America, and not just for bio stuff, but for everything.
Eventually, as the EU becomes Islamicized and the US becomes an authoritarian Christian dominionist horror show, the smart people from the EU, the US, Russia, China and even India will converge on Latin America as it gets its shit together. Buenos Aires will be the new Silicon Valley; something close to Schengen for LATAM will be enacted about when research universities there supplant America’s as they embrace tech the US is now trashing (mRNA and other biosciences, renewable power, and so many more).
By 2100, Latin America will be the place to be. The US and China will be sad also-rans and the EU will be under a new caliphate.
Men, what is it like to be with a manipulative woman and what are some common things they do?
Some things (all I’ve directly experienced):
I know the same is true of some men as well, but some women nearly make you give up on any connection with any other human being at all of any gender. That’s how bad they are.
I think just as much as the economic headwinds, the expectation that every kid needs to be closely surveilled 24/7 by necessity means a much lower birth rate.
Culture cannot be ignored. And right now, children are expected to be treated like concentration camp inmates under constant guard, not allowed to stray more than 10 feet away lest the cops be called, not allowed to play alone or sometimes even be alone, and with no prospect of any of the freedoms I and most people over 40 enjoyed as children.
While children suffer, regarding the birth rate, parents in this terrible culture also must bear a heavy burden. They must devote every scrap waking attention to making sure little Timmy or Joanna is never out of sight as CPS gets called in an eyeblink these days. This culture of extreme monitoring puts an upper limit on how many children most people will have or wish to have.
After all, who’d want to have children who could never be more than an arm’s length away where you basically become an unpaid prison guard in charge of their every move and breath?
Sounds terrible. And requires an enormous time investment, far more than previous generations would’ve devoted to any one kid. So, yes, culture matters just as much as economics when looking for the answer as to why more people don’t want to live a life like that to have some kids.