2:00PM Water Cooler 2/4/2025

By Lambert Strether.

Bird Song of the Day

Brown Thrasher, Hilltop Reservation, Essex, New Jersey, United States.

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In Case You Might Miss…

1. DOGE: Fresh lawsuits and probes.
2. The DNC… . Oh, Lordie…
3. How one programmer’s thoughts on bitcoin changed.
4. Oldest known portrait.

* * *

Politics

“So many of the social reactions that strike us as psychological are in fact a rational management of symbolic capital.” –Pierre Bourdieu, Classification Struggles

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Spook Country

Couldn’t happen to a nicer set of goons:

It still hasn't sunk in: the FBI took part in framing not just any random person as a Russian agent, but the President of the United States. In the process, the FBI endorsed the Clinton campaign's condescending, elitist message that voters who didn't push the button for Hillary… https://t.co/jOatk6aRve

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) February 4, 2025

“The Situation: What’s Going on at the FBI?” [Benjamin Wittes, Lawfare]. On the January 6 investigation: “Things have clarified enough today to say one thing clearly: A lot of people at the bureau—leadership and street agents, analysts and staff alike—are flirting with heroism right now…. How widespread is the internal resistance? I don’t know. But we are going to find out soon… Will the acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove, receive a pile of actionable material or will he receive what amounts to a large pile of spoiled questionnaires? And either way, what will he—and the White House—do with whatever it receives? In one situation, it will have to take on the reality that a shockingly large number of bureau personnel played a role, quite unsurprisingly, in the largest federal investigation in American history. They executed search warrants, ran down leads, interviewed people, made arrests and testified in one or more of the 1,500 plus federal prosecutions that resulted. Does Bove imagine that he will fire all of these people?”

“FBI agents try to block administration’s effort to examine Trump, Jan. 6 cases” [WaPo]. “A group of nine FBI agents asked a federal judge on Tuesday to block the Trump administration’s efforts to collect information on thousands of case agents across the country who worked on investigations tied to the President Donald Trump or the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol…. Each of the plaintiffs in the suit worked either on a Jan. 6 case or the investigation into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents after his first term as president, their lawsuit states. They are seeking an injunction that would bar the Justice Department from any ‘aggregation, storage, reporting, publication or dissemination’ of any list or compilation of agents that would identify agents and other personnel.'” • I like the underlined language. Maybe apply it to whatever scheme DOGE is working up to?

DOGE

“Elon Musk is a ‘special government employee.’ What does that mean?” [WaPo]. “White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has confirmed that Elon Musk — the tech billionaire whom President Donald Trump tapped to lead a large-scale effort to cut government spending and regulation — is a special government employee.’ … A special government employee is ‘anyone who works, or is expected to work, for the government for 130 days or less in a 365-day period,’ with or without compensation, according to the Justice Department. … Special government employees, or SGEs, ‘are subject to most rules, although sometimes in a less restrictive way,’ the Justice Department said in a summary. For example, SGEs who are paid at or below the level of federal employees with Senior Executive Service status are not required to file a public financial disclosure report; instead, they can file a report confidentially if they are expected to ‘have a substantial role in the formulation of agency policy,’ according to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. This is especially relevant in Musk’s case, because critics have argued that his ownership of Tesla and SpaceX represents a conflict of interest in his review of government spending and regulation, particularly in his dealings with government agencies that have in the past decided whether to award contracts to his companies or laid out rules that influence his companies’ actions and profits.” • Not to mention his advocacy of the blockchain….

“Unions sue to block Musk team’s access to Treasury payments” [Politico]. The lawsuit. “The Alliance for Retired Americans, along with the American Federation of Government Employees and Service Employees International Union, claim that Musk’s efforts may have illegally exposed the personal data of millions of federal employees — as well as any other individual who does business with the federal government — to unauthorized Department of Government Efficiency personnel. ‘The scale of the intrusion into individuals’ privacy is massive and unprecedented,” the groups said in their complaint, which was filed in federal court in the District of Columbia. The complaint accuses the Trump administration of illegally granting Musk’s team access in violation of federal laws that govern the privacy of agency records and protect the confidentiality of taxpayer information.’ • Access is bad enough. But according to Wired reporting, DOGE has admin privileges.

“Warren, Wyden call for probe of Musk aides’ access to Treasury payments” [Politico]. “The top Democrats overseeing the Treasury Department are calling on a congressional watchdog to investigate the Trump administration’s decision to give Elon Musk’s team access to the federal system that controls trillions of dollars in payments…. ‘GAO must investigate and determine who was granted access to these systems, why and how this access was granted, and the implications for the nation’s economic and national security,’ Warren and Wyden wrote in a letter to the congressional watchdog that was shared with POLITICO…. Bessent on Monday night assured House Republican lawmakers during a closed-door meeting that Musk and his team did not enjoy control over Treasury’s payment systems and that DOGE was reviewing federal payment processes to find inefficiencies and root out waste and fraud.” • You’d think Bessent might have assured everyone. Again, access, access, access.

“Bessent tells lawmakers Musk’s DOGE does not control Treasury payments system” [Politico]. “Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent privately reassured Republican lawmakers Monday that Elon Musk and his team do not have control over a sensitive government system that manages the flow of trillions of dollars in payments, according to five lawmakers in the room for a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill…. The remarks, relayed by lawmakers in the room who were granted anonymity to discuss a closed-door meeting, came during a two-hour gathering between Bessent and GOP members of the House Financial Services Committee Monday night that included a reception and dinner…. Bessent declined to comment on the matter exiting the gathering.” That’s a confidence builder: “Other Republican lawmakers on Monday also brushed aside criticism from Democrats that Musk and his team could abuse access to the system to shutter payments that Americans rely on. ‘It’s important for them to be able to know what is being spent — and make certain it’s being spent A, the way Congress intended, and B, the way the President would want it to be spent,’ said Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio). ‘Sometimes you have to go into the actual disbursement system, because that way you don’t get misinformation, which a lot of bureaucrats do.'” • This is stupid. DOGE’s team isn’t big enough to audit a lemonade stand, let alone the entire Federal government. Whatever is going on is not an audit.

DOGE (1):

DOGE already drilled through untold layers of government bureaucracy and found the heart of the Deep State beast.

USAID

Amazingly, this made all the Deep State puppets in our government "prairie dog" to complain, so we can easily spot them going forward. Don't miss that part of…

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) February 3, 2025

Oh, is that where it is? USAID? Pretty pissant, if you ask me.

DOGE (2):

🎯 https://t.co/4itxXyTzOV

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 3, 2025

Dudes, come on. Not even close. Then again—

DOGE (3)

Those who know, please reply to this post listing all the evil things that NED has done. It’s a long list. https://t.co/8smJsP5Hji

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 2, 2025

Nominations

“Sen. Todd Young will back Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence” [Politico]. “In a letter that Young posted online Tuesday, Gabbard committed to ‘holding accountable’ any intelligence community employee, contractor or subcontractor who who leaks intelligence; that she would not ‘protect’ members of the intelligence community who engage in an unauthorized disclosures; and committed to not ‘making any recommendations in a personal or profession [sic] capacity’ regarding Snowden’s legal standing,”

2024 Post Mortem

“How Democratic Gen Z activists lost the Gen Z vote” [Vox]. “Six months ago, young Democrats were preparing for a very different conversation. They were breathing a sigh of relief after Joe Biden formally dropped out of the 2024 presidential contest. Gen Z, some said, was ready to feel the “#Kamalove” and break with the past that Biden represented. The flurry of ‘Brat summer’ and coconut-tree memes that filled social media platforms was surely proof that there was a latent enthusiasm for Harris among the youth….. The work could now focus more on turning out the youth for a fresh candidate instead of persuading those who had been disillusioned by Biden to drag their way to the voting booth. This election was now more a matter of simply getting youth to show up.” Whoops: “See, there’s a fundamental divide between the young people who care about Democratic politics and the kind of people they were trying to persuade. Many of their turnout targets simply didn’t trust institutions or the status quo like organizers and young Democrats did. They existed in different information bubbles and media ecosystems, missing persuasion efforts including memes, celebrity endorsements, or digital organizing. Or they just didn’t care enough about the complex issues youth activists were talking about, when their concerns were much more basic, like how much a paycheck could afford, whether Democrats could be trusted to help them get ahead financially, and whether Harris or Trump would be a bigger disruptor of the status quo.” • BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!!!!

“How Democrats Lost the Dissident Vote” [Ross Barkan, New York Magazine]. “But the fact that [Gabbard and RFK] are nominees for vital cabinet positions in a Trump presidency is a reflection of Democratic weakness. One, Trump won. Two, the Americans who admire Kennedy and Gabbard were overwhelmingly Democrats a mere decade ago. Just as Kennedy and Gabbard maneuvered into Trump’s orbit, their supporters largely did the same — concluding that only one party could be hospitable to them. One way to think of these Americans is as dissident voters. The term itself is broad and slippery enough, and here it will refer to a people from a wide range of backgrounds. At their core, dissidents are skeptics of institutions, whether that might be the federal government, the military-industrial complex, corporate America, or the pharmaceutical industry. Some of them are anti-vaxxers and some of them are 9/11 truthers. Some indulge in many conspiracies and some none at all. Some homeschool their children. Some care a great deal about wellness and physical fitness and have unconventional ideas for how they might achieve optimal health. Elements of the Kennedy and Gabbard worldviews speak to a wide swath of these voters, who are nowhere near a majority of Americans but make up a minority that can’t be readily ignored. ” • Hmm.

Democrats en déshabillé

Closing festivities at the DNC:

Meanwhile at the DNC headquarters…The Democrats are no different than the band who played on as the Titanic was sinking. pic.twitter.com/CcSiJMgu4N

— Power to the People ☭🕊 (@ProudSocialist) February 2, 2025

Martin the new chair:

Powerful

Ken Martin won the chair seat, but just before the vote, former chair @donnabrazile talks about member’s freedom to vote their conscience without retaliation. https://t.co/8DDmZV586w pic.twitter.com/XIzZhbrOXZ

— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline) February 1, 2025

Consultants, your contracts are safe:

pic.twitter.com/cuzaXDtwKH

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) February 1, 2025

The usual thuggery:

Powerful

Ken Martin won the chair seat, but just before the vote, former chair @donnabrazile talks about member’s freedom to vote their conscience without retaliation. https://t.co/8DDmZV586w pic.twitter.com/XIzZhbrOXZ

— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline) February 1, 2025

Did I mention that “bold” was a word to watch out for, basically a synonym for PR-driven and ephemeral?

biggest red flag yet is this post lol https://t.co/h8pIjQnQOS

— soul khan (@soulkhan) February 2, 2025

They will die as a party rather than change (1):

The Democratic National Committee apparently thinks it is very important to elect JD Vance President in 2028. https://t.co/zEYH0j8uNy

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) February 2, 2025

They will die as a party rather than change (2):

Outgoing DNC Chief Jaime Harrison says he thinks Kamala should run again and can win in 2028. pic.twitter.com/HNUhwSPoTV

— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) January 31, 2025

Syndemics

“I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.” –William Lloyd Garrison

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Covid Resources, United States (National): Transmission (CDC); Wastewater (CDC, Biobot; includes many counties; Wastewater Scan, includes drilldown by zip); Variants (CDC; Walgreens); “Iowa COVID-19 Tracker” (in IA, but national data). “Infection Control, Emergency Management, Safety, and General Thoughts” (especially on hospitalization by city).

Lambert here: Readers, thanks for the collective effort. To update any entry, do feel free to contact me at the address given with the plants. Please put “COVID” in the subject line. Thank you!

Resources, United States (Local): AK (dashboard); AL (dashboard); AR (dashboard); AZ (dashboard); CA (dashboard; Marin, dashboard; Stanford, wastewater; Oakland, wastewater); CO (dashboard; wastewater); CT (dashboard); DE (dashboard); FL (wastewater); GA (wastewater); HI (dashboard); IA (wastewater reports); ID (dashboard, Boise; dashboard, wastewater, Central Idaho; wastewater, Coeur d’Alene; dashboard, Spokane County); IL (wastewater); IN (dashboard); KS (dashboard; wastewater, Lawrence); KY (dashboard, Louisville); LA (dashboard); MA (wastewater); MD (dashboard); ME (dashboard); MI (wastewater; wastewater); MN (dashboard); MO (wastewater); MS (dashboard); MT (dashboard); NC (dashboard); ND (dashboard; wastewater); NE (dashboard); NH (wastewater); NJ (dashboard); NM (dashboard); NV (dashboard; wastewater, Southern NV); NY (dashboard); OH (dashboard); OK (dashboard); OR (dashboard); PA (dashboard); RI (dashboard); SC (dashboard); SD (dashboard); TN (dashboard); TX (dashboard); UT (wastewater); VA (wastewater); VT (dashboard); WA (dashboard; dashboard); WI (wastewater); WV (wastewater); WY (wastewater).

Resources, Canada (National): Wastewater (Government of Canada).

Resources, Canada (Provincial): ON (wastewater); QC (les eaux usées); BC (wastewater); BC, Vancouver (wastewater).

Hat tips to helpful readers: Alexis, anon (2), Art_DogCT, B24S, CanCyn, ChiGal, Chuck L, Festoonic, FM, FreeMarketApologist (4), Gumbo, hop2it, JB, JEHR, JF, JL Joe, John, JM (10), JustAnotherVolunteer, JW, KatieBird, KF, KidDoc, LL, Michael King, KF, LaRuse, mrsyk, MT, MT_Wild, otisyves, Petal (6), RK (2), RL, RM, Rod, square coats (11), tennesseewaltzer, thump, Tom B., Utah, Bob White (3).

Stay safe out there!

Sequelae: Covid

Funny all the airline crashes of late:

Pilots need to be tested for spatial problems post- Covid. There is a growing body of research showing post Covid brain damage, esp with memory and spatial skills. 46 Visuospatial Functions in Patients After COVID-19 Diseasehttps://t.co/p6McS5BX2m https://t.co/gOt0MaALKL

— Martha Young- JD, MBA, N95-clean the air:🦋😷 (@mryoung151) February 2, 2025

Morbidity and Mortality

“Early adult death rates remain higher than expected post-pandemic” [News Medical Life Sciences]. “New research from the University of Minnesota and Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) shows that death rates for early adults, or adults aged 25-44, rose sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic and remain higher than expected post-pandemic. Heightened death rates during the COVID-19 pandemic intensified an already negative trend for early adults, which began around 2010. As a result, early adult death rates in 2023 were about 70 percent higher than they might have been if death rates had not begun to rise about a decade before the pandemic.” • 2010? Thanks, Obama!

* * *

Lambert here: Wastewater is back (and down). Good.

TABLE 1: Daily Covid Charts

Wastewater
★ This week[1] CDC January 27	Last week[2] CDC (until next week):
Variants [3] CDC January 18	Emergency Room Visits[4] CDC January 11
Hospitalization
★ New York[5] New York State, data February 3:	National [6] CDC January 24:
Positivity
National[7] Walgreens January 27:	Ohio[8] Cleveland Clinic January 18:
Travelers Data
Positivity[9] CDC December 30:	Variants[10] CDC December 30
Deaths
Weekly Deaths vs. % Positivity [11] CDC January 11:	Weekly Deaths vs. ED Visits [12] CDC January 11:

LEGEND

1) ★ for charts new today; all others are not updated.

2) For a full-size/full-resolution image, Command-click (MacOS) or right-click (Windows) on the chart thumbnail and “open image in new tab.”

NOTES

[1] (CDC) Down, nothing new at major hubs.

[2] (CDC) Last week’s wastewater map.

[3] (CDC Variants) XEC takes over. That WHO label, “Ommicron,” has done a great job normalizing successive waves of infection.

[4] (ED) A little uptick.

[5] (Hospitalization: NY) Definitely jumped, but no exponential growth either, Odd.

[6] (Hospitalization: CDC). Leveling out.

[7] (Walgreens) Leveling out.

[8] (Cleveland) Continued upward trend since, well, Thanksgiving.

[9] (Travelers: Positivity) Leveling out.

[10] (Travelers: Variants). Positivity is new, but variants have not yet been released.

[11] Deaths low, positivity leveling out.

[12] Deaths low, ED leveling out.

Stats Watch

Employment Situation: “United States Job Openings” [Trading Economics]. “Job openings in the United States fell by 556,000 to 7.6 million in December 2024, missing the market expectation of 8.0 million and indicating a gradual cooling of the labor market.”

Manufacturing: “United States Factory Orders Ex Transportation” [Trading Economics]. “Factory orders excluding transportation in the United States rose by 0.3% over a month earlier in December 2024, following a 0.2% increase in the prior month.”

Supply Chain: “United States LMI Logistics Managers Index” [Trading Economics]. “The Logistics Manager’s Index in the US climbed to 62 in January 2025 from 57.3 in December 2024, signaling the fastest expansion in the logistics sector since June 2022. This growth reflects the sustained expansion of the US economy, alongside a sharper-than-expected rise in inventories amid uncertainty surrounding trade regulations, particularly tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China.”

* * *

Manufacturing: “Boeing Deferred Production Costs: $39bn since 2019 MAX grounding, $22bn for 737” [Leeham News and Analysis]. “[T]he balance sheet does indicate a figure of $87.55bn sitting in the Inventory account, but what is the detailed break-down of what is contained therein?… Each quarter, in the Boeing financial reports section titled Inventories, are the details of what makes up that account…. Typically, expenses are recorded onto the Income Statement during the period for which they are incurred, matching revenues and costs. Program Accounting allows Boeing to put those amounts into Inventory and keep them there, until it decides to pull them out. Normally these accrued amounts are expensed with a delivery. Other times, they are written off. Many investors would look at the balance sheet and assume that Boeing has over $87bn in product that it is able to sell to customers.” • If you play the ponies on Boeing, this post is definitely worth a read.

Manufacturing: “Boeing’s Starliner Fiasco Has Now Burned Through $2 Billion” [Gizmodo]. “Nearly five months after an uncrewed Starliner undocked from the International Space Station (ISS), Boeing announced that it lost an additional half a billion dollars from its troubled spacecraft as the fate of its contract with NASA remains unclear. In its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday, Boeing reported a total of $523 million in losses from the Starliner Commercial Crew Program in 2024. That brings the total amount of losses from the ill-fated program to a whopping $2 billion in cost overruns. Boeing cited ‘highly complex designs and technical challenges,’ as well as ‘schedule delays and cost impacts,’ that increased the cost estimates for its programs…. Boeing had forewarned that more losses were coming during the fourth quarter of 2024, and it turned out to be the heftiest bill of the entire year.”

Manufacturing: “Airbus Vs Boeing Vs COMAC: How The Plane Makers’ Market Share Compares In Asia” [Simple Flying]. “COMAC has a long way to go to ramp up and challenge Airbus and Boeing in any meaningful way. In January 2025, Flight Plan reported that COMAC delivered 12 C919 narrowbodies in 2024 (up from just two in 2023). It added COMAC plans to establish a production system able to produce 150 aircraft annually by 2028. Simple Flying has already reported COMAC plans to deliver 50 C919s in 2025…. COMAC’s currently low production numbers, together with China’s massive and growing aviation market, mean that Chinese airlines will have no choice but to continue ordering Airbus and Boeing aircraft for a long time to come (including all of their widebody aircraft). Time will tell how fast COMAC can ramp up production to meet more and more of its domestic requires and produce surplus for export. The COMAC faces a potentially bright future because it is a Chinese aircraft. China now boasts one of the world’s largest airline markets (the United States retains the largest), meaning that there is plenty of domestic market potential even before considering exports.”

Tech:

If China pulls a DeepSeek on the Adobe creative suite they’ll have us singing Red Sun in the Sky by Q2 2025

— Q. Anthony Ali (@NobleQAli) January 27, 2025

I thought I ran this, but it doesn’t show up in search, so…

Tech: Of Sam Altman:

I would observe that Sam – and too many others like him – have the same relationship with AGI as do teenage boys with their raging hormones and sex:

He can’t tell us exactly what it is, but he assures us he will know it when he sees it. He thinks that everyone is doing it when…

— Grady Booch (@Grady_Booch) February 1, 2025

Tech: A good question:

Why do all the AI logos look like butt holes? pic.twitter.com/O5VC3bAgP5

— greg (@greg16676935420) January 31, 2025

NOTE I only had time to verify OpenAI’s logo….

The Bezzle: “After twelve years of writing about bitcoin, here’s how my thinking has changed” [Moneyness]. From 2024, still germane. “If you want to buy some bitcoins, go right ahead. We can even help by regulating the trading venues to make it safe. But don’t force others to play. Alas, that seems to be where we are headed. There is a growing effort to arm-twist the rest of society into joining in by having governments acquire bitcoins, in the U.S.’s case a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. The U.S. government has never entered the World Series of Poker. Nor has it gone to Vegas to bet billions to tax payer funds on roulette or built a strategic Powerball ticket reserve, but it appears to be genuinely entertaining the idea of rolling the dice on Bitcoin.” And: “Bitcoin is an incredibly infectious early-bird game, one that after sixteen years continues to find a constant stream of new recruits. How contagious? I originally estimated in a 2022 post, Three potential paths for the price of bitcoin, that adoption wouldn’t rise above 10%-15% of the global population, but I may have been underestimating its transmissibility…. It begins with a small strategic reserve of a few billion dollars. It ends with the Department of Bitcoin Price Appreciation being allocated 50% of yearly tax revenues to make the number go up, to the detriment of infrastructure like roads, hospitals, and law enforcement. At that point we’ve entered a dystopia in which society rapidly deteriorates because we’ve all become obsessed on a bet.” • Sadly, “early bird game” is undefined. Readers?

* * *

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 45 Fear (previous close: 44 Fear) [CNN]. One week ago: 47 (Neutral). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Feb 4 at 2:10:42 PM ET.

Rapture Index: Closes down one on Food Supply. “The lack of activity has downgraded this category” [Rapture Ready]. Record High, October 10, 2016: 189. Current: 180. (Remember that bringing on the Rapture is good.) • This is a tough crowd. Surely Trump’s first month brought the Rapture closer?

Gallery

“Dolní Vĕstonice Portrait Head: The oldest known human portrait in the world” [LiveScience]. “This sculpture, discovered at the archaeological site of Dolní Vĕstonice in the Czech Republic in the 1920s, is considered the oldest surviving portrait of a person anywhere in the world, at 26,000 years old…. Carved with stone tools out of mammoth ivory, the tiny head measures just 1.9 inches (4.8 centimeters) tall and 1 inch (2.4 cm) wide. The sculpture appears to represent a woman’s face, with engraved eyes, a dimpled chin, and a raised nose and mouth. She may be wearing her hair in an updo or under a hat. Unlike other objects from the site — such as the Venus of Vĕstonice, which lacks facial features — this face seems to be individualized, making it the earliest known depiction of a specific person.” Also in the camp: “In one of these burials, covered in red ocher and arrayed with 10 drilled fox teeth, excavators discovered the skeleton of a middle-aged woman in 1949. Her skull was asymmetrical, potentially due to a traumatic childhood injury. When researchers used forensic techniques to reconstruct the woman’s face from the skull in 2018, they discovered it was very similar to the tiny ivory carving, whose left eye is significantly smaller than the right…. [T]his little head carved from mammoth ivory is likely the earliest personal portrait in the world.” • Here she is:

Zeitgeist Watch

“What’s Up With All the Sex Parties?” [The Atlantic]. ” learned that “play parties” can take place in people’s homes, but many happen under the auspices of private clubs. I reached out to a number of prominent ones, wondering if the sex-club boom was real, and what actually goes on at them. One of my major findings: People, especially rich people, come up with extremely elaborate justifications for getting laid. To be clear, these clubs are not brothels—guests have sex with one another, not with the club’s employees. Some say that they are putting on performances of ‘high erotic art’; others want to promote ‘equitable pleasure.’ They all try to sell erotic experimentation less as a means of gratification than as a moral virtue. They are creating, they insist, not so much a venue for sex as a gathering space of ‘like-minded individuals.’ People who are ‘liberated’ from social mores. People who think differently. People for whom the normal rules don’t apply. Snctm, a members-only sex club in Beverly Hills inspired by the movie Eyes Wide Shut, opened about a decade ago, and growth ‘was slow and steady’ at first, Robert Artés, the club’s managing director, told me. ‘But the last three to four years, there’s been tremendous growth in this space. Snctm members pay $12,500 or more a year for access to masquerade parties that can cost upwards of $2,000 a ticket.” • The rich are different…

“What ‘Boy-Friendly’ Changes Look Like at Every Grade Level” [EducationWeek]. “n Boys’ Latin’s lower, or elementary, school, the most noticeable difference in scheduling was adding a second recess in the morning. Before the official start of the school day, students can now play outside with their friends from 7:30 a.m. to 7:50 a.m. Gregory Schnitzlein, the head of the lower school, said most students participate—a ‘huge win’ for both the boys and their teachers, he added. A few boys, notoriously late in years past, now routinely get to school well before class starts. They don’t want to miss out on playing pick-up soccer games. And the boys who take advantage of early-morning recess tend to start class calmer and more alert, Schnitzlein said. In general, boys tend to have a much harder time than girls sitting still in class, according to a nationally representative EdWeek Research Center survey of K-12 teachers. While about 4 in 10 teachers indicated that both boys and girls ‘sometimes’ struggled with sitting still, 51 percent said boys ‘often’ or ‘always’ have a hard time sitting still—compared to 18 percent who said the same about girls. That could help explain why teachers punish boys more frequently than their female classmates, beginning as early as preschool and continuing through high school.”

News of the Wired

“Exploring the boundary of quantum correlations with a time-domain optical processor” [Science]. From the Abstract: “Contextuality is a hallmark feature of the quantum theory that captures its incompatibility with any noncontextual hidden-variable model. The Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ)–type paradoxes are proofs of contextuality that reveal this incompatibility with deterministic logical arguments…. We demonstrate [a GHZ-type paradox] with a time-domain fiber optical platform and recover the quantum prediction in a 37-dimensional setup based on high-speed modulation, convolution, and homodyne detection of time-multiplexed pulsed coherent light. By proposing and studying a strong form of contextuality in high-dimensional Hilbert space, our results pave the way for the exploration of exotic quantum correlations with time-multiplexed optical systems.” • I’m sure this means something. But what?

“A computer can never be held accountable” [Simon Willison]. ” This legendary page from an internal IBM training in 1979 could not be more appropriate for our new age of AI.” • And the original and its author are long gone. Presumably, their COBOL code “lives” on…

* * *

Contact information for plants: Readers, feel free to contact me at lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [DOT] corrente [AT] yahoo [DOT] com, to (a) find out how to send me a check if you are allergic to PayPal and (b) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi, lichen, and coral are deemed to be honorary plants! If you want your handle to appear as a credit, please place it at the start of your mail in parentheses: (thus). Otherwise, I will anonymize by using your initials. See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. From CM and MB:

CM writes: “Please see attached, ‘From somewhere near Pittsburgh.’ It was in the ballpark of a hundred pounds of edible material. ‘All fungi are edible. Some fungi are only edible once.’ –Terry Pratchett. Chicken of the Woods, but more like a dinosaur!

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