Extra, Extra
Are We Having Fund Yet? “President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he has made a deal with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the United States to stop sending $4 billion in aid annually to Israel. It was not immediately clear which exact funding Trump meant.” (To us, or him.) Prepare for a new deal that will include graft.
+ Stand Up for Comedy: “Where were you when the A.I. revolution came for stand-up comedy? I was looking at my phone this month when all of a sudden my social media scrolls filled with teasingly seductive female comedians in front of brick walls, drawing hundreds of thousands of followers through flirty onstage punchlines. If the jokes of these Stepford stand-ups, packed into crop tops and body suits, seemed familiar, that’s because they were stolen.” Invasion of the Sexy A.I. Joke Thieves. (If this tech comes after news puns, I’m history.)
+ Virtual Insanity: “The Texas Legislature gave virtual schools a tremendous boost last year when it mandated that virtual schools get the same per-pupil funding as their brick-and-mortar counterparts. That’s despite their lacking the physical plants, maintenance staff and bus fleets, and many of the extracurriculars, that make up a big chunk of the costs of a neighborhood school. Stride doesn’t need to put unspent money back into its schools as traditional public schools would. That gives the company more for things such as advertising and executive compensation — and for a healthy operating profit, about $450 million across the whole company in the most recent academic year.” Bloomberg (Gift Article): Texas Pays Online School Empire For Kids Who Don’t Show Up.
+ Big Old Jet Onliner: “Many of their engines haven’t been fired up for years. But America’s soaring demand for electricity to power data centers is bringing them back to life. Several companies are racing to strip the engines out of old aircraft to convert them into electrical generators. And data centers, desperate for power, are snapping them up.” Old, Polluting Jet Engines Are Being Scavenged to Power Data Centers. (Claude, please tell me you didn’t come up with this idea…)
+ Do Harm? A West Point cadet drugged his girlfriend to force an unwanted abortion. Then he went to grad school. “He wrote … that he was interested in ‘the intersection of emergency medicine, addiction and public health’ and aimed to become a physician.”
+ Try Cycle: “What Ridwell will rid you of is diverse: Orange prescription bottles become glasses frames, while bike inner tubes are made into wallets. Hard-to-recycle plastics, electronics, lightbulbs, batteries and even old pickleballs are accepted.” WaPo (Gift Article): One company promises to recycle almost everything. I gave it a try.
+ Thrones and Drones: WSJ (Gift Article): The Wild Rise of a Trump-Backed Drone Company. “Assembled from $5.7 million in assets, Powerus has grown within months into a $300 million enterprise, led by an unlikely cast of characters that includes a public golf-course operator in Florida; a sushi restaurateur; a Democratic donor with a New York cleaning business; and a former child-modeling talent scout who has settled claims of defrauding parents.” Oh, and of course, they have some likely investors: Eric and Don Jr.
