Thursday, June 26, 2025, Delray Beach, Florida


Inside This Issue...

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I was all set to put this issue to bed on Monday night. I had just finished a longish essay on the US bombing of Iran when, almost as if it was done to spite me, Trump announced that the “war” had come to an end. The Iranians and the Israelis had agreed to a cease-fire, followed by negotiations for peace – after just 12 days.

The second sentence of that essay was: “This wasn’t just a minor step up in US support of Israel, this was – in so many ways – insane!”

“Insane” was not the perfect word, but anything else I thought of sounded bloodless and analytical.

I don’t think I was the only one struggling for words, which means, of course, struggling for coherent thoughts that conveyed my response to this surprising-if-not-astonishing action.

One part of my brain – the one that has been working out ideas I’ve been forming on culture – felt good about it. That brain believes that all cultures are not equal, neither in how they serve those who take part in them nor in respect to any universal moral standard.

Another part of my brain – the one that grows too quickly weary of comfort, lacks the discriminatory power to assess risk, and is always looking for adventure – was excited. No, it was more than excited. It was nothing short of thrilled to be alive at this moment – at the threshold of extinction!

A third part of my brain – the one that wants to present itself well – had been working furiously since the bombing, trying to make sense of what we (the US military) had done and what the effect of it would be.

In the main essay below, aside from updating a few facts, I’ve reprinted most of what I wrote on Monday almost entirely as I wrote it because (a) most of the questions I was trying to answer are still unanswered, and (b) some of the speculations I made about what the bombings could bring about did in fact come about.

I’m also including a few extra bits that I hope you will enjoy, including a unique profit-making opportunity (in the “Building Wealth” section) and a profile of NYC’s new mayor.

Correction: In the last issue, I mistakenly said that Benjamin Cañas, the brilliant Central American surrealist, was Guatemalan. Wrong! Though he was born in Honduras, he grew up in El Salvador and is considered to be Salvadoran. (I knew that! What was I thinking?)

Building Wealth

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Is It Time to Sell Your Business? 

Are you a Baby Boomer looking to sell your business? Or the child of a Baby Boomer looking to buy one?

A window of opportunity is open right now that (1) is very large, and (2) won’t be open much longer.

It started with a gentle rise nearly 10 years ago and has been slowly increasing. It is peaking now and is predicted to stay near peak levels for another three to four years and then drop precipitously.

What’s especially cool about this trend is that it is providing very high profit opportunities for both buyers and also sellers. But it won’t last forever. So if this is something you are contemplating, you should start preparing for it now.

The numbers are impressive. According to Nick DiFrancesco, a business broker who wrote a persuasive article in LinkedIn that I read last week, the Baby Boomer generation (those born between 1946 and 1964) is in the midst of a “historic wave of retirement, with approximately 10,000 Boomers leaving the workforce each day.”

A decent percentage of these retirees own small- and mid-sized businesses, and many of those businesses are mature and profitable – giving buyers the opportunity to realize cash flow from day one and, if the buyers can expand market share or increase profits, enjoy significant and steady positive cash flow in the coming years.

There are about 12 million businesses at that size-level operating across the US today. And the majority of them are construction firms, manufacturing companies, and service operations – most of which are resistant to the AI/Robotics revolution that is putting so many higher tech and creative firms out of business, along with their owners and employees.

The size of the arbitrage is enormous. It’s estimated that more than $10 trillion worth of business assets will change hands through sales, mergers, or generational handoffs in the next 10 years. But the biggest part of that – along with the greatest opportunities for profit – is likely to come in the next three to four years.

Most of these businesses that are flooding into market now are owned by single-person operators who have no one to give them to and no succession plan for themselves. That presents the buyer with the opportunity to step in and solve the seller’s problem by making a quick deal on the best possible terms.

In his article, DiFrancesco identifies several factors that have lined up recently to create what he calls a “perfect storm” for making great deals on both sides of the sale.

He points out that…

* Banks have started lending again to small businesses, especially SBA-backed loans under $5 million.

* Buyers? They’re coming from everywhere – first-timers sick of corporate life, private equity firms, big companies buying up smaller businesses, and even tech entrepreneurs wanting to buy traditional businesses just to automate and scale with AI.

* Private equity is shifting down-market, hunting for smaller deals in the $1 million to $3 million EBITDA range because they see real growth there.

* Inflation is down and rates are stabilizing, making conditions for profiting for buyers and sellers better than they’ve been in years.

The buyer pool in 2025, he says, is more diverse than ever. “First-timers, often exhausted corporate folks trying to go independent, are utilizing SBA loans. Strategic buyers and rollup groups are actively snapping up companies to expand their reach. Even tech entrepreneurs are buying operations like HVAC or plumbing – not to work in them, but to automate and turn them into high-efficiency assets. Meanwhile, family offices and private equity firms, flush with cash and desperate for good deals, are competing at the smaller end of the market.”

If you are interested in following up on this, you can contact Nick DiFrancesco here.

Profiles

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Meet Zohran Mamdani – NYC’s New Mayor! 

On Monday, I sent a note to four of my friends that live in New York City, warning them that I had heard they and their fellow city dwellers were on the verge of electing another one of those “Progressive” or “Socialist” Democrats and urging them to vote, instead, for the Republican candidate, Curtis Silwa, the man who founded the Guardian Angels.

My message was worded passionately but it was entirely disingenuous, which, I thought, would be crystal clear. After all, they were all coevals of mine – Baby Boomers who, in our college years, were anti-war, anti-interventionist, anti-government, and anti-Big Business, and then went to respectable colleges and universities that reinforced those ideas.

Since 2015, however, our generation had undergone a major ideological shift in which a vast number of us were infected by an allergic reaction to Donald Trump as a politician, which was tenacious and inflammatory and eventually presented itself as TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome, characterized by a reflexive disagreement to everything Trump does or says).

There are many curious symptoms of TDS, but the most noticeable is that millions of people that once were anti-war, anti-interventionist, anti-government, and anti-Big Business are now staunchly pro-war, pro-interventionist, pro-government, and pro-Big Business.

Of course, there were some of us who maintained our original biases, which, through five decades of living in the real world, turned us into Conservatives.

Anyway, back to my digital poke…

One of my friends must have thought I was serious because he wrote back and said that he couldn’t bring himself to vote for the Republican candidate because he “lacked the managerial experience.”

I suppose I could have said, “I was joking!” Instead, I wrote, “You don’t need ‘managerial experience’ to be Mayor of New York City. You need an open pocket and a red beret.”

Curtis Silwa, Andrew Cuomo, Eric Adams, and Zohran Mamdani 

The next day, thinking about my friend’s comment about Silwa’s lack of managerial experience, I wanted to find out what experience Mamdani has had, especially considering New York City’s newly adopted ranked-choice voting system.

According to Alex Berenson (one of a very few journalists I read regularly), Mamdani was born in Kampala, Uganda, and grew up in a heavily subsidized apartment in Manhattan with an interesting education, thanks to his father, Mahmood, a professor at Columbia who specializes in “post-colonial studies” and “the politics of knowledge production.”

From Berenson:

Mamdani went to Bowdoin College in Maine – think Oberlin with worse weather – where he founded (okay, co-founded) a chapter of Students for Justice and Palestine along the way to earning a degree in “Africana Studies” a few months short of 23.

After college, he “worked” as rapper called “Mr. Cardamom” before becoming a “field director” and “foreclosure prevention coordinator.” No matter that getting foreclosed on, much less evicted, in New York is nearly impossible. The state’s protections for tenants and homeowners verge on the absurd.

In 2020, Mamdani ran for New York’s state assembly on the promise of putting rent and mortgage payments on a “moratorium” until the end of COVID, with no back payments due later. Not surprising, he won.

In his bid for the mayor’s position, he has been promising a freeze on rent for all rent-stabilized tenants in New York City, which sounds like a really good idea unless you know how to count.

The core housing problem in NYC, which is no secret to anyone who lives there, is that there aren’t enough rental units to satisfy the city’s need. Despite the ever-rising crime and filth, the perception of the city as a springboard for wealth, fame, and power continues to attract 20,000 new residents every month.

Officially, the city has a population of 8.3 million people. Counting illegal immigrants, the number is closer to 9 million. (Interesting: In the 1960s and 1970s, when I was watching The Naked City, there were about 7 million.)

But building in New York is tediously difficult and crazy expensive. This has made it all but impossible for builders to risk new construction for lower- and middle-level-income families. The only option from a P&L perspective is high-end buildings for high-net-worth customers, leaving the housing shortage just as it is.

Berenson:

A rent freeze will do nothing to change these dynamics, and a lot of Mamdani’s other suggestions will make them worse. New York City’s budget, about $112 billion, is approximately as large as the state of Florida’s – though Florida has close to three times as many people.

The city depends hugely on the income taxes paid by the top 5 percent and particularly the top 1 percent and 0.1 percent of its residents. In 2021, the top 1 percent of filers paid half of all personal taxes the city collected.

These hyper-wealthy New Yorkers are not the reason New York is so expensive or crowded, and they’re certainly not the reason the city’s government is so bloated and inept. But they are the people that pay for half of what the city spends each year!

So, after Mamdani and his supporters get done celebrating his all-but-certain win, they should sit down and face the facts: If they want New York to continue supporting its cherished million-plus population of unemployed drifters and grifters, of mentally disabled streetwalkers who have no homes, of the professionally unemployed and perennially needy lay-abouts and half a million illegal immigrants, they’d better start thinking about what will happen to the city’s tax revenues when this tiny group of its citizen (probably 0.3% of the taxpayers) begins to move out of the city for a better tax and quality of life experience elsewhere.

As a former New Yorker, I don’t like to root against them. But as someone who is living in a state that will probably net at least 30% of those uber-rich who will be leaving NYC during Mamdani’s administration, I’m looking forward to the benefit it will bring to us.

Just One Thing

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The 12-Day War (or Whatever It Was) 

What the hell just happened?

Did the US military just bomb the hell out of Iran? Did it really fly thousands of miles over the ocean and then over Eastern Europe and then into and over Iran air space, undetected, and then drop “bunker buster” bombs on all of Iran’s major nuclear power facilities? Did it destroy them, as Trump claimed? Or does the Ayatollah and his war machine have “plenty more of that [enriched uranium]” hidden in some remote location we failed to hit?

And what the hell is going to happen now?

Will Iran launch a counterattack? Will it bomb US facilities in and around the Persian Gulf? Will other Arab countries get behind Iran and turn this now three-country conflict into a regional war? Or worse yet, will Russia and China, whose interests are tied up strongly with Iran, get involved? Are we talking about WWIII?

If Trump is right about how much damage was done, will Iranians give up (at least for now) their hopes of becoming a nuclear power? And if they do, would they consider talking peace with Israel? Would they consider, seriously for the first time in 40+ years, suspending their crusade to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth?

Let’s Look at the Pieces, One at a Time

Here are the questions that popped up in my mind the moment I decided to take a crack at writing about this. I’m sure they are the same questions that a thousand (10,000? 100,000?) online bloggers are asking themselves right now:

* What, exactly, happened?
* What was the goal?
* What was the rationale?
* To what degree was it achieved?
* What was the global reaction?

And as a headline in The Free Press asked:

Did Trump just start a war or end one? 

I am conscious that this will be read by many of my colleagues, friends, business associates, and especially members of various discussion groups I belong to – each of whom has intellectual prejudices related to this conflict that they are unlikely to be swayed away from by anything I say. (I can already hear them shouting at me, telling me what I should think!)

A Full Range of Ideological Biases and Predispositions

My Anarchist/Capitalist and Libertarian heroes have roundly denounced the bombings. They long ago figured out that war is always bad for freedom and the economy and is usually the result, as Hemingway noticed, of screwing around with the national currency.

My Liberal and Leftist friends that hate Donald Trump and are also antisemitic (as the majority of them are) are appalled by the bombings and have no doubt that this is another example of Trump thinking he’s a King and acting like a Dictator.

My Liberal and Leftist friends who hate Trump but think of themselves as fair-minded about the Arab/Israeli conflict and/or sympathetic towards Israel are confused. The hate-Trump part of their brains wants to hate the bombings. But another part – the part that understands that Iran is the largest sponsor of pro-Hamas/anti-Israel terrorism in the world – is secretly happy about the bombing and hopes it may remove from Iran the possibility of developing a nuclear weapon.

I don’t have any Neocon friends (or perhaps I do, but they know better than to let me know). These people are very happy with the bombings and are hoping to see much more of that sort of thing all over the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

Maybe it’s best to begin with stating something that everyone reading this will agree with: The bombing of Iran was a big thing. And it’s almost certainly going to have big consequences. The only question is: What sort of consequences? And how many?

Things were spicy hot around the globe before the bombing took place. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was already, under the Biden administration, another proxy war between the US and Russia. And when Israel defended itself after the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre of 344 Israeli civilians, and then began its attack on Iran, the tension was at a breaking point.

Now, with the US moving into the conflict actively, many media personalities, Foreign Relations analysts, and Cold War pundits are writing and speaking about the possible repercussions.

I’m neck-deep in reading what those guys have to say. But I’m finding very little in the press from the leaders of countries that have a stake in what just happened. I’ll try to figure out why they’ve been surprisingly quiet later in this essay. Meanwhile, let’s try to answer the first question: What, exactly, happened?

Some of the Relevant Facts

Last weekend, the US launched a precision strike targeting key Iranian nuclear sites – mainly facilities believed to be involved in developing nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. According to officials, the operation was planned months in advance, likely involving a mix of satellite imagery, signals intelligence, and possibly cyber operations.

Reports said cruise missiles and drones were used to hit specific underground bunkers and storage depots – places where Iran has been known to hide and protect sensitive material. Early assessments from US and Israeli sources claimed the attack caused significant damage, possibly delaying Iran’s progress by several months, if not longer.

Iran’s government immediately condemned the attack, calling it an act of war and promising retaliation.

Iran has been working relentlessly to develop nuclear weapons for years. It’s also been building up a missile arsenal capable of reaching Israel and potentially Europe and US interests.

According to US intelligence sources, Iran’s underground nuclear facilities – like the Fordow plant – are heavily fortified and dispersed. That makes them tough targets, but the US use of the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) bomb, which can penetrate 100 feet into the ground or into 20 feet of reinforced concrete, can, in theory at least, reach and destroy them.

If It Were Only That Simple 

Iran has a history of secretly hiding and moving nuclear materials, and intelligence analysts suggest they’ve already taken steps to preserve their capabilities. Some leaks indicate that they might have already managed to transfer or hide key components, meaning this strike could have been a temporary setback rather than a knockout punch.

So, if you ask me, Operation Midnight Hammer was a targeted operation designed to delay Iran’s nuclear breakout – and it was probably the best shot we had right now.

But let’s be real. Iran’s regime remains deeply committed to its goal: developing nuclear weapons and ICBMs to attack and eventually destroy Israel and the US, and after that to convert or slaughter the rest of the non-Islamic peoples.

Why Did Trump Decide to Bomb Iran?

Trump had been saying, long before he took office, that Iran should not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon. During his first and second campaigns, he said it again, repeatedly, and chastised previous administrations for not taking aggressive action to stop it from happening.

Iran has long claimed its nuclear program is peaceful, but that’s nonsense. For peaceful purposes, uranium enrichment only needs to be in the single digits, and Iran has enriched uranium up to 60%. Apparently, that’s where you want to keep it until you are ready to use it because it’s more stable there, but it can be upgraded to 80% quickly and easily.

Iran’s regime has a proven history of threatening Israel with annihilation, along with ongoing missile development and regional destabilization. And intelligence leaks and reports from sources close to the Trump administration indicate that Iran has been clandestinely moving nuclear materials and deploying advanced centrifuges, despite their public claims of peaceful energy development. Meanwhile, many analysts believe – and I can’t see why they wouldn’t – that Iran regards nuclear weapons as its ultimate deterrent. Which is why they have spent so much money over so many years building out that capability while insisting they are creating fuel for peaceful reasons.

So, the declared reason for the US strike – which I think is 100% accurate – was the intention to prevent the Iranian regime from acquiring a nuclear bomb. And that striking now gave the US a good chance to at least set back its development by decades and possibly get the regime to accept a non-development agreement.

I think Trump and his team were right in thinking that, as risky as the bombing decision was, continuing to ignore Iran’s relentless and undeniable progress in developing nuclear war capability would have been riskier.

Has the Bombing Destroyed (or at Least Impeded) Iran’s Plan to Develop Nukes? 

This is the million-dollar question.

Everyone seems to agree that Iran’s most critical nuclear facilities are deeply underground, built within fortified mountains and designed explicitly to withstand conventional bombs.

Israel doesn’t have the bombing capability to reach those sites, but the US does. In the US surprise attack last weekend, stealth bombers flew thousands of miles into the region and then over Iran to deliver GBU-57 bombs that are specifically designed to destroy hidden, hardened underground bunkers.

It’s very probable that they caused significant damage, potentially crippling or even destroying Iran’s underground enrichment and storage capabilities.

However, Iran is supposedly notorious for its secrecy and clandestine activities. Intelligence agencies around the world believe that Iran has constructed multiple, equally fortified sites that are either undiscovered, disguised, or located in remote areas, especially in the mountainous regions along the border with Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Reports on the Success of the Strike from On High

Trump has said, several times, that the mission was “a great success” and that Iran’s nuclear option has been completely destroyed.

Others are saying that no one but the Iranians has any idea if that’s true, because they have a long history of moving and hiding their development sites, and there is no reason to think that they haven’t done that in recent months.

That’s what Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman seemed to be referring to when she said that the attacks were meant to “destroy what we could find” and to “send a message” that Iran’s nuclear ambitions won’t go unanswered. Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper said the goal was “to damage Iran’s underground facilities enough to force them to slow their program or reconsider their progress.” And Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders said that the strike was successful in causing “significant damage” to “key parts of Iran’s underground program.

So, guess what? Trump is exaggerating. He’s overstating the case – maybe because he can’t stop himself. But his team is saying that the bombings, even if they didn’t hit all the sites, were successful in severely damaging Iran’s ability to build a nuke any time soon.

The Logic 

Still, I don’t see any advantage in Trump’s team or Israeli officials saying that the US military had “largely” completed its mission if it hadn’t. If they are lying, what do they accomplish? A few weeks or months of patting themselves on the back before we discover the truth?

Assuming that the sites were at least damaged sufficiently to postpone any thoughts Iran had about becoming a nuclear power in the near future, what they have to focus on right now is the continuing military attacks coming from Israel.

From Israel’s point of view, the US has given them the one thing they would need to get Iran to come to the bargaining table and discuss not just disarmament but some sort of promise to stop funding Hamas and Hezbollah and all its other anti-Israel proxies. Or, if Netanyahu thinks that will never happen, to crank up his attacks on the country’s military infrastructure until it is completely destroyed.

Iran has to see that as a distinct possibility. A risk it would be foolish – no, insane – to take right now. There’s no doubt that the US bombings have only hardened their commitment to wiping Israel and the US from the face of the Earth, but they are not going to have any chance of doing that if they don’t persuade the rest of the world that they have seen the light and will sign a non-development deal.

For 40 years, Iran’s leaders have shown that they’re willing to bide their time, hide their true activities, and push forward behind a fog of deception. But at this point in time, at this stage of the war’s escalation, will the Ayatollah and his advisors take the rational path? Or will they pray to their God for courage and do what the Koran demands of them?

Bottom line: Iran’s long game is still very much alive. What they do next will depend on how much external pressure they face.

Reaction to the Strike from the Rest of the World

The reaction from the rest of the world? It’s been surprisingly muted, but that’s probably more telling than a loud outcry.

Most Arab countries, especially Sunni Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have historically been wary of Iran’s regional ambitions. But right now, they seem more concerned with how this might spiral out of control than about Iran’s nuclear threat.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman warned that escalation “could destabilize the entire region,” and many Gulf state leaders are quietly preparing for possible fallout – though they’re not openly condemning the strike.

Turkey’s response was cautious. President Erdogan called for “restraint and dialogue,” aware that Turkey’s own interests lie somewhere between balancing its fragile alliance with the West and its extensive trade relationship with Iran. As one Turkish official put it, “We want stability in the region, not another war,” but everyone is clearly wary of letting things get out of hand.

And then there was the response – or lack thereof – from Russia and China.

Russia has been openly opposing America’s moves and backing Iran as part of their broader push to challenge Western dominance. And yet the response from Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was understated. He said the attack “undermines regional stability” and that “military solutions will not resolve the core issues.” And Chinese authorities have urged “all parties to exercise restraint.”

That a little confusing because there are good reasons why China and Russia are allied with Iran in this conflict.

From an economic and political perspective, both nations should be in Iran’s corner. Russia benefits from Iran’s oil and military cooperation. And China profits from trade, including oil and infrastructure deals under the Belt and Road Initiative.

Politically, both superpowers see Iran as a resource in countering Western sanctions, influencing Middle Eastern stability, and reducing US leverage in the region. Supporting Iran allows Russia and China to push back against US efforts to isolate Tehran and assert their own regional and global power.

So, why such soft responses?

It could be because Russia, China, and even many Muslim countries in the region understand that they benefit from regional stability and are hyper-aware that that this conflict could escalate into full-blown confrontation – especially when the wild and unpredictable Trump card is on the table.

So, What Am I Saying?

If it feels like I’m landing this essay in limbo, it’s not on purpose. The stakes are high. The momentum is increasing. The principal players are unpredictable.

The decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities was a decisive move. We can only assume that there is a good chance that Iran will respond. And an equally good chance that the US and Israel are planning on it.

I think that Russia, China, and most of the Muslim countries that are “on Iran’s side” will sit this one out. That gives Iran the choice of fighting the US and Israel on its own or finding some way to capitulate with some degree of dignity.

I have to believe that Trump and Netanyahu would be very happy with that outcome, but I’m guessing that the Ayatollah will not be willing to make them happy. And if that’s so, the future – our future – will depend on whether he’s really the Supreme Leader.

Sources 

The Free Press, “Did Iran Just Sneak Out Critical Nuclear Materials?” 

The Free Press, Matti Friedman on Iran’s nuclear capabilities post-strike

The Free Press, “Trump Keeps His Promise on Iran”

The Free Press, Albert Eisenberg on murders by Iran and US involvement

The Wall Street Journal on Trump’s approach to Iran and its implications

Other sources include official statements and analyses from:

* Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, public speeches and interviews regarding Iran’s nuclear ambitions

* Dr. David Albright, Institute for Science and International Security, analysis of Iran’s underground nuclear facilities

* Former CIA Director Michael Hayden, various public comments on Iran’s clandestine capabilities

Worth Considering

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How Much Time Do You Spend on Email Each Day? 
 
A Japanese mentee emailed me last week, apologizing for being late on a promised response and explaining that she had been swamped with other work, including “20 emails a day.”

My first thought was, “Only 20?”

That got me thinking about my own never-ending battle to rule over my email inbox rather than have my email inbox rule over me.

Here’s how it breaks down…

I get an average of 150 emails a day.

About 20 of them are reports from my main client, a digital information publisher based in Baltimore. I don’t spend a lot of time reading them, but if I notice an anomaly – significantly higher or lower sales than usual – I dig in.

Another 50 are free subscriptions to various online newsletters and other digital information services. I subscribe to them because their subject matter falls within my scope of interest and because they are, in my opinion, well written. I spend at least a half-hour every day scanning, selecting, and filing the essays and articles I think I might use for my blog or my personal journal.

I get about 20 pieces of advertising or promotional email every day, too – mostly offers from the above-mentioned free subscriptions. I never take the bait because I get so much useful and interesting information for free. Well, that’s not entirely true. I have “upgraded” three or four of my 50 free subscriptions because they are so good that I felt the need to pay them something.

Another 30 emails are group-sent business memos, all of which I read and about half of which I reply to, either briefly or at length.

And finally, I get 20 to 30 emails each day sent to me by individuals – colleagues or friends and relatives.

Those from colleagues I answer immediately. The emails from friends and relatives I often make the mistake of putting aside until I feel I can give them the time they deserve, which means I’m usually obliged to begin each one with, “Sorry I didn’t reply sooner, but…”

What this boils down to is about 25 outbound emails a day, which, at one-sixth of my inbound volume, seems about right.

If you are still reading this, you may be wondering why you are still reading it. My answer is that I don’t know, except you probably have the same strain of OCD that I have, and you should (we should) spend less time each day reading and responding to email. (And much less time tracking everything we do.)

What Is This?

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2nd prize winner in the annual Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest in the “People” category… 

A Chinese couple unfolds an oil-paper umbrella in front of a small temple, “evoking the subtle beauty of Chinese culture.”

Test Yourself

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Sweet! 

Click here to test your knowledge of popular desserts from around the world. (I got 9 right: 69%.)

Readers Write

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Comments & Contributions

About AI… 

“I agree with your assessment in the June 21  issue about the effect of AI in the information publishing industry. I’m finding that even the newest paid models are very untrustworthy when it comes to health research. For instance, the latest ScholarGPT and ChatGPT builds are constantly providing me with scientific studies that don’t exist.

“With enough nagging, it will eventually stop lying, fess up, and apologize. But its behavior never changes. Then I make excuses for it and keep using it. Classic toxic relationship stuff. In fairness, at the highest paid/premium access levels, you can somewhat train it to avoid doing this. But even then, it’s dicey.

“This issue will likely be resolved within the next year or two at most. But in the meantime, I’ve found that it does a very good job of extrapolating data from (real!) studies that you provide it with. (For instance, quickly calculating something like absolute risk where it wasn’t explicitly provided by the study authors.)” – JZ

“Thanks for getting me interested in AI. I’ve started dipping my toe into it and find it very informative and a time saver. But it will all go back to how good the information is that goes into its use. Just think how easy it might be to rewrite history, if we let it.” – TA

Postscript

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Ronald Reagan may not have the smartest president that’s been in the White House, but he was probably the best storyteller. Click here and here for two examples.

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