At first glance, it may seem counterintuitive, but research consistently shows that giving people cash is far more transformative than providing services. And when you think about it, that makes perfect sense. How can those who are wealthy truly understand the daily challenges faced by people living in poverty?

Well-intentioned donors may assume that better schools, more supplies, or job-training programs are obviously helpful. But the reality is that much of the funding for these services never reaches the communities it’s meant to support—it flows instead to the business owners and organizations providing the services. Meanwhile, when people in poverty receive cash, they spend it locally, supporting neighborhood businesses and strengthening their own communities.

It’s similar to giving tax breaks to the wealthy: the money doesn’t make its way back to Main Street. Affluent individuals aren’t spending at local diners—they’re booking tables at Michelin-star restaurants. They’re not shopping at local stores—they’re buying luxury goods from high-end retailers.

Money circulates in the communities that already have it. Trickle-down economics doesn’t work at the national level, and trickle-down philanthropy doesn’t work either.

Atul Gawande of Harvard’s School of Public Healt on the effects of the Trump administration’s decision to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID):

In the article, Gawande cited an analysis in The Lancet that estimated that USAID assistance—aimed at combatting diseases such as HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, and polio, reducing maternal and child deaths, and fighting malnutrition—had saved 92 million lives over two decades.

The dismantling of USAID, according to models from Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols, “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children,” Gawande wrote. He noted that the toll will continue to grow and may go unseen because it can take months or years for people to die from lack of treatments or vaccine-preventable illnesses—and because deaths are scattered.

“We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed ‘public man-made death,’” Gawande wrote.

This is the trailer for an HBO documentary called Thoughts and Prayers about “the impact of the $3 billion active shooter preparedness industry on schools and communities across America”.

From David Ehrlich’s review in IndieWire:

Bulletproof desks that students can flip over at the first sign of trouble. A robot dog the size of a Pomeranian that jumps and yaps at the sight of an intruder. Inflatable body armor light enough for a first grader to blow up and hide behind. These are just a few of the more sensible products that are on display in the opening moments of Zackary Canepari and Jessica Dimmock’s utterly damning “Thoughts & Prayers” — the least farcical selection of props that contribute to America’s burgeoning active shooter defense industry, which now grosses more than three billion dollars per year.

Of course, that’s a small price to pay for the laughably transparent illusion that we’re taking any meaningful steps toward protecting our kids from being slaughtered in their classrooms. In a crumbling empire where common sense has been eroded by ideology, and the political will to solve a problem can’t hope to compete with the ghoulish impulse to profit from it, creating a new business sector might just be the only kind of healing that the richest country on Earth can afford.

Its is disgusting that we think this is an acceptable way to live in America.

Sean Duffy, the secretary of transportation, began a new campaign on Wednesday that he called “The Golden Age of Travel Starts With You".

From the Department of Transportation website:

Secretary Duffy posed a few key questions every flyer should ask themselves this holiday season to help Americans reach their destinations as quickly, efficiently and comfortably as possible:

1. Are you helping a pregnant woman or the elderly with placing their bags in the overhead bin?
2. Are you dressing with respect?
3. Are you keeping control of your children and helping them through the airport?
4. Are you saying thank you to your flight attendants?
5. Are you saying please and thank you in general?

We can start with the guy at the top.

The Sagrada Família has become the tallest church in the world, after workers placed the first part of a cross at the top of its central tower. The Barcelona church will top 564 feet when the rest of the cross is placed in the next few months.

The Financial Times reporting:

Apple is stepping up its succession planning efforts, as it prepares for Tim Cook to step down as chief executive as soon as next year. Several people familiar with discussions inside the tech group told the Financial Times that its board and senior executives have recently intensified preparations for Cook to hand over the reins at the $4tn company after more than 14 years.

John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice-president of hardware engineering, is widely seen as Cook’s most likely successor, although no final decisions have been made, these people said.

People close to Apple say the long-planned transition is not related to the company’s current performance, ahead of what is expected to be a blockbuster end-of-year sales period for the iPhone. […]

The company is unlikely to name a new CEO before its next earnings report in late January, which covers the critical holiday period. An announcement early in the year would give its new leadership team time to settle in ahead of its big annual keynote events, its developer conference in June and its iPhone launch in September, the people said. These people said that although preparations have intensified, the timing of any announcement could change.

I absolutely love the idea of Cook’s successor being a product person like Ternus, and Ternus is young enough — 50, the same age Cook was in 2011 when he took the reins from Steve Jobs — to hold the job for a long stretch. Ternus took over iPhone hardware engineering in 2020, and was promoted to senior vice president of hardware engineering in January 2021, when Dan Riccio stepped aside. Apple’s hardware, across all product lines and including silicon, has been exemplary under Ternus’s leadership. And Ternus clearly loves and understands the Mac.

I would also bet that Cook moves into the role of executive chairman, and will still play a significant, if not leading, role for the company when it comes to domestic and international politics. Especially with regard to Trump.

Bill Wurtz’s History of Japan is the most entertaining history of anything I have ever seen.

Poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor but because we cannot satisfy the rich.

Martin M. McLaughlin

Ski mountaineer Andrzej Bargiel becomes the first person to climb Mount Everest and ski back to Everest Base Camp without supplementary oxygen. After nearly 16 hours climbing in the high altitude “death zone” (above 8,000m where oxygen levels are dangerously low), Bargiel clipped into his skis on the summit of the tallest mountain on earth and started his descent via the South Col Route. He reached Camp II that night and rested - the summit ridge and Hillary Step had taken longer than planned, meaning darkness made it dangerous and difficult to navigate further that day. The next morning, he skied through the treacherous Khumbu Icefall - guided by a drone flown by his brother, Bartek - before safely arriving at Base Camp to become the first person to ascend and descend Mount Everest on skis with no supplementary oxygen.

What an absolute madman. This deserves a full two-hour film filled with all the highs and lows. From the overhead shots it looks effortless, but when you see Andrzej’s GoPro footage, he’s struggling to breathe and constantly coughing. It’s somehow one of the most peaceful and most terrifying videos I’ve ever watched.

Rachel Moody in an Opinion piece for The Daily Tar Heel:

Part of that is due to the false perception that these minimum wage jobs are low-skill. But they’re not low-skill. They simply require different skills, ones that not just anyone possesses. I dare anyone who thinks so to work a service job for a few months. They’ll quickly realize it’s not just common sense, nor as easy as they think.

Important to remember that every person who does a job deserves our respect.

Thor Pedersen on the lessons he learned on his epic nearly decade long trip - and the one thing that struck me the most - what you want and what you need are not the same thing:

Just about anything can become routine and begin to feel like work – even travelling to every country in the world. It is rare for people to travel constantly for much more than a year because it wears the soul; most long-term travellers return home exhausted to reflect and recharge.

I pushed myself for nearly a decade. Buses, trains, boats, people, food, unpacking, packing, embassies, borders, bureaucracy – a long tunnel of countries. I hit a wall after about two years, but had to push through it to reach my goal. I learned the difference between what I want and what I need. I learned to live on a rock and how to engage in conversation with absolutely anyone. Once I returned home, I realised the only things that had kept their value were the relationships and conversations I had had. Everything else seemed perishable.

Anil Dash sums up my feelings on the AI bubble perfectly:

What’s amazing is the reality that virtually 100% of tech experts I talk to in the industry feel this way, yet nobody outside of that cohort will mention this reality. What we all want is for people to just treat AI as a “normal technology”, as Arvind Naryanan and Sayash Kapoor so perfectly put it. I might be a little more angry and a little less eloquent: stop being so goddamn creepy and weird about the technology! It’s just tech, everything doesn’t have to become some weird religion that you beat people over the head with, or gamble the entire stock market on.

Opposition leader María Corina Machado wins the Nobel Peace Prize.

When authoritarians seize power, it is crucial to recognize courageous defenders of freedom who rise and resist.

Dave Snyder writing for Design Observer:

I’ve been designing digital products for 25 years. I remember when the big decision was going from 800×600 to 1024 pixels. I’ve lived through multiple cycles of VR hype, watched the web go from static pages to social networks to AI everything. I’ve launched products that failed spectacularly and others that succeeded for reasons no one predicted.

Trees don’t pay off tomorrow. They pay off in a decade. They compound quietly, making everything around them better, shade, value, beauty, longevity. Most products? We treat them like shrubs. Plant twenty features, hope one sticks. Feature bloat dressed up as “innovation.” It’s impatient, and it’s stupid.

The smarter play is restraint. Plant the tree. Solve the one core problem. Put the craft in. Then let time and real user behavior do the work.

Donald Trump on his blog:

THE BIDEN FBI PLACED 274 AGENTS INTO THE CROWD ON JANUARY 6. If this is so, which it is, a lot of very good people will be owed big apologies. What a SCAM - DO SOMETHING!!! President DJT

The man is obviously unwell.

Ryan Gould and Liana Baker, reporting for Bloomberg:

Intel Corp. has approached Apple Inc. about securing an investment in the ailing chipmaker, according to people familiar with the matter, part of efforts to bolster a business that’s now partially owned by the US government.

Apple and Intel also have discussed how to work more closely together, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. The talks have been early-stage and may not lead to an agreement, the people said.

I have no idea would Intel could offer Apple. There is no way Apple is going back to Intel x86. And Intel’s fabrication capabilities can’t come close to TSMC for fabricating Apple’s own chip designs. This makes for some great tech gossip - but it is not going anywhere.

This is still spot on…

Now at this last we must take a hard road, a road unforeseen. There lies our hope, if hope it be.

Tolkien JRR. The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, Book 1). HarperCollins UK

The trailer for Wake Up Dead Man, the new Knives Out movie.

Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) returns for his most dangerous case yet in the third and darkest chapter of Rian Johnson’s murder mystery opus. Starring Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Daryl McCormack, and Thomas Haden Church.

The trailer for Wake Up Dead Man, the new Knives Out movie.