Monopoly

Monopoly was first introduced to America in 1935, but its roots go deeper. Boon Leng Teo/Dreamstime

My wife beats me at Monopoly and now ... my 8 year old granddaughter does the same thing though I think I finally learned how to win against both my tormentors but one never knows. Maddening, greedy and altogether predatory, the game encourages capitalism at its worst while being disguised as a pastime for the ages. With that being said, it seems Monopoly has a rather interesting story to tell.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Monopoly, patented on December 31, 1935 by Charles B. Darrow, is not a game: It’s a world. The basic template: a multiplayer economics game, in which players roll two six-sided dice, move around the periphery of a square board, buy properties, collect rent when opponents land on their spaces, and buy up or trade for connected properties to build houses and hotels on. You win when everyone else goes bust. Played the right way, it’s as much about psychological warfare as economics; sidebar wheeling and dealing is not only encouraged but necessary. Things have to keep moving, and generations of family and friends have convinced and cajoled, causing epic fights in households worldwide. 

Charles B. Darrow is credited with inventing Monopoly as we know it today,
based on real locations in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Bettmann/Getty Images

Darrow’s Monopoly is set in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and the properties around the board mirror the one-time values of real estate on the actual streets of that city. The street names were genius from a game design perspective. Many of the town’s streets are named after states, so you get to travel the whole country block by block, which means that the town is both specifically a fun resort destination and Everywhere, America, at the same time. But there’s a troubling side there as well: the city’s deep racial and socioeconomic ghettoization surfaces in Monopoly’s setup. Baltic and Mediterranean, the cheapest properties on the board, correlate to historically ethnic neighborhoods (even in name), while the historically rich, white enclaves, such as Park Place and Boardwalk, constitute the game’s more expensive zones.

Nothing ever happens in a vacuum, including Monopoly

The Landlord’s Game, on which Monopoly is based, has a very different philosophy. It educated about taxes and criticized the landlords. Thomas Forsyth/LandlordsGame.Info/Public Domain

And Atlantic City Monopoly is itself a version of another game, a debt it doesn’t recognize for obvious reasons. In 1904, inventor Lizzie Magie patented The Landlord’s Game, at its heart an educational tool to teach players about taxes. The Landlord’s Game is the same concept and mechanism—players travel around a game board, buy properties, and pay each other rent. But there are crucial differences. For one thing, the game is criticizing, not celebrating, landlords: The purpose is to show players how rents put money into the coffers of fatcat landlords while impoverishing tenants. There are monopolist and anti-monopolist versions of the rule set. Darrow’s 1935 version, while in many ways a copy of Magie’s, misses the original point: The goal of his game is to revel in the fantasy of being a land-grabbing property owner who bleeds renters dry and uses under-the-table deals to create structural inequality. Barring incredible dice luck, you can only win at Monopoly by dominating trades.

Nothing personal but I like The Landlord's Game a lot better. :)

No need to lie ... anymore

From left, the founders of the A.I. start-up Mechanize: Matthew Barnett, Tamay Besiroglu and Ege Erdil.Credit...Manuel Orbegozo for The New York Times

No need to lie anymore, AI's coming for your job just like Ronnie came for your job by offshoring manufacturing and giving it to China. Now, it's white collar's turn as AI's CHEAPER so the question to ask is, is a guaranteed income in the cards.? Not a chance in the US given just how cruel and hard edge this nation has become since Trump II came on board.

On Thursday, I got a glimpse of a post-labor future at an event held in San Francisco by Mechanize, a new A.I. start-up that has an audacious goal of automating all jobs — yours, mine, those of our doctors and lawyers, the people who write our software and design our buildings and care for our children.

“Our goal is to fully automate work,” said Tamay Besiroglu, 29, one of Mechanize’s founders. “We want to get to a fully automated economy, and make that happen as fast as possible.”

“We’ll only truly know we’ve succeeded once we’ve created A.I. systems capable of taking on nearly every responsibility a human could carry out at a computer,” the company wrote in a recent blog post.

Manuel Orbegozo for The New York Times

What's interesting is the fact their tech is coming for their ability to work as well. Man bites dog for sure. 

Escher lives ...

Escher would approve. 

1037 ...

Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times

Hidden in plain sight but maybe not as Trump's Big Beautiful Bill contains big plans to turn America into something unimagined prior to the reelection of Agent Orange, the luckiest man on planet earth.

To whit ...

Whatever else can be said against the One Big, Beautiful Bill, the 1,037-page legislation carrying President Trump’s domestic agenda, at least the grandiosity of its name reflects the grandiosity of its ambition. Far more expensive than the pandemic stimulus package Mr. Trump signed in his first term, the bill would provide some $3.8 trillion in tax cuts that favor the wealthy, paid for by cutting over a trillion dollars from government programs and borrowing most of the rest.

As the Senate takes up the legislation after its passage in the House last month, Mr. Trump and his allies have worked hard to conceal the true impact it would have on the country, falsely casting it as a golden deal with no downside for the American people. Times Opinion asked seven writers with a wide range of policy expertise to reveal its potential repercussions.

A presidential power grab

Typically, if parties refuse to comply with court orders such as temporary restraining orders, judges can threaten to hold them in contempt. It’s one of the main ways that the courts enforce their rulings. If this bill passes, courts would be able to make such interventions only if plaintiffs first provided security, or a bond.

A sicker America

The current draft of the Republican tax bill would reduce the federal Medicaid budget by at least $600 billion over a decade. That would be the largest cut the program has faced since its inception.

Immigration, a blueprint for nationwide fear

This bill would pave the way for the largest investment in federal immigration enforcement since the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002 — one that would turn that department into a Trojan horse for an assault on the civil rights of all Americans.

The United States already spends more on immigration enforcement than on all other federal criminal law enforcement agencies combined. This bill seeks an additional $175 billion for Mr. Trump’s restrictionist agenda, including deportations in the interior of the country, as well as border barrier construction and surveillance technology. The bill has $45 billion earmarked for detention infrastructure alone. It would also give billions of dollars to border states for assisting in border security operations.

More economic turmoil and isolation

Mr. Trump has made clear that foreigners are not welcome here. He has sought to prevent them from selling their goods and services here. And now Republicans have a plan to discourage them even from investing in the United States.

Dirtier, more dangerous air

The bill would prevent America from innovating in the energy sector and make the country poorer — but Americans, by and large, wouldn’t feel that.

What they would feel is what this bill would do to their air. By slowing the rollout of renewable energy and by removing incentives for Americans to buy electric vehicles, the bill would increase the amount of coal, natural gas and oil burned nationwide, making pollution far worse. (Power prices may also rise.)

A weaker military

The bill seems as though it would fulfill Mr. Trump’s promise to make the U.S. military “bigger, better, stronger and more powerful than ever” — until you look closer.

The bill would add $150 billion to the Pentagon’s top line, and the administration claims this would be the first $1 trillion defense budget.

But the $150 billion in the measure is a one-time increase rather than a permanent change and one that the submitted budget wouldn’t sustain: My colleague Todd Harrison calculates that when you strip away the financial gimmicks, Mr. Trump’s claimed trillion-dollar defense budget would actually be a $31.5 billion reduction from the last one under President Joe Biden. That’s roughly the annual cost of 10 Army brigades.

Factoid

Mr. Trump’s policy bill would add $2.4 trillion to the national debt, the Congressional Budget Office said on Wednesday. That estimate was all but certain to inflame concerns over the fiscal consequences of the legislation.

And we haven't even talked about the negative impact of this bill on science, research and tech. Seems this administration has no competency whatsoever save for the lust for money and the power it accrues as grifting and surveillance as art form is the one thing this administration know how to do well without question. 

Read the very long NYTimes Op piece, you will learn a lot, I know I did.

Divisions among Republicans threaten President Trump’s policy bill, which includes cuts to taxes, Medicaid, food assistance and clean energy programs, and additional money for border security and the military.
Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

The wheels are off ...

Google News

The wheels are off. Combine this with the supremes granting the DOGE team launched by Elon Musk unfettered access to information collected by the Social Security Administration, data that includes Social Security numbers, medical and mental health records, and family court information.

In an unsigned order, the court, acting at the request of the Trump administration, temporarily overturned actions by two lower courts that had limited the DOGE team's access to sensitive private information at the Social Security Administration. The high court sent the case back to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., to rule on the merits. ...

Splinterlands awaits ...

Julian West, looking backwards from 2050, tries to understand why the world and his family have fallen apart.

Part Field Notes from a Catastrophe, part 1984, part World War Z, John Feffer’s striking new dystopian novel, takes us deep into the battered, shattered world of 2050. The European Union has broken apart. Multiethnic great powers like Russia and China have shriveled. America’s global military footprint has virtually disappeared and the United States remains united in name only. Nationalism has proven the century’s most enduring force as ever-rising global temperatures have supercharged each-against-all competition and conflict among the now 300-plus members of an increasingly feeble United Nations.

As he navigates the world of 2050, Julian West offers a roadmap for the path we’re already on, a chronicle of impending disaster, and a faint light of hope. He may be humanity’s last best chance to explain how the world unraveled—if he can survive the savage beauty of the Splinterlands.

You will remember this work forever ... Robert E.

Not right!!!

I'm lucky as we have, in West Haven, CT, a really good VA resource as said enterprise is connected to Yale New Haven Health, which means the young docs, interns, techs and nurses coming out of there are top notch and really care. When spending time at this VA, one sees how universal HC works in practice because the professionals there don't have to deal with insurance companies but rather to us "wonderful" rubes as needs warrant. Needless to say, this differs from HC in the public sector unless one has good insurance, something becoming increasingly difficult to come by given just how greedy the insurance companies truly are. With this being said, yours truly had to update the online connect to the VA, a rather arcane process for me (4 tries) but for folks not knowing tech ... a CF of epic proportions. Prior to Trump, vets needing to link to the VA could talk on the phone to get the info needed to make the connection but now, vets have to drive to the VA resource of choice to get the same info they used to get on the phone. Now, think of the people who are disabled, who have to make the trip in person ...

Anger does NOT BEGIN to address the outrage this vet feels as this is not right! I've talked to some of the VA people who help me out and they are just as angered as well. Not right, as stated before, applies.

An extinction-level event ...

Image credit: Josh Dinner

From tariffs to diplomacy to science, it seems Agent Orange's crew can do nothing right save damaging rather important endeavors like space exploration and science as it's better to not tax billionaires and surveil against us 24/7 rather than insure the health of the nation with emphasis on research as research enable countries to thrive, a notion these people seem to not understand in any way, shape or fashion.

Since January, when President Donald Trump took office for the second time, the White House has been asking U.S. government organizations to implement some pretty radical changes. Things have been tense, to say the least. Thousands of federal workers have been laid off with little explanation, programs that improve diversity in the workplace have been eliminated, research grants have been cancelled in large sweeps, and international college students find themselves at risk of losing their legal status.

One government organization that could be hit the hardest is NASA.

The agency has faced a particularly extensive amount of pressure from the Trump administration: surveillance, goal restructuring, website purging and more. Other federal science organizations haven't been spared, either — places like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) have been targeted as well. The ground of U.S. science seems to be quaking for political reasons rather than scientific ones, leaving scientists disheartened by their government and anxious about what's next.

And things only got worse on May 30, when the Trump administration's fiscal year 2026 budget request for NASA came out. It proposes cutting the agency's science funding by 47%, and the agency's workforce by about one-third — from 17,391 to 11,853. This budget has to be officially passed by Congress to take effect, but if it indeed does, the effects could be brutal.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the White House's 2026 NASA budget proposal is the sheer amount of missions it would cancel altogether: 41 projects, as the Planetary Society said in a statement denouncing the report.

"This is the extinction-level event we were warning people about," Dreier said.

NASA's Perseverance Mars rover took this selfie looking down at one of 10 sample tubes deposited at the sample depot it created in an area nicknamed Three Forks. This image was taken by the WATSON camera on the rover’s robotic arm on Jan. 20, 2023, the 684th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

China is so happy about this administration from hell as it's doing a great job of
dismantling a once great nation for China at no cost.
Something to think about don't you think? 

Nature is economical ...

The researchers were surprised to find that the pattern of species distribution was the same,
regardless of the life form. (CREDIT: Wirestock / Freepik)

Nature is economical as energy and entropy, the two entities that drive reality, manifest themselves in consistent fashion. From Fibonacci spirals to strange attractors in chaos, the ways nature distributes energy is limited, something readily seen in how life survives on planet earth.

Seen below is an elegant example of how energy is distributed in an open system via chaos.

An animation of a double-rod pendulum at an intermediate energy showing chaotic behavior.
Starting the pendulum from a slightly different initial condition would result in a vastly different trajectory.
The double-rod pendulum is one of the simplest dynamical systems with chaotic solutions.

Four Key Measures of Biodiversity

To reveal this pattern, the team looked at four essential aspects of biodiversity:

Species richness – How many species live in an area.

Range size – How widely each species is spread within the region.

Endemicity – Whether species are found only in that area or also elsewhere.

Biota overlap – How many species come from neighboring regions.

 What could be driving this universal pattern? The team points to a mechanism long proposed in ecology but rarely confirmed at a global scale: environmental filtering. This is the idea that only species suited to local conditions—such as temperature, rainfall, or soil type—can thrive in a given area.

The researchers found evidence for two kinds of environmental filters shaping these patterns. One filter works within regional hotspots, where conditions are just right for a high number of unique species to thrive. The second operates at the edges of regions, where conditions are more variable and only certain species from neighboring regions can survive.

The researchers found evidence for two kinds of environmental filters shaping these patterns. One filter works within regional hotspots, where conditions are just right for a high number of unique species to thrive. The second operates at the edges of regions, where conditions are more variable and only certain species from neighboring regions can survive.

These two filters, working together, help determine which species make it into the core, which ones reach the edges, and which ones never cross into a new area at all.

Species sorting within biogeographical regions largely explains local variations in species richness across the planet. (CREDIT: Nature Ecology & Evolution)

The Golden Mean

Sunflower

Helianthus annuus cv. Sunfola

Leonardo Pisano, "Fibonacci"

The genius myth ...

 

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

High IQ does NOT equate to genius. Richard Feynman's IQ was 125. The last time I checked, Feynman was a genius so ... high IQ does NOT equate to genius. These characteristics, IMHO, do.

Curiosity, as prime driver, is the key to creativity without question.

The Act of Creation - Arthur Koestler: The creative act is the joining together of two or more seemingly dissimilar ideas that generate a heretofore unexpected result. i.e. Chemistry - H20 consists of 2 Hydrogen + 1 Oxygen atoms, both explosive yet, when combined, becomes water. 

The joke: Henny Youngman - Take my wife, Please. :)

Creativity starts with the asking of a question: Why is this the way it is?

Question everything - Einstein

The ability to see relationships is key because everything is connected as reality is a Quantum space and entanglement stitches it together.

Play is indispensable. What if ... is the real deal here. A sense of wonderment is essential.

Creativity takes courage as new ideas disrupt the "natural" order of things.

Creativity is problem-solving. It matters not the discipline used save that said discipline shapes how the creative act is produced.

The act itself is ineffable and cannot be explained. Like quantum, creativity just happens. It cannot be forced, only acted upon when the idea shows up. The finished act is anything but as it can be explained after the fact without issue.

Practice makes better. Beginners mind and intuition are key.

The size of the problem solved dictates the significance of the creative act. i.e. Mixing anchovies with pineapples on a pizza is a creative act. The size or importance of the problem solved, not so much while Einstein's Theory of relativity proving that Newton was wrong at universal scale, is.

Creativity, like tech and existence, has no morality. It simply is.

Stay hungry, stay foolish - Stewart Brand/Whole Earth Catalog. :)

AI is but a tool, the issue now becomes, does the tool become the master? 

As per the Atlantic ...

Who has the highest IQ in history? One answer would be: a 10-year-old girl from Missouri. In 1956, according to lore, she took a version of the Stanford-Binet IQ test and recorded a mental age of 22 years and 10 months, equivalent to an IQ north of 220. (The minimum score needed to get into Mensa is 132 or 148, depending on the test, and the average IQ in the general population is 100.) Her result lay unnoticed for decades, until it turned up in The Guinness Book of World Records, which lauded her as having the highest childhood score ever. Her name, appropriately enough, was Marilyn vos Savant. And she was, by the most common yardstick, a genius.

Vos Savant hasn’t made any scientific breakthroughs or created a masterpiece. She graduated 178th in her high-school class of 613, according to a 1989 profile in New York magazine. She married at 16, had two children by 19, became a stay-at-home mother, and was divorced in her 20s. She tried to study philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, but did not graduate. She married again and was divorced again at 35. She became a puzzle enthusiast, joined a high-IQ society, and occasionally wrote an essay or a satirical piece under a pen name for a newspaper. Mostly, she devoted herself to raising her boys.

What did happen, though, is that on the back of her anointment in Guinness, vos Savant built a career as a professional genius. She wrote books such as the Omni I.Q. Quiz Contest and Brain Building in Just 12 Weeks. Billing her as “the smartest person in the world,” Parade magazine gave her an advice column, where she answered readers’ queries and published puzzles. (She didn’t respond to my attempts to contact her through the magazine.) Her specialty was logic problems—which showcase the particular type of mental ability most readily identified by IQ tests. In one column, she provided a solution for an apparently insoluble conundrum, the Monty Hall problem. Angry readers wrote in to correct her, but she stood firm.

Vos Savant’s life perfectly illustrates how genius can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. She was a housewife raising her children in total obscurity, until she was labeled a genius. And then she became one.

Reality is fractal.

Nowhere to go ...

Daniel Janzen has been monitoring insects since the 1970s in Costa Rica’s Guanacaste conservation area. He says he has seen biodiversity crash even in pristine environments.
Photograph: P Greenfield/Guardian

Oh where have the insects gone?, a question more and more people are asking while the collapse of these creatures continues unabated due to pollution, environmental degradation, habitat loss and chemicals, a situation becoming increasingly dire as we speak. Back in the day, yours truly had to clean off the windshield of a beloved VW Camper Bus nearly every 15 minutes due to the flying hordes of insects one encountered in the 70's but no more. As per George Carlin, the earth will survive, us, well, that's another story.

A new point in history has been reached, entomologists say, as climate-led species’ collapse moves up the food chain even in supposedly protected regions free of pesticides

Crumbling populations

The declines witnessed by Janzen – and described by others around the world – are part of what some ecologists call a “new era” of ecological collapse, where rapid extinctions occur in regions that have little direct contact with people.

Reports of falling insect numbers around the world are not new. International reviews have estimated annual losses globally of between 1% and 2.5% of total biomass every year.

Widespread use of pesticides and fertilisers, light and chemical pollution, loss of habitat and the growth of industrial agriculture have all carved into their numbers. Often, these were deaths of proximity: insects are sensitive creatures, and any nearby source of pollution can send their populations crumbling.

But what Janzen and Hallwachs are witnessing is a part of a newer phenomenon: the catastrophic collapse of insect populations in supposedly protected regions of forest. “In the parts of Costa Rica that are heavily hit by pesticides, the insects are completely wiped out,” Hallwachs says.

“But what we see here in the preserved areas – that as far as we can tell, are free of even these destructive insecticides and pesticides – even here, the insect numbers are going down horrifyingly dramatically,” she says.

Long-term data for insect populations – particularly less charismatic species – is still patchy, but Janzen and Hallwachs join a number of scientists that have recorded huge die-offs of insects in nature reserves around the world.

They include in Germany, where flying insects across 63 insect reserves dropped 75% in less than 30 years; the US, where beetle numbers dropped 83% in 45 years; and Puerto Rico, where insect biomass dropped up to 60-fold since the 1970s. These declines are occurring in ecosystems that are otherwise protected from direct human influence.

Now a rare sight