From the technological Olympus of Silicon Valley to the urban canyons of Wall Street, a narrow club of vastly wealthy plutocrats sits on a ballooning share of the nation’s resources. One percent of Americans at the apex of the economy are hoarding over 31% of the nation’s total wealth, a cool $55tn in net worth.

Getting them to share with the rest of society, to fund redistribution or pay for public goods, is proving pretty much impossible. Their ability to move resources around, hide profit across jurisdictions, and minimize income to hoard wealth until they die appears to put them beyond the reach of taxation.

One recent research paper found that the country’s richest 384 oligarchs paid only 24% of their economic income in 2025, compared with 30% for the average taxpayer. And not all of them are getting top notch tax advice. Reporting by ProPublica revealed that some of the richest Americans – like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Michael Bloomberg – live largely tax free.

In a prior study, the researchers had found that users were increasingly turning to chatbots like ChatGPT to get advice on sensitive topics like health, finance, mental health, and employment, so much so that it was “now becoming more like a social partner than just a tool,” lead author Abhisek Dash said.

Building upon that finding, this time around they also looked into what kinds of sensitive information get stored by the chatbot and just how. They found that 52% of the memory entries contained information about users’ psychological states, including their desires, intentions, emotions, and beliefs.

Mental health practitioners have identified the sycophantic personas of LLMs — the fact that they are essentially algorithmic “yes-men” who adopt and endorse the worldviews of users — as a crucial mechanism by which chatbots embolden and extend our beliefs. However, some psychiatrists and philosophers interested in AI-human relationships suspect that AI psychosis may just be the most visible example of a much broader phenomenon: the subtle reshaping of ordinary human belief by conversational AI.

At the same time, Osler warns that we need to be keenly aware that we are talking about technologies that are not public goods — they are owned and operated by private companies driven by financial agendas — and should remain critical of the technologies that we have while also asking questions about what those technologies could become.

“The idea that we won’t create beautiful things with this technology is belligerent, and the idea that we won’t create dangerous things with this technology is naïve,” Osler said. “What we do with these things is what we have always done: the full roster of amazing to terrible.”

Our sense of what is real is shaped by social feedback. Increasingly, that feedback is coming from privately owned AI chatbots. Ultimately, these companies get to decide what personas their LLMs assume, how agreeable they are, what they remember, and how closely they mimic the characteristics of human-to-human interaction. In an even stranger, and perhaps more worrying, sense, they will increasingly have to decide whose reality is the “real” reality.

It's finally cold here and I had a random craving for sauteed kale, turmeric, and veggie sausage.

So I threw a bunch of stuff in a cast iron skillet without measuring it and sauteed it on medium heat in this order:

Olive oil with a smidge of butter so it wouldn't burn Chopped red onion

Sliced white mushrooms

Sauteed separately until both start to brown (probably 15ish mins)

Add Chopped garlic

Chopped turmeric root and ginger saute for ~8 mins

Add sliced Apple Sage Tofurky sausage and saute until it start to brown

Finally add kale leaves and saute until they wilt (I would guess another 8ish mins)

Throw it in a bowl and top with avocado

Authorities reported on Friday that 28-year-old Darya Shipilova, a lab tech at a research facility in Siberia, had died at the Shelekhov Hospital in a suspected case of the plague, according to The Moscow Times.

She had been hospitalized with acute pneumonia symptoms on Tuesday and was placed on a ventilator, with reports saying she died two days later on Thursday.

The incident prompted Shelekhov Hospital to quarantine, soon followed by several others in the Irkutsk region, even as health authorities reassured residents everything was fine, the outlet reported. The Irkutsk Aluminum Smelter in Shelekhov also instituted a mask mandate for “preventative measures,” according to its director, Artem Fominykh.

On Saturday morning, the local government for the town of Baykalsk advised residents to avoid traveling to Shelekhov and other nearby towns because of a plague-related death, but the post was taken down shortly after, according to the Times

People of Baikal reported that Shipilova had been exposed to the disease after she had accidentally broken a test tube containing live bacteria on Sept. 25. She first developed symptoms during a work expedition near the Russian border with Mongolia, according to the outlet.

However, Russian epidemiologist Mikhail Favorov, who now lives in the U.S., alleged that the broken test tube story is a government cover-up.

“It’s laughable,” Favorov said, according to the Post. “Someone working at the anti-plague Institute in Irkutsk wears a protective anti-plague suit. If you break a test tube, the likelihood of infection is actually very low. In short, it doesn’t matter to the general public — they’ll believe the ‘dropped test tube story.’”

State-run surveillance operations around the world are using Claude to streamline their operations, Anthropic said in a threat report released Thursday.

The Reagan administration pulled right-wing media executives Rupert Murdoch and Richard Mellon Scaife into a CIA-organized “perception management” operation which aimed Cold War-style propaganda at the American people in the 1980s, according to declassified U.S. government records.

Although some records relating to Murdoch remain classified, several documents that have been released indicate that he and billionaire Scaife were considered sources of financial and other support for President Ronald Reagan’s hard-line Central American policies, including the CIA’s covert war in Nicaragua.

A driving force behind creation of Reagan’s extraordinary propaganda bureaucracy was CIA Director William Casey who dispatched one of the CIA’s top covert action specialists, Walter Raymond Jr., to the National Security Council to oversee the project. According to the documents, Murdoch was brought into the operation in 1983 when he was still an Australian citizen and his media empire was much smaller than it is today.

Footnote with more information if you like learning about "perception management, propaganda, and how/why America has gone so far off the rails:

Rupert Murdoch is the most easily recognizable name mentioned in the main article, but you should really know the names William Casey and Richard Mellon Scaife in the context of creating the modern U.S. right wing propaganda machine:

•Early in his career, as a business lawyer, William Casey created the concept of a tax shelter to help his wealthy clients escape regulations mandated under the New Deal.

•In addition to being recruited by Casey into the perception management operation, Richard Mellon Scaife was also responsible for helping launch the conservative think tank, Heritage Foundation. Without Heritage, humanity never would have been blessed with the moral majority movement or Project 2025.

•The precursor organization to Heritage, which focused mainly on social (rather than economic) conservatism, was created by self described "political mechanic" Paul Weyrich (who would eventually coin the term "moral majority") and funded by heir to the Coors brewing fortune, Joseph Coors. When the precursor organization failed, Weyrich was connected with the economic expertise of conservative Ed Feulner. Soon, another investment from Coors helped launch Heritage, and Coors' money was then followed by large donations from Richard Mellon Scaife and other wealthy conservatives.

•Once they had funding, Heritage created their first edition of Mandate for Leadership (the most famous edition would become Project 2025), and both Carter and Reagan received a copy before the upcoming election. Carter ignored it. Reagan loved it.

•The Iran hostage crisis unexpectedly allows Reagan to defeat Carter. Except, the history nobody really talks about is the fact that Jimmy Carter and several members of his administration firmly believed that prior to the election, Reagan's CIA director, William Casey, traveled to Iran and helped orchestrate the delayed release of the hostages. The delayed hostage release (the October surprise) is believed to be the main factor leading to Carter's defeat and Reagan's victory. Once in office, Reagan implements the majority of the Mandate for Leadership within his first year and appoints William Casey as CIA director.

• Coincidentally, it turns out, Joseph Coors and William Casey were good friends, and when the Iran Contra scandal happens, Coors names Casey while testifying (which could really be a whole other TIL post). Casey dies very suddenly during the Iran Contra hearings and subsequently takes all the blame for the entire scandal.

The rest is history.

Footnote TLDR: Starting as early as the 1970s, the man who would eventually become Reagan's CIA director, (who also held intelligence ties due to his work with the CIA precursor, OSS, during WWII), joined forces with several wealthy oligarchs to do some wild shit to the United States. Including interfering with global political negotiations, influencing public perception, subverting democracy, and essentially setting into motion Project 2025 decades before it was written.

I know that sounds like a crazy conspiracy, but at the end of the day, it really just boils down to the lengths a group of nepo babies and their high powered lawyer went in order to: 1. Skirt the regulations created to protect the people they continue to harm and manipulate to this very day, 2. Avoid paying the taxes they continue to avoid paying, and 3. Stack the decks in their favor in order to remain in control.

The Pentagon, as it struggles with a budget crunch driven by the Iran war, sought access to billions of dollars Congress provided to another agency for biomedical research, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee said Thursday.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut said in a statement that the Defense Department had signed an interagency agreement that could give it access to funding appropriated to the National Institutes of Health, including money for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. DeLauro did not say the NIH signed the agreement and described what transpired as a Pentagon “attempt.”

It also was not immediately clear how much money the Pentagon was seeking, where within the Defense Department it would go or what it would pay for. DeLauro’s office said NIH officials disclosed the effort after House Appropriations Committee Democrats pressed them for information.

“This secretive attempt to siphon research funds away from NIH is outrageous,” DeLauro said, calling for the agreement to be terminated. “It is no secret that the Department of Defense is facing enormous financial pressure because of President Trump’s war of choice with Iran. But the Trump administration cannot make American patients, families, and scientists pay the price.”

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases funding was appropriated for biomedical research aimed at developing treatments or cures for infectious diseases, including influenza, malaria, tuberculosis, HIV and Ebola, DeLauro said.