I Watched Stand-Up in Saudi Arabia

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/10/fear-laughing-riyadh-comedy-louis-ck/684527/?gift=SKtFP-7gCBnFn1bNJdqPMi_7j1-Q3xFUfh3oXFEbWpw

As I ate dinner one night at the Ritz-Carlton, in a Chinese restaurant overlooking the indoor swimming pool, I reflected that the promise of a five-star hotel is insulation, a cocoon against the outside world. A rich person—a successful comedian, say—could glide from the business-class lounge to the front of the aircraft to an air-conditioned limo to a luxury hotel where your dinner is interrupted by five different people asking if everything is okay. Live enough days like this, and the whole world becomes your bellhop. No wonder these guys like Saudi Arabia. The way that daily life bends around rich people is that little bit more obvious here.

The Agentic State Vision Paper

https://agenticstate.org/paper.html

AI technologies have matured sufficiently to handle real-world government complexity whilst costs have decreased enough to enable widespread deployment. Citizens increasingly expect digital service experiences comparable to those they receive from leading private sector organisations, creating public demand for agentic government services. Perhaps most importantly, governments that act now can actively shape the development trajectory of agentic AI to serve public purposes rather than merely adapting to systems designed by others according to commercial priorities.

Seven Charts That Explain the Past 25 Years of the NBA

https://www.theringer.com/2025/10/10/nba/seven-charts-that-explain-the-21st-century-nba

It’s hard to overstate just how much pro basketball has mutated since Y2K. The 2000s NBA was an analog league full of hulking centers, midrange jumpers, and pixelated national TV games framed in 4:3. But the game has since changed in every imaginable way: stylistically, financially, globally, and culturally. We’ve witnessed the rise of the 3-pointer, the death of the post-up, the internationalization of the MVP race, and the billionaire-ification of the NBA’s ownership class and even of some players. 

As part of its weeklong reflection on the NBA quarter century, The Ringer asked me to come up with a set of charts that explain the past 25 years of the best basketball league in the world. Let’s start with shooting.

Algorithms are breaking how we think

US gov't admits F-35 is a failure

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/f-35-failure/

Nearly a quarter century after the Pentagon awarded Lockheed Martin the contract to develop the Joint Strike Fighter Program into the F-35, the government finally admitted the jet will never live up to Lockheed’s ambitious promises — used to sell the $2 trillion boondoggle to nearly 20 countries around the world.

The Government Accountability Office released a report last month detailing the ongoing challenges the program faces. The first paragraph of the highlights page includes this sentence:

“The program plans to reduce the scope of Block 4 to deliver capabilities to the warfighter at a more predictable pace than in the past.”

The casual reader will be forgiven for possibly glossing over the passage because of its anodyne wording. But the statement is a profound admission that the F-35 will never meet the capability goals set for the program. “Reduce the scope of Block 4” means that program officials are forgoing planned combat capabilities for the jets.

Block 4 is the term to describe ongoing design work for the program. It began in 2019 and was termed as the program’s “modernization” phase. In reality, Block 4 is just a continuation of the program’s initial development process. Officials were unable to complete the F-35’s basic design within the program’s initial budget and schedule. Rather than making that embarrassing admission and requesting more time and money from Congress, Pentagon officials claimed the initial development process was complete (it was not) and they were moving on to “modernization.” What they really did was simply reclassify initial development work with a fancy rebrand.

So, when program officials say they plan to “reduce the scope of Block 4,” they are saying the F-35 will not have all the combat capabilities that were supposed to be a part of the original design.

This is a remarkable development

The dawn of the post-literate society

https://jmarriott.substack.com/p/the-dawn-of-the-post-literate-society-aa1

As you have probably noticed, the world of the screen is going to be much a choppier place than the world of print: more emotional, more angry, more chaotic.

Walter Ong emphasised that writing cools and rationalises thought. If you want to make your case in person or in a TikTok video you have innumerable means for bypassing logical argument. You can shout and weep and charm your audience into submission. You can play emotive music or show harrowing images. Such appeals are not rational but human beings are not perfectly rational animals and are inclined to be persuaded by them.

A book can’t yell at you (thank God!) and it can’t cry. Without the array of logic-defeating appeals available to podcasters and YouTubers, authors are much more reliant on reason alone, condemned to painfully piece their arguments together sentence by sentence (I feel that agony now). Books are far from perfect but they are much more closely bound to the imperatives of logical argument than any other means of human communication ever devised.

Power, Money, and Booze - A Leaders Perspective on Preventing Sexual Assault

https://mkloepper2025.substack.com/p/power-money-and-booze-a-leaders-perspective

As you can imagine, the regional AAFES manager was not super happy about our request that he reduce shelf space dedicated to hard alcohol. Afterall, AAFES operates for profit. It’s a unique organization that provides service members with good retail services and circulates a portion of their proceeds into various morale programs. And, they operate for profit. And, booze makes money (as does tobacco and junk food). 

 In any event, despite his misgivings, when presented with our data, our regional AAFES manager had little choice…he reduced the linear shelf space of hard alcohol and limited container sizes to .75 liters. (Math is interesting…in one meeting the manager revealed his quarterly profits from hard alcohol. It was a lot. We did some quick napkin math and showed him the profit value to AAFES for each sexual assault in my Brigade. It was sickening, and inarguable).

I Printed a Microchip That Runs on Air — A Nervous System for Squishy Robots!

Disney and the Decline of America’s Middle Class

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/opinion/disney-world-economy-middle-class-rich.html

For most of the park’s history, Disney was priced to welcome people across the income spectrum, embracing the motto “Everyone is a V.I.P.” In doing so, it created a shared American culture by providing the same experience to every guest. The family that pulled up in a new Cadillac stood in the same lines, ate the same food and rode the same rides as the family that arrived in a used Chevy. Back then, America’s large and thriving middle class was the focus of most companies’ efforts and firmly in the driver’s seat.

That middle class has so eroded in size and in purchasing power — and the wealth of our top earners has so exploded — that America’s most important market today is its affluent. As more companies tailor their offerings to the top, the experiences we once shared are increasingly differentiated by how much we have.

Data is part of what’s driving this shift. The rise of the internet, the algorithm, the smartphone and now artificial intelligence are giving corporations the tools to target the fast-growing masses of high-net-worth Americans with increasing ease. As a management consultant, I’ve worked with dozens of companies making this very transition. Many of our biggest private institutions are now focused on selling the privileged a markedly better experience, leaving everyone else to either give up — or fight to keep up.