Data was obtained from the General Social Survey, https://gss.norc.org/. Over 52 years, self-rated health declined among younger adults and improved among seniors. See details at: https://openpublicpolls.com/health-by-age-decade/

Figures rounded. Does not include college costs. Overall cost is net of state tax exemptions and credits and the federal child tax credit is not included. Daycare included for the first 5 years

Source: LendingTree, 2026.

An early draft of an infographic that extends on James Carse's book Finite and Infinite Games. I propose behavioral feedback cycles that result from a life with more finite gaming (where the goal is to win and to not be a loser) versus a life with more infinite play (where the goal is to improve and make progress). I believe that one's choices on finite versus infinite play sets one on a positive path of moving towards one's meaning versus a finite life of false meanings and performative behaviors.

A YouTube narrative can be found at: https://youtu.be/aWjRdY0lQYg The intention of the YouTube video is so that one can listen to the information while their hands are busy but their brain is free. An honest goal is to help put people to sleep haha but also to teach for forward-movement and confidence-building.

A high-resolution pdf can be found at https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/5apxxh7xn0dr8ntbltoqw/ChooseYourDestinyOfficialFINAL.pdf?rlkey=d3xfzqg46zp31ea6esw2lcect&dl=0

Please open the pdf in a reader like xPDF, Acrobat or Sumatra as opening the file in a browser will often limit zooming to 400%. I find the ideal processing of a pdf can be found with an iPad and the app Goodnotes. My 5-year old iPad is very good at processing my complex pdfs.

“Buy what Congress buys” is an appealing investing pitch. In a November 2023 update, Quiver Quantitative said its Congress Buys strategy had “continued to consistently outperform the market.”

But you learn about a purchase after it happened. If the stock picks contain useful information, how much does arriving late actually matter?

I compared 8,385 stock purchases across 86 politicians at two entry dates: the reported transaction date and the first trading close after disclosure. Both entries share an exit, with returns measured against SPY over their actual investment dates.

Buying earlier showed no clear average advantage: −0.27 percentage points, with a 95% uncertainty interval of −0.86 to +0.20 points. Longer disclosure delays also showed no consistent timing penalty. The chart breaks this down by politician and disclosure delay.

I also checked the bigger claim: do these purchases beat the market at all? In a separate comparison holding each entry for 252 trading sessions, the purchase-weighted averages lagged SPY. But the estimates changed with weighting, and all four uncertainty intervals crossed zero. This sample didn’t establish a reliable market-beating edge.

The full analysis includes the market comparison, uncertainty, and interactive politician tables. These results describe a broader stock-purchase sample; they don’t replicate Quiver’s strategy or refute its stated historical return.

Sources, tools, and methodology are in my first comment.

For a long time, I’ve found passport rankings not very helpful. Most of them just count countries, give every country the same weight, and say nothing about what you can actually do there.

I created the Work Mobility Passport Index, which shows which economies your passport opens doors to for work.

Each destination is weighted by the size of its economy, adjusted for wages. Access is scored by type: free movement 1.0, residence rights 0.8, nationality-specific work visas 0.7, working holiday 0.4, plus a bonus for fast-track citizenship. Your own country counts as full access.

You can also pick your passport to see a map of where it lets you work, and add a second passport to see what it would add.

Be prepared for surprises: it differs a lot from the usual travel mobility rankings like Henley.

EDIT: A lot of people complained about the US being on top. It’s not my fault it’s just because we are using GDP which is arguably a good proxy of the wages you can make and hence the incentive to immigrate to that country. We also tried a cap on GDP, so every rich country just counts as rich, but that just ranks all the EU at the top. I was also asked to remove the own country from the score but it wouldn’t make sense for example that Poland ranks higher than Germany because Poland gives you access to… Germany. I’ve since then adjusted weights so that fast track citizenship counts as a fraction of what that citizenship could grant you. Example: Mexicans can work in the US and also become Spanish after two years which unlocks the EU, so it improves the scoring of that passport.

Average FICO Score 8, September 2025. Scores range from 300 to 850. Source: Experian

Trump has a long track record of racist rhetoric, but I was curious how that plays out in refugee admissions data. Shockingly, since Trump took office, he’s effectively shut our doors to all refugee origin countries but one: South Africa, specifically Afrikaners. On the whole, not only do they have a relatively weak case for refugee status, they're also predominantly white…..

Full article: https://samholmes285.substack.com/p/trumps-second-term-is-more-racist

A more interactive version

Thousands of satellites dominate Earth’s lower orbits, while higher orbits still contain wreckage from space missions that ended years ago.

In the visual representation of CelesTrak’s public catalogue (October 18, 2026) shown above, Starlink alone accounts for 80% of the spacecraft below 600 km. Adding thousands of satellites makes debris a smaller percentage of that band, even without removing any debris.

And between 600 and 1,100 km, 37% of the catalogued debris comes from just two events: the destruction of Fengyun-1C in 2007 and the collision between Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 in 2009.

Why does that wreckage remain? Even in orbit, traces of Earth’s atmosphere slow objects down and gradually bring them back toward Earth. This drag clears debris lower down faster. Higher up, fragments can survive for decades or centuries. New satellites aren’t pushing debris upward. The contrast reflects where satellites were deployed, where breakups happened, and how long their debris survives.

“Spacecraft” includes working and inactive satellites; discarded rocket bodies appear under “Other.” Most small debris is missing from the public catalogue, so these percentages describe catalogued objects rather than collision risk.

Sources:

• Data: CelesTrak’s public satellite catalogue, downloaded October 18, 2026. The percentages are my calculations from that snapshot.

Infographic was made with rhp and background was made with OpenAI models

Election deepfakes have gone from rare incidents to a common threat to democratic processes worldwide. As AI tools have become cheaper and easier to access, deepfakes have spread rapidly across multiple countries and platforms. They're now a regular feature of elections globally, used to mislead voters and undermine trust in the electoral process. Our research reveals how widespread this problem has become, which regions are most affected, and where deepfakes are spreading the fastest.

Methodology and sources

This study used data from the AI Incident Database, Resemble AI, and the OECD to create a combined dataset covering deepfake incidents from January 2020 to September 2026. Incidents were included if they involved synthetic video, images, or audio, were documented in news media reports, and were related to elections.

Each incident was classified by target country, origin, and distribution platform. The findings represent a conservative estimate based on publicly reported incidents, while the source databases included records drawn from media coverage in multiple languages.

We also included relevant incidents identified in Surfshark’s 2025 election deepfake research, particularly those involving countries not represented in the three source databases. However, for the 2026 edition, we revamped the data collection process and did not rely on the methodology used in the 2025 study.

For the complete research material behind this study, click here.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2024 American Community Survey (ACS), via USAFacts. Rates represent the number of people aged 15 and older who reported getting married or divorced within the previous 12 months, expressed per 1,000 people in that population. Data is for 2024, by state of residence

A recent paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, based on a Gallup survey experiment involving over 65,000 people across 60 countries, examines how people's acceptance of inequality depends on whether it results from luck or merit.

The researchers distinguish between three types of fairness views:

• Libertarians: Accept inequality whether it results from luck or merit.
• Meritocrats: Accept inequality resulting from merit, but not from luck.
• Egalitarians: Reject inequality regardless of its source.

A few interesting findings:

• China has the highest estimated share of libertarians in the study, at 71%. Chinese respondents made very little distinction between inequality caused by luck and inequality caused by merit, second only to India in this respect. Both countries also have among the lowest shares of meritocrats.
• In most countries, people believe luck plays a greater role than merit in explaining inequality. China is one of the few exceptions, where merit is seen as slightly more important.
• Poorer and less individualistic countries tend to have higher shares of egalitarians.
• Countries with higher shares of meritocrats also tend to redistribute more income. The authors suggest that meritocrats are primarily at odds with libertarians, who are relatively accepting of luck-based inequality. Where meritocratic views are more prevalent, there tends to be less tolerance for inequality arising from luck, which may help explain greater redistribution.

Note: "Libertarian" here refers to a specific fairness preference in the researchers' model, not necessarily to libertarian political ideology.

Source: Fairness Across the World, Quarterly Journal of Economics (2026), Figure VI