Notes Today:

• University of West Virginia trustees are eliminating foreign languages, 20 graduate programs, and much more, going in exactly the wrong direction in our increasingly complex world.

• The crypto dude Sam Bankman-Fried is going to jail for witness tampering.

• The average monthly payment for a new car in the US hit a record $736 last month - up 28% over the last 3 years. 

• New car loan rates went from 4% to 8% while used car loan rates are at 12%+. 
• The average weight of a new vehicle sold in the US last year was a whopping 4,329 pounds.
• That’s over 1,000 pounds higher than the average in 1980

• Chinese-owned Smithfield is PERMANENTLY closing 39 hog farms in Missouri. 

• The world’s largest agriculture producers are pushing back against new EU rules that require proof that crops weren’t grown on deforested land, which producers say will add to the cost of making food. 

• DeSantis’s Florida approves Climate-Denial videos in schools 

• Berkshire Hathaway is posting new all-time high. 
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• Texas Gov Abbott has installed circular saws between the Rio Grande border buoys to maim or kill anyone who attempts to climb over. Two bodies have already been found trapped in the floating barrier. (@LaikenJordahl )

• Can you run for president while in prison? Yep. 

• By analyzing how people moved while wearing virtual reality headsets, researchers said, a machine learning model accurately predicted their height, weight, age, marital status and more the majority of the time. The work exposes how artificial intelligence could be used to guess personal data, without users having to directly reveal it.

 

Problem with these notes: some tend to run up against a deeply rooted feature of human cognition - the desire not to think about anything unpleasant…Sorry about that.