I wondered if it was continued fallout from coronapanic, but the course offerings for MIT’s January 2026 term (“IAP” for Independent Activities Period, in which both for-credit and more casual courses are traditionally offered) seemed rather thin when I first looked. The deadline for submitting an event was December 1, 2025 and I checked the schedule on November 29. There were still some awesome classes, e.g.,
Here was another one that seemed likely fun/challenging/technical:
Keep an eye on the neighbors?
Want to learn what’s new and interesting in physics? A search on November 29 revealed zero events (see below for how the site populated later):
There were two pages of results for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion:
Let’s look at the first class on Informed Philanthropy: “Students analyze the work of non-profits to address the challenges and opportunities facing MIT’s neighboring communities, with particular focus on community representation, equity, and social justice”. Imagine raising one’s hand towards the end of the class and saying, “Cambridge is critically short of affordable housing and health care. Therefore, in order to advance social justice for those whose ancestors were slaves in the U.S., we should give the $7,000 to ICE so that they can deport all of the undocumented migrants who are living in Cambridge public housing, contributing to long waiting lists to see doctors, and driving up food prices with their SNAP/EBT cards.”
It you were concerned that the recent jihad waged by Rahmanullah Lakanwal might exacerbate the crisis of Islamophobia in the U.S.:
When I searched again on January 14, about 10 physical science events had been added for the month of January. More importantly, since LLMs will soon do all of the physical science research that anyone might want, I found a class on AI!
As in previous IAPs, this conflicts with what will probably be an awesome talk on mechanical watches:
(The same folks are going to run 32 students through a 4-hour session (8 at a time) where they’ll actually take apart and put a watch back together.)
It seems that the MIT IAP tradition has survived, but curiously the more technical or scientific the class the later the date at which it would appear in the online guide. Also, it seems that some classes aren’t listed at all in the IAP guide, e.g., our own class is on a Course 16 web page but not in the larger guide.
One of my favorite posts from 11 years ago, Guy with a “Whites Only” sign in his conference room tells others not to discriminate, poked fun at Tim Cook for complaining that people he’d never met in Indiana and Arkansas were racist and might put up a “whites only” sign while simultaneously going to work every day in a white-only environment:
The root cause of the Mississippi fraud seems to be the same as the root cause of the Minnesota fraud: state officials allowed to make decisions about how to spend federal money. The author says that Clinton administration technocrats in D.C. were concerned that they’d destroyed the Black American family. Children born to “single mothers” went from roughly the same percentage as in the white population to over 60 percent (current data: 25 percent for whites; 65 percent to Blacks) in response to the Great Society “marry the government” programs introduced under Presidents FDR and Johnson, e.g., Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The Clinton geniuses implemented Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (“TANF”) in which states would get block grants and then could do whatever they wanted to with the money. They could, for example, give cash directly to “families” that didn’t work, but could also give money to nonprofit organizations that purported to assist those who didn’t work, e.g., by helping them write resumes or delivering other nebulous services.
The Mississippi DHS folks decided to give roughly 10 percent of the TANF funds to poor people and then 90 percent to friends’ nonprofit orgs whose executives spent the money on new houses, luxury vacations, kickbacks to state bureaucrats, etc. Only about $100 million was stolen from federal taxpayers, but the mechanism seems to be the same as in the much larger Minnesota fraud. The core prerequisites are (1) letting state officials decide how to spend federal money, and (2) the ability of officials to hand over taxpayer funds to nonprofit orgs.
There are some other good insights into the bureaucratic lifestyle. Some families in Mississippi living in $1 million houses and with six-figure incomes were enjoying Medicaid (an angel/VC-investor friend in a $2 million (pre-Biden dollars) house Maskachusetts was doing this about 15 years ago; he answered all of the questions on the Mass Health Connector accurately and the system kicked out that he was entitled to superlative MassHealth (Medicaid) coverage at $3/month). When the auditors pointed this out to the Medicaid bureaucrats their response was to push back rather than admit any bureaucratic errors or shortcomings. Even the people in the welfare bureaucracies who were corrupt or personally benefitting had a powerful desire to obstruct auditing and to preserve business as usual.
I’m almost done with the book and so far there isn’t a single example of a person who lost his or her job as a consequence for incompetence. A handful of people suffered criminal convictions, but nobody lost a day of wages as punishment for taxpayers losing $100 million.
Loosely related, a thoughtful perspective from U.S. Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana:
If you’re one of the crooks in Minnesota who took a giant Great Dane whiz down the leg of every taxpayer, you ought to be in JAIL. pic.twitter.com/kXAGwUXiWC
The U.S. is packed with sanctuary states, sanctuary cities, and noble citizens who say that they will do anything necessary to maximize the number of migrants living in the U.S. Why, then, are we seeing videos of ICE going into various low-income neighborhoods and rounding up the undocumented? There are very likely more Americans who’ve voted for open borders than there are undocumented migrants (tough to estimate the latter number, though, according to Yale). Wouldn’t we expect every undocumented migrant or family of migrants to have found a secure home in the basement or spare bedrooms of a migrant-welcoming native-born American? If that were true and if the migrants kept quiet until the U.S. was once again run by open borders enthusiasts, how could ICE ever get the necessary warrant to go into a progressive’s suburban house and detain the migrants within? The probable cause would be “shops at Costco more than once per month”?
The above-described situation would be a win-win for the hosts and the migrants. The migrants would get to stay in the U.S. forever and wouldn’t have to work. At the cost of a slightly higher grocery bill, which could be offset by avoiding Whole Foods, the hosts would be able to don the mantle of heroism previously earned by Miep and Jan Gies, two of the Dutch gentiles who hid Anne Frank and her family (Miep was rewarded by God with a 100-year life; Jan wasn’t as virtuous, apparently, and died at 87).
Related, the botanical garden in Tortola reminds us that “uncontrolled transport of plants” results in “replacement” of natives because the immigrants consume resources and reproduce rapidly.
In my little [German] town of 32,000 people the change can be seen on the streets. In 2012 when I arrived, I did not see a single foreigner besides other EU citizens and a handful of Turks who came during 1960s. Now in the last 3 years I see Africans, Arabs, and Afghani refugees everywhere I go. I don’t see any working in jobs but lots are loitering in the town center. At work there has been a huge influx of Indians to work the IT jobs at the [multinational] company – at least they are productive tax payers. It will be interesting to see how easily they assimilate into German society. I increasingly see advertisement targeted to Indians on investing and buying real estate in Germany. Interestingly I don’t see many Chinese moving to Germany like I see in the USA. On MS teams the majority of scientists based in the USA branch of my company are mainland Chinese (e.g., recent call to data sciences team had 95% Chinese colleagues, first generation).
Home prices have shot up as well as rentals. Since 2019 both have increased by 30%, and when a rental is listed, long lines form during the open house, something you’d only see in the past in big cities like Berlin and Munich. The refugees have taken up all the low-income social housing. Even small government buildings in my residential neighborhood such as the forest registry office have been converted into housing to meet the demand.
Lines at the immigration office are also longer. Interestingly when the war broke out between Ukraine and Russia, there was a special line made just for Ukrainian refugees, to fast-track them. I didn’t remember seeing a fast track line made for the Syrians. It would be nice to see a fast-track line for employed immigrants just trying to renew their residence permit. Maybe something I should bring up the next time I go.
How about celebrating Jesus’s birthday with one’s Muslim neighbors?
Christmas market had the security blocks put in place. Two years ago that never happened.
Here’s a photo from 27 years ago of Munich’s English garden that shows a decidedly un-Islamic outfit for a female in public:
(Source: Siemens was using our open-source online community toolkit and I went over there with another software developer. They took us to a medieval-themed restaurant where forks were not provided. Any man who didn’t drink beer, e.g., me, was forced by the waitresses to wear a maid’s cap. The Siemens executives and managers thought it would be fun to see weak Americans get drunk, but my colleague was himself a heavy drinker and fairly beefy so he drank them under the table. I had a bit of mead.)
Here are a couple of crowd photos from that late 1990s trip. I don’t see anyone in a burqa or even hijab.
Cartoonist lost much of his platform in 2023 after remarks that were considered racist
On his “Real Coffee” podcast in 2023, discussing a poll that found only 53% of Black Americans agreed with the statement “it’s OK to be white,” he said the data provided evidence that Black people were a hate group. “I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people,” Adams said. … Adams responded on his website that he was “speaking hyperbolically.” He already had alienated some of his fans by supporting Donald Trump.
(The WSJ implies that it might be possible to support Donald Trump without being a racist?)
Hmm… the Wall Street Journal editors and journalists say that it’s “racist” to suggest that white people might want to exert some effort or pay some money (equivalent to exerting more effort in the workplace) in order to avoid being among Black people. Can anyone think of a white WSJ editor or journalist who lives in a neighborhood that is at least 30 percent Black? If not, isn’t the WSJ staff actually doing what Scott Adams was merely suggesting as a talking point?
Here’s the executive team at the WSJ after boldly opposing Adams’s hypothetical advice:
And the folks from whom you’re getting the opinion that Scott Adams was an outlier racist:
So you didn’t avoid Blacks, you just avoided looking at any houses in places where Blacks live. You paid about 3X per square foot to live in [nearly-all-white town], which is 0.5% Black and is inconvenient, rather than in Brockton, which is 50% Black and blessed with many walkable neighborhoods.
The Federal Reserve is in the news lately for spending about $3,000 per square foot to renovate some office space in D.C. that will be used by 3,000 to 3,400 people. (source: the haters at Fox) The cost will be roughly $1 million per employee ($3.1 billion total).
I recently got off the Celebrity Ascent, a two-year-old cruise ship built by the notoriously efficient French. According to a talk that I attended by Instagram-famous Captain Tasos, she cost $1.2 billion, brand new, and can be both a home and work space for more than 5,000 people. ChatGPT estimates the square footage of the Fed’s buildings at 1.1 million and the Ascent at 2 million (cabins plus public spaces). The Ascent is fully covered with WiFi and, thus, could serve as an office building in our modern Zoom-based age (at a dock it could be hooked up to a fiber bundle instead of an apparently rather feeble Starlink subscription (throttled to 3.5 Mbps download per device; 2.5 Mbps upload).
Instead of renovating the Fed buildings, why not have our French brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters build an “office ship” to be moored in SE DC (just east of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, I guess, due to the 75′ vertical limit)? As a bonus, any time that Fed employees need to visit colleagues in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, or Miami (the latter isn’t home to a regional Fed, but maybe it should be?), the “office ship” can set sail up or down the east coast (not a Jones Act violation because the government can do whatever it wants?).
What’s the flaw with this proposal to save taxpayers at least $2 billion (maybe $3 or $4 billion if the DC project goes over budget) and give each Fed employee twice the square footage (plus an awesome buffet restaurant and a wonderful theater if the Fed is as good at putting together an orchestra as Royal Caribbean/Celebrity are; hire Jessica Gabrielle to do an employee disco night once/month and her Blue Jays band to work lunch two days per week; maybe bring in Stephen Barry a few times per year for gender diversity reeducation (he liked to borrow purses from female-identifying audience members)).
Since every American will be on GLP-1 pills, the Fed could run a “chocolate shawarma” station as Celebrity did. Imagine replacing the two foreigners below with efficient enthusiastic friendly American government workers:
(Why did Celebrity put up a sign labeling these “shawarma” rather than “crêpes”? It’s true that the legacy white Christian French population contributed the underlying pancake, but they also had a chocolate wheel from which shavings were being made.)
Sanity check on ChatGPT’s numbers: Ascent is 1071×130′ in size. That’s 139,230 square feet of space if the ship were shaped like a block. She has the equivalent of about 15 full-length decks so that works out to 2.1 million square feet. Then subtract a bit because there is some tapering.
Speaking of sanity, if the Federal Reserve truly wanted to conserve taxpayer funds, it could order a ship built in China (30-40 percent cheaper, supposedly, though apparently still not competitive in the real-world cruise industry) and skip out on the fancy Azipods and bow thrusters (the office ship won’t move too often so perhaps just use tugboats to achieve precise positioning within harbors). Speaking of Azipods, how do those clever Swedes get the slip rings to work? Enormous amounts of power are transferred and the pods can rotate continuously (i.e., a power cord won’t work). ChatGPT:
Folks: If you love cold gray weather and flying, consider coming to our FAA Ground School class at MIT, next Tuesday-Thursday (January 20-22, 2026). If you are already in Boston and already know how to fly, email me (philg@mit.edu) and we can pick a time to meet before or after the class.
Here’s the forecast for Tuesday (high of 24; low of 10 (in the units that God prefers)):
During the time when Americans cared about opioids (see Who funded America’s opiate epidemic? You did.), the scapegoats for the mostly taxpayer-funded problem were Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family that owned Purdue Pharma (also scapegoated: members of the Sackler family who had no ownership or management role in Purdue Pharma!). Seldom vilified in the press:
Medicaid bureaucrats who enabled the addictions by paying for opioids in spectacular numbers
FDA bureaucrats who approved additional uses for opioid pills
Johnson & Johnson, which grew and imported the raw materials for opioid pills (and also sold some of its own pills to compete with Purdue Pharma)
DEA bureaucrats who approved the importation of opium raw materials in growing and spectacular quantities
Pill distributors and pharmacies
Taxpayers who followed the headlines would learn that the U.S. had a near-perfect system, but that there was one bad apple within the perfect system. Once Purdue and the evil Sacklers were shut down we could get back to business as usual at Medicaid, FDA, DEA, J&J, CVS, etc.
I wonder if Tim Walz and his merry band of check-writers in Minnesota are the new Purdue Pharma/Sacklers. The U.S. welfare system is perfectly engineered for fraud, it seems, with state bureaucrats having the authority to spend federal money. Any system without a massive fraud incentive would start with state bureaucrats spending only state taxpayer money and local government employees spending only local taxes. (Imagine a bureaucrat in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He/she/ze/they would reasonably approve 100 percent of residents for SNAP/EBT because the money is coming from the federal treasury and will grow the Cambridge economy. The same bureaucrat would have an incentive to approve 100 percent of residents for state-funded programs since only a small fraction of state taxpayers live in Cambridge.)
What if fraud levels are nearly as high in some other states, but people who benefit from the U.S. running the world’s second largest welfare state (percentage of GDP; maybe we are #1 now after the coronapanic enhancements?) don’t want peasant taxpayers to look into the situation? It would then be ideal to scapegoat the Minnesotans and their Somali brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters. Once a handful of Somalis in Minnesota have been sent off to Club Fed (they’ll live at taxpayer expense for a few years as punishment for previously living at taxpayer expense), everyone can assume that the problem is solved because the bad apples (bad guavas?) have been removed from the welfare state barrel.
Back when he had visited the United States in the 1990s, Ren Zhengfei had been struck by the grand architecture of Las Vegas, modeled after Roman palaces. He’d remarked that Las Vegas might be the most beautiful city in America. Now in the hinterland to the north of Shenzhen, he began building his own version. Huawei had outgrown its Shenzhen headquarters by 2016, with 180,000 employees globally and counting, and Ren’s team was searching for more space. This was hard to find in Shenzhen, which was a thicket of skyscrapers by now, with soaring property prices. They found what they were looking for in Dongguan, Shenzhen’s up-and-coming northern neighbor, which still had stretches of undeveloped land. Eager to woo the company, Dongguan officials offered Huawei a prime 1.2-square-kilometer tract of verdant land on the south shore of a lake. Ren’s younger brother, Steven Ren, was put in charge of the construction of these new Dongguan R&D grounds, which they called Ox Horn Campus. They hired Japan’s Nikken Sekkei, the world’s second-largest architectural firm, which produced a fever dream of a design: Ox Horn would be built to look like twelve miniature European cities, including Paris, Verona, Bruges, and Oxford. They would re-create some of the greatest hits of Western civilization, including Germany’s Heidelberg Castle and France’s Palace of Versailles. “What is important is not simply to copy certain architectural styles but to make them truly beautiful,” Steven Ren wrote of the project. Huawei would overlook no detail. The architects were proud that none of the roofs of the 108 buildings were identical. Reflecting an eye for historical accuracy, some of the shingles were slate, others terra-cotta or copper. The pitches of the roofs ranged from twenty to ninety degrees. The buildings were faced in a range of materials, including granite, sandstone, limestone, dolomite, brick, and stucco (for Verona and Grenada). There were, of course, some concessions to modernity, such as treating the porous stones to prevent mildew and algae growth. Facial-recognition gates were installed at the entrances.
Huawei hired 150 Russian painters to cover the halls’ ceilings and walls with Renaissance-style murals, with the painters joking that even the Kremlin didn’t have such beautiful corridors. Someone stocked the lake by the castle with black swans—a reference to the financial term for worst-case scenarios that are hard to forecast. Ren so frequently warned his staff to look out for black-swan events that, at some point, the bird became Huawei’s unofficial mascot.
Huawei today makes the world’s best smartphone in terms of camera quality. DXOMARK:
The founder didn’t want to get into this business:
In Huawei’s early days, Ren had been less than enthused at the idea of hawking handsets—which were called “terminals” in Huawei-speak—as he considered it too far afield from the company’s core businesses of switches, routers, and base stations. “Huawei will not make a mobile phone,” Ren once insisted indignantly. “Anyone who talks this nonsense is going to get laid off!” Even after Huawei began pursuing smartphones seriously, Ren feared wasting money on marketing and was often harsh on the company’s head of consumer products, Richard Yu, or Yu Chengdong. “People always say I criticize Yu Chengdong,” Ren remarked to staff. “Actually, my criticism of him is my way of caring for him.”
How tough is it to break into the premium phone market? From 2016:
To close the gap with Samsung would be a formidable challenge: Samsung was pouring $14 billion a year into advertising, more than Iceland’s GDP.[
There is a chapter on Canada holding Meng Wanzhou, the founder’s daughter from his first marriage and Huawei CFO, hostage at the request of the U.S. government, but that’s been extensively covered elsewhere. (The allegations against Huawei had to do with selling equipment to Iran.)
The U.S. also strong-armed the Taiwanese into shutting out Huawei, which merely resulted in the improvement of Chinese domestic capabilities. May 2020:
TSMC had supplied Huawei for years, but now, under the threat of sanctions, it could not risk losing access to US technology to run its own operations. TSMC shut its doors to Huawei. Huawei’s only hope now was for China’s domestic chip foundry, the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, or SMIC, to learn how to produce advanced chips at lightning speeds. This was a real Hail Mary: SMIC had been endeavoring for two decades to advance its technologies but still lagged several generations behind global leaders in advanced chipmaking. This second round of US sanctions cut deep. In July 2020, citing the new US sanctions, the UK announced that it was reversing its position on Huawei and would remove all Huawei equipment from the nation’s 5G networks by the end of 2027.
Whoever was running the U.S. during the Biden-Harris was just as hostile to Huawei as Donald Trump had been:
If there had been hopes among Huawei’s executives that Biden would be softer on China than Trump, they were quickly dispelled. The Biden administration was more careful in its rhetoric to avoid fanning anti-Chinese racism. It didn’t use terms like “Clean Network” and “Clean Nations.” But in many ways, it was only picking up where the Trump administration had left off and deepening the efforts to contain China.
Finally, check out the aesthetics on this data center that Huawei built:
