For the last couple of months, I have had this strange experience: Person after person — from artificial intelligence labs, from government — has been coming to me saying: It’s really about to happen. We’re about to get to artificial general intelligence. What they mean is that they have believed, for a long time, that we are on a path to creating transformational artificial intelligence capable of doing basically anything a human being could do behind a computer — but better. They thought it would take somewhere from five to 15 years to develop. But now they believe it’s coming in two to three years.
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Seth Godin: “Once you have enough for beans and rice and taking care of your family and a few other things, money is a story. You can tell yourself any story you want about money. And it’s better to tell yourself a story about money that you can happily live with. So if you want more money, you need to understand you’re always going to have to trade something for it, and you need to be very clear with yourself what you’re willing to trade.”
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30 Charts That Show How Covid Changed Everything
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The Atlantic magazine in 1920: “The older generation had certainly pretty well ruined this world before passing it on to us. They give us this thing, knocked to pieces, leaky, red-hot, threatening to blow up; and then they are surprised that we don’t accept it with the same attitude of pretty, decorous enthusiasm with which they received it, way back in the 1880s.” Some things never change.
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Savoring has been defined as “the capacity to attend to, appreciate, and enhance the positive experiences in one’s life.” This can mean focusing on a current, future, or past experience with particular attention to the positive parts. Savoring has been shown in research to stimulate the brain’s striatum, a region involved in processing reward, and is effective in lowering symptoms of depression. The result, correspondingly, is a higher level of reported happiness.
Savoring positive experiences in the moment also leads to happier memories later on. Researchers found when they instructed people to savor these experiences more fully as they recorded them, their subsequent memories were more vivid, and in effect they enjoyed the experiences more. Easier said than done, unfortunately: We are evolved less to savor the good things in life than to take note of what we dislike and harbor resentments. Humans typically exhibit a “negativity bias,” meaning that adverse events arrest our attention more than positive ones.
This makes sense in an evolutionary sense: Your suspicious, nervous troglodyte ancestors survived to pass on their genes while their blissfully unaware friends became a saber-toothed tiger’s lunch. But in our modern world, largely free of prowling super-predators, our negativity bias tends to be maladaptive. Many scientists have pointed out that a negative disposition makes us error-prone in our predictions, and this anachronistic bias simply lowers our quality of life.
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You want your parents to have health insurance so that medical needs don’t bankrupt them, right? You want them to have car insurance so that if they get in an accident, they don’t need to pay out of pocket to replace an entire car or in case someone sues them for $100,000, right? These are examples of potential economic devastation wrought by a couple different risks. Getting scammed is a risk that can be just as disruptive and economically devastating.
What advice can I give me parents to protect them from scam calls that is extremely easy and simple to execute that won’t require any judgement in the moment?” I settled on advising them to say this every time a financial institution calls: “Where are you calling from? Thank you. I’m going to hang up and call back.”
Then go find the institution’s phone number (from a statement, the back of the credit card, or by typing in the URL of the website itself and finding it on the website; you can’t just search for the website because scammers can manipulate search results) and call the institution yourself. I also told my loved ones, “And you can always call me if you have any questions about what’s going on or what you should do.”
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Winners of the 2025 World Nature Photography Awards
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Why crashed cars are increasingly totaled; pandemic-era trends accelerated the percentage of vehicles that are declared a total loss, for multiple reasons.
- The cost of replacement parts spiked.
- The amount of time needed to get repairs increased, which also increased the amount of time that insurers had to provide loaners to car owners.
- The cost of loaners soared as car prices skyrocketed, when the chips shortage created production delays.
Tuna Thoughts 