Tootfinder

A good friend of mine has the Muppet character "Beaker" as his avatar. For reasons.
He offers me advice. I offer him advice. We chat. These are #ChatsWithBeaker
The link in the discussion thread:
https:/…

So in another dream I just woke up from, I was talking to someone about "the idea problem" (that it's becoming harder to monitize ideas, from a vox article written by an AI cooked reporter).
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-it-could-happen-here-30717896/episode/executive-disorder-white-house-weekly-46-313675864/
Basically, I was arguing that the majority of inventions target men because patriarchy puts economic control in men's hands. As men have started to help more with childcare, there have been more inventions related to childcare. (I don't have any idea if this is true. Seems legit, but I'm just relating my dream. I think I was also oversimplifying a bit to "men" and "women" because of my audience, but anyway it was a dream.) There's actually more low-hanging fruit, I pointed out, related to making care work easier.
So I argued that the real problem was a failure to invest in research into solving that problem. Today there are all these boondoggles built around killing people. What if, instead of all this government research into killing people, we dumped a ton of money into making it easier to support a household? That would be great for the economy. (Being asleep, I seem to have forgotten that working people need money.)
In the blur of being just awake I started thinking about how you could kickstart the US economy by taking the money from the AI boondoggle and other autonomous murder bots and create something like a program to build robots for housekeepers. You'd still be funding tech with government money, so the same horrible people get paid, but you're now actually solving real problems. It wouldn't even matter if it was a boondoggle, honestly. Just dumping money into something other than murdering people is good enough.
I imagined first if there was a program to fund a robot housecleaner, like robot dog with AI some laundry pickup, that would be provided, free of charge, to help people with children. It would work the same as the military boondoggle where a private company makes the government buy a piece of hardware from them and then also pay them to service it for some number of years. But instead of that hardware sitting around waiting to kill someone, it would be getting brought to people's houses to help them.
Then I thought, hey, you could even boost the economy more if you just had government funding for doulas and housecleaners and paid them a living wage. Hey, you could really kickstart the economy by nationalizing healthcare and including doula support as part of all births. Oh, and you could also just include the optional household help for families with children until the kids turn 18.
None of this is perfect (I don't actually think most of this is possible from any state), but the point is that it's actually wildly easy to figure out all kinds of ways to invest in the economy and monitize ideas as long as you aren't entirely focused on the same old "make money from spying on people and killing them." Funny that. Like they said in the podcast, maybe "finding ideas" isn't the problem.
Hope you enjoyed the weird semi-awake brain dump/rant.

Wetlands efficiently remove nitrogen pollution from surface water, leading to cost savings for municipalities https://phys.org/news/2025-10-wetlands-efficiently-nitrogen-pollution-surface.html

Wetlands efficiently remove nitrogen pollution from surface water, leading to cost savings for municipalities
Wetlands are an important part of the ecological system, providing a myriad of benefits for people, wildlife, and the environment. They also serve as "nature's kidneys," filtering out pollutants from surface water. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign finds that wetlands along the Mississippi River Basin effectively clean up nitrogen runoff from agricultural fields. The researchers also show this can lead to significant savings for local drinking water treatment faciliti…

The Italian neurosurgeon
#Sergio #Canavero has been preparing for a surgery that might never happen.
His idea?
⚠️Swap a sick person’s head—or perhaps just the brain—onto a younger, healthier body.
Canavero caused a stir in 2017 when he announced that a team he advised in China had exchanged head…

Job titles of the future: Head-transplant surgeon
Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero has a dream to extend life by swapping someone’s head (or at least their brain) onto a new body.

The Declarative configuration journey: Why it took 5 years to ignore health check endpoints in tracing
#OpenTelemetry

“By 2040, the Locational scenario could reduce the total system cost by 23 – 59 Bn. EUR annually. These savings are in the order of magnitude of those associated with the integration of European electricity markets.”
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/J…

Locational Price Signals in Europe
As Europe strives to become the first climate neutral continent, grid congestion is becoming an increasingly urgent issue, with the potential to lead to large-scale curtailment of renewables and undermine the system’s security. Accordingly, the Mission Letter to Commissioner for Energy and Affordable Housing Dan Jørgensen lists the task to improve locational price signals. These aim to ensure that investments occur where they are most beneficial to the system, while incentivizing an efficien…

Six days after a senior FDA official sent a sweeping internal email claiming that covid vaccines had caused the deaths of “at least 10 children,”
Twelve former FDA commissioners released an extraordinary warning in the Dec. 3 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
They wrote that the claims and policy changes in the memo from Vinay Prasad, the head of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research,
pose “a threat to evidence-based vaccine policy and public h…

Inside the FDA’s Vaccine Uproar - KFF Health News
An internal email claiming covid vaccines killed children triggered a formal response from a dozen past FDA commissioners. The email, sent by the head of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, outlines a framework that could have significant impact on the nation’s vaccine policies.

Neighbors with solar panels can now trade energy directly with each other, thanks to a breakthrough cloud-based system from Washington State University.
The platform lets communities share power locally, cutting energy costs by up to 12% in testing. It's a glimpse of how neighborhoods could become mini power grids, keeping solar energy local instead of sending it back to utilities.

Community-based energy trading system for home solar-plus-storage
A research team led by Washington State University has developed a cloud-based system for trading and sharing energy from solar panels and batteries within a neighbourhood. The concept displayed potential energy cost savings of around 12% over a five-day test period.

Employers slashed more than 150,000 jobs in October,
the largest wave of layoffs in more than 20 years,
a report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas said Nov. 6.
From tech to Hollywood, retailers and utilities,
U.S. companies are intensifying job cuts and workforce reductions that began in 2024,
as they focus on cost savings and leaner operations amid a challenging economic environment.
Firms have pointed to a myriad of causes for their layoffs,
fr…

Layoffs are hitting. See the major companies cutting jobs in 2025.
Verizon, Amazon, Target and Paramount are just a few of the many companies to have announced layoffs in 2025.