Tootfinder

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.

The Los Angeles Metro Board
unanimously voted Thursday to proceed with developing a
14-mile-long subway under the Santa Monica Mountains.
It’s one of the first significant steps in what city and county leaders are describing as
the region's most consequential transit project -- and perhaps one of the most important in the country.
Metro staff said in a report to its board that it has secured funding through county tax measures for about 14% of the $24.2 bill…

LA Metro Board says heck yeah to proposed Sepulveda Transit Corridor train route — with a warning
The governing board of the countywide transportation agency unanimously approved a route that would provide 20-minute rides from the Valley to the Westside.

Amidst all the buzz around things like Gas Town and Ralph, etc. there are some bits of actual substance that promise to actually empower coders — and potentially shift the power dynamic away from Big AI, while making it easier to create software just by describing ideas in plain text. I've been thinking of the idea as "codeless" software creation, for lack of a better term (the jargon doesn't matter, I just needed a name to talk about it) and would love your thoughts!

Codeless: From idea to software
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

Nice annotation of the US-Russia "peace plan" with regard to Ukraine.
https://samf.substack.com/p/the-witkoff-dmitriev-peace-plan-annotated?utm_campaign=post&showWelcomeOnShare=true

The Witkoff-Dmitriev peace plan annotated
We now know a bit more about the process which led to the new peace plan and we now have a copy of its contents, to which I will turn soon.

Protecting public health abroad benefits Americans.
In a globalized world, diseases and their social and economic impacts do not stay within national boundaries.
Increased rates of untreated HIV in any part of the world increase the risk of transmission for U.S. citizens.
Changes made in the first year of Trump’s second term to address the global HIV epidemic won't keep Americans safe.
In September 2025, the U.S. Department of State announced its "America First…

HIV knows no borders, and the Trump administration’s new strategy leave Americans vulnerable – an HIV-prevention expert explains
The America First Global Health Strategy aims to secure US interests but may instead undermine it by design.

What if Denmark were to make Greenland available to the US on a long term lease for a fee of a few trillion dollars a year? Or rather, Euros, just in case the value of the US dollar collapses.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgmd132ge4o

Trump says US needs Greenland after naming special envoy
Denmark warns Washington to respect its sovereignty, while Greenland says it will decide its own future.

Meta rolls out link sharing to let users invite up to eight people into their Hyperscape virtual rooms via a Quest 3 or 3S headset, or the Horizon mobile app (Jay Peters/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/825705/meta-hyperscape-social-links-capt…

Meta’s Hyperscape is ready to turn your real living room into a VR hangout
Meta is rolling out the ability to visit virtual worlds captured with its photorealistic Hyperscape tech with groups of people instead of solo.

MAGA-oriented voices say that they want fearless judges
— but many of them seem really to want judges who will do Trump’s bidding,
Mike Davis, the founder of the Article III Project,
a legal nonprofit that, like the Federalist Society, also espouses originalism,
but is more closely aligned with the MAGA movement, said too many of the Federalist Society’s leaders were “missing in action” during the Biden years,
when Trump faced criminal investigations and a length…

The Federalist Society Is Torn Between Its Legal Philosophy and Trump’s Demands
Guided by Leonard Leo, the society built a pipeline for traditional conservative judges. But that might not be enough for President Trump in his second term.

By now you’ve seen Trump’s big speech at Davos.
The slurring,
the confusing of Greenland and Iceland,
the nonsense about wind power,
and the racist smearing of Somalis before the whole world
—it was an unmitigated disaster.
But things got worse when Trump’s propagandists spun it all as a world-historical triumph:
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt unleashed an extraordinary stream of obsequious praise,
absurdly declaring that
…

Trump Press Sec. Goes Full Cult as Reviews of Davos Fiasco Turn Brutal
As Karoline Leavitt and others struggle to spin Trump’s speech as a world-historical triumph, a critic of Trump’s unfitness explains why it was a disaster for our whole country and its future.