INSTEAD OF WATCHING AN HOUR OF NETFLIX TONIGHT.
This 60-minute Cambridge lecture by Demis Hassabis will teach you more about the future of AI than most people will learn in the next 5 years.
Bookmark it and give it an hour, no matter what.
Joe Kernen: The amount of money you made in crypto, it was an outsized number. Do you know about the crypto ventures?
Trump: I could know about it. There's nothing illegal.
Kernen: Title 18, Section 208.
Trump: I don't even know that.
Starting in early 2025, Elon Musk and the Trump administration began terminating USAID's programs and firing its staff — with Musk himself boasting about "feeding it into the woodchipper." One year ago today, USAID was officially dissolved, its remaining programs haphazardly folded into the State Department. Amid all the lies and misinformation that have followed, some facts about what has actually been lost:
• USAID saved more than 3 million lives a year at a cost of less than $10/month per American. That is what was destroyed. On purpose.
• According to Boston University's Global Impact Counter — which tracked deaths attributable to the cuts until it stopped operations in February 2026 — an estimated 781,000 people died preventable deaths in the first year, including 518,000 children.
• Global child mortality (the number of children who die before their fifth birthday) rose in 2025 for the first time in 35+ years — by 200,000 additional deaths.
• USAID's 50-country disease surveillance network — the system that cut outbreak response times from 2 weeks to 48 hours — is gone. We are now watching an unprecedented Ebola outbreak unfold in real time — with the highest first-month caseload and death rate in modern history.
• Programs reaching 93 million women and children were cut 92%. TB programs cut 56%. Water and sanitation cut 86%. Over 2,000 health facilities permanently closed.
• 25 million fewer people received humanitarian assistance in 2025. The overall humanitarian budget was slashed 74% — from $14.1 billion to $3.7 billion.
• 363 million people face acute hunger in 2026. The famine early-warning system that would have seen it coming went dark for five months.
• $1.7 billion in democracy and governance funding (election monitoring, anti-corruption work, support for independent media and civil society) was terminated.
• 360+ independent media outlets lost funding. Hundreds of legal clinics closed.
• Far from saving money, the Trump administration itself has already said the dismantlement will cost taxpayers at least $19.2 billion in cancellation fees, severance, and penalties. That's more than half of USAID's annual budget — spent on destruction and closeout, not support for vulnerable people.
• American farmers, universities, and businesses are among the casualties too. USAID partnered with more than 3,500 U.S. companies and maintained 17 university-based research labs. Its work with U.S.-based contractors and the private sector generated hundreds of thousands of American jobs and multiplied the return on every dollar spent. Those markets and partnerships are gone.
@rossiadam I wish we never stopped building nuclear power plants, but opened up their safety inspections by law to the public. Nuclear power is the closest thing we have to a free lunch regarding energy.
@whignewtons But if this President is issuing EOs that are really obviously illegal—like denying birthright citizenship—it standards to argue he should be denied more. Like if Obama tried to ban all guns six times with EOs, he should be denied 6 times.
@whignewtons First of all, great handle @whignewtons -- but I think there's some accounting for an honest and logical interpretation of law and the constitution. For instance, the 14th amendment is absolutely clear—unless you're trying to change the English language.
I genuinely hope every single person experiences the feeling of taking care of their loved ones and giving back to your parents.
The sense of accomplishment from that itself is close to none.
So if you're still stuck in a rut, keep going with the end goal of taking care of the people around you.
Worth every single hardship there is.
@NicoPerrino Not that I agree with the 6-3 court, but they very much side on the idea that if the law doesn't explicity let an agency regulate it, they cannot. AI certainly had not been written into the FTC charter.
Everyone with an Amazon prime account who cares about the prices they pay on Amazon should read this.
1. Amazon used to reimburse sellers according to what we’d receive if we sold an item. So when we sell a $19.99 Brain Flakes jar we'd get $9.50 which is roughly what we'd receive from Amazon, before a few costs.
2. Amazon shareholders (which includes management) are constantly pressuring the company to make even more money. Normally a company as powerful as Amazon would just raise prices, but (this is me speculating) Amazon doesn't do that because they know it looks bad so they do it in sneaky ways.
3. So instead of reimbursing us for revenue after fees they say “well reimburse you for your manufacturing cost (which they do not know)” which means instead of $9.50 we get much less.
4. So now, when Amazon accidentally feeds a jar of Brain Flakes discs into a robot sending discs exploding everywhere they give us like $3 instead of $9.50 basically whatever they determine is the manufacturing cost. You can go through the headache of proving your manufacturing cost by sending invoices from your supplier but who wants to give the good people at Amazon Basics this information.
5. Here's where it gets crazy. After they reimburse you, they’ll, without any expertise in the product, “fix it”. They'll tape it up or whatever.
6. And then they'll sell it and undercut you.
7. And then they'll tell you to match their price of the inventory they broke, which they reimbursed you for insufficiently
8. And who knows, maybe they'll punish you in search
9. So the best way to handle this is to actually buy the product back from Amazon so your customers don't get a shitty broken product and leave a bad review hurrying your brand
10. So now Amazon has an incentive to break your stuff so they can get the product for way less than manufacturing cost and then capture 100% of the revenues (they don't pay you when the product sells because they own it now because they reimbursed you for it)
It's a total scam and you can't do anything about it because Amazon has every company like ours by the balls.
We can't say “oh yeah Amazon we'll stop selling on your platform” because without Amazon we can’t pay our bills because they account for 80% of our sales!
Next time you shop, ask yourself if you can do it directly with the brand (https://t.co/yGgzMQnLr0).
For us we’ll give you the same products for less simply because on our website the fees are so much lower.
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