Paul Schultz ن

"This is why a strategy based on the old dynamics of 'punishing' defection doesn’t work. They’re not being pro-life because they’re afraid of the consequences. They’re being pro-life despite the consequences. The pro-life movement needs to recognize and embrace this."

People who locked in a mortgage at 2% in 2021

the concept of putting concupiscible in a book for babies

If you are going to be in Ann Arbor, MI tomorrow. The Project will be at St. Thomas from 1-3pm (I'll be set up early so if you want to stop in). Please stop out and say hello! Pic is from a display at Our Lady of Peace in Bay City, MI.

The future for mothers who have to carry the domestic mental load is bright and filled with agents

The Great Inversion: AI Is Quietly Draining the Public Internet of Thought Something profound is happening to the Internet, and almost no one is naming it clearly. I have been cataloging it of the last 4 years. For decades, the web’s most valuable resource wasn’t bandwidth or servers. It was the messy, public give-and-take of human questions and answers. I was a Top Writer on Quora for nearly a decade as well as a massive pre-crazy Wikipedia contributor — I lived in the space of that give and take. Someone would hit a wall, open a forum, type out the problem, and a conversation would form. Ideas were stress-tested in the open. Nuance appeared. Dead ends were marked. Better questions got refined in real time. That entire process — the friction, the disagreement, the collective thinking — was left behind as searchable, linkable, durable public knowledge. That flow has reversed. The same questions, the same moments of curiosity or confusion, are now more routed into private AI interfaces. A person opens a chat window, types the prompt, receives the output, and the entire exchange vanishes into a closed ecosystem. The assumption we must make (because it is true) is that the AI company stores both the prompt and the response. The thinking that once would have become part of the shared human record is instead locked inside a corporate training silo. This is not a minor shift in user behavior. It is an inversion of the Internet’s original knowledge architecture. Public discourse is being systematically stripped of its higher-signal material. As the internet’s data gets more and more noisy in a very really way it is growing quiet. The questions that used to generate the richest threads the ones that forced people to clarify assumptions, admit uncertainty, or synthesize across domains are the ones most efficiently answered by AI. What remains on the open web is increasingly the residual: lower-effort posts, performative arguments, recycled takes, and the questions that still feel too social or too ambiguous for a model. AI then trains on that thinning residue, while the better thinking is captured privately and never returns to the commons. The result is a strange feedback loop. The public Internet becomes less thoughtful precisely because the thoughtful interactions have been privatized. And the models, trained more and more on what is left behind, risk becoming increasingly fluent in the lesser exchanges that now dominate the surface. This is not the usual complaint about “AI is making people dumber” or “forums are dying.” Those are symptoms. The deeper phenomenon is structural: the migration of human cognitive surplus from a public knowledge commons into private, non-reciprocal data reservoirs. The Internet is no longer primarily a place where thinking is externalized and shared. It is becoming a place where thinking is extracted and contained. The novelty of this observation is that it reframes the problem away from content moderation, engagement algorithms, or even AI capability. The core issue is architectural. We have inverted the direction of knowledge flow. What once leaked outward into a shared substrate now drains inward into silos that do not, by default, give back. The long-term consequences are massive under-discussed as not noticed. How does a civilization maintain a high-quality public epistemic environment when its best questions are no longer asked in public? What happens to the training data of future models when the richest human reasoning is locked behind commercial walls? And what cultural muscles atrophy when the habit of thinking out loud, in front of others, becomes rarer? This is the silent inversion of the Internet. The data once destined for the commons is now shunted into AI. The thoughtful exchanges are disappearing from the surface, and the models are learning from what remains. That is the novel dynamic. Everything else is downstream of it.

Vacation towns are about to get decimated. Start in the 1960s. Somebody's grandparents bought a place like this on a middle class income. One earner, a decent job, a cabin on the water. Their kids did a little better. Upper middle class, bigger house in the suburbs, and they bought a second home too. That was still normal. Then look at now. Today the median first time buyer is 40 years old, an all time high, and first timers down to 21% of the market, an all time low. People are hitting middle age before they close on a starter house, and plenty never do. So the chain breaks right here. Three generations in, the handoff stops. Now run it forward. The boomers own a staggering amount of this stuff, and over the next decade it will all come to market in the same window. Lake houses, beach cottages, ski condos, desert casitas. The heirs mostly don't want it. Insurance on anything near water, fire or hail has gone vertical. Property taxes reset on transfer in some states and just keep climbing in the others. The dues on a resort condo run like a car payment and half these towns have cracked down on short term rentals, so the "it pays for itself" math doesn't pencil anymore either. And an inherited house rarely stays inherited. Somebody always wants the money instead. So it gets listed. Usually right after probate clears. Massive inventory is coming. But buyers aren't. Get ready for these prices to go to rock bottom.

Breaking News: Ross Douthat, The New York Times opinion columnist, is joining CBS News’s “60 Minutes” in one of the first major hires since Bari Weiss’s takeover. nyti.ms/45s7aEh

On average, combining market work, education, childcare, housework, eldercare, all combined, married dads do about 30 minutes *more* of work per week than married moms. But total work burden has steadily risen for both!

Write about your worst memory for 15 minutes a day, four days in a row. Six months later you'll go to the doctor half as often as people who didn't. James Pennebaker first ran that experiment at SMU in 1986. He's been trying to figure out why ever since. Two years later he ran it again with two scientists who study the immune system. The writers' T-cells came back stronger. Way stronger than everyone else's. Those are the cells your body uses to fight off infections. In 1999 the same idea got tested on people with asthma and arthritis. Twenty minutes a day, three days in a row. Four months later the asthma group was breathing better, and the arthritis group had fewer symptoms. A 2004 study in New Zealand tried it on 37 people with HIV. The writers' CD4 counts went up. That's HIV's main target. The other group, who wrote about boring everyday stuff, didn't budge. By 2006 someone had pulled 146 of these studies together. The same effect kept showing up across cancer patients, prisoners, college kids, and people with autoimmune diseases. Researchers in the UK pushed it further in 2008. They split 36 people into two groups and gave each person a tiny circular cut on the inside of the arm, the kind you get from a skin biopsy. The first group had spent three days writing about something painful before the cut. The other wrote about their day. Two weeks later the writers' cuts had closed up faster on ultrasound. Different angle, 2024. A team in Norway put EEG caps on people while they wrote. 256 sensors picked up brain activity. When you write by hand, wide stretches of your brain start talking to each other. The parts that handle movement and memory fire in patterns tied to learning. When you type, that doesn't happen. Forty years in. The simplest version still works. Sit down for 15 minutes, write about what's bothering you. The "crazy gift" yimika is talking about shows up in blood draws, biopsy ultrasounds, and brain scans.

Fr. Robert P. Boxie (45), priest of Washington, is elected Titular Bishop of Cataquas and Auxiliary Bishop of Washington (USA 🇺🇸) @WashArchdiocese gcatholic.org/hierarchy/data…

Go thee hither, and laugh: freddiedeboer.substack.com/p…