I’ve used the same lawn maintenance service for over ten years, ever since I decided (not that my wife the professor didn’t have some say in the matter) that it probably wasn’t the best idea for me to be dealing with heavy lawnmowers on large slopes that approach forty degrees in some places, especially at my then-hardly-young age. Not that I needed much convincing, since, as a teenager I mowed lawns for three long summers, and I’ve disliked mowing ever since.

I’ve always made the point of paying for a month’s service in advance by mailing a check, and I’ve never had any trouble with the service, until this month, when I suddenly realized I wasn’t getting my weekly emailed invoice. Then several sprinklers malfunctioned (beyond simple replacement) followed by a split somewhere in a main water feed.

But when I went to call the service, I looked them up on the internet to check the telephone number and discovered they had a glitzy new website which suggested I use it to schedule the necessary repairs. The only problem was that the “new” system wouldn’t recognize either my email or my street address. The new system’s chatbot was no help, either.

So, I used the old-fashioned telephone, and I got a helpful real person on the line, except she couldn’t schedule the sprinkler repair because I either had to have a credit card on file or fill out and return an email form that she would send to me. She tried four times to send the form. The system said that it sent it, but I never received anything, even though the system had the correct email address.

After more hassles I called back and got another helpful person. He found me on the system, but nothing still arrived by email. In the end, after almost half an hour, between the two of us, we figured out that my mailing street address was “wrong,” that is, that it was listed as “south,” followed by the street name. Five years ago, that was the correct postal address, but then USPS removed the “south,” despite the fact that we’re still “south.” For the most part, that hasn’t been a problem, but every so often, relatives and friends using the “old” address have letters rejected. The thing is: we’re the only house on the street, which is only a half-block long; there’s no other street with any similar name; and we’ve lived here for 33 years.

With that one little change, all of a sudden, the lawn service system could send me the sprinkler request form and all my back invoices.

But it took three human beings over two hours to “solve” what never should have been a problem, and none of us, including the tech on the system, could say why a single word in the database not even associated directly with the email address could block sending emails to me.

And the tech gurus wonder why people are leery of AI?

In an article published in The New York Times, on May 7, 2026, dealing with possible causes of the declining birthrate in the United States, the economist Claudia Goldin cited two factors: (1) the unpredictable shifts and low wages that have barely kept pace with the cost of living for less-skilled workers and (2) so-called “greedy jobs,” positions that demand far more of an employee than can be accomplished within “normal working hours.”

In fact, today most U.S. workers face three possibilities for work: no available jobs, jobs with wages/hours insufficient to pay the bills, or “greedy jobs.”

I’m more than a little acquainted with “greedy jobs,” since every political or consulting job I had for the eighteen years I worked in Washington, D.C., took far more time than nine to five and had requirements that went far beyond the job description.

Sometimes, financial circumstances also create “greedy jobs,” particularly the costs of higher education. A junior degreed professional – doctor, engineer, lawyer, dentist, and others – who leaves graduate school with a high level of student loans may well find his or her job barely able to provide a living wage after making student loan payments while another junior degreed professional whose family supported them through college and graduate school won’t have near the financial problems.

As for tenure track/tenured university professors, whether a position is “greedy” depends on the university and the field. At least at my wife’s university, the pay is higher in certain areas, such as business, and the hours are shorter. In the performing arts, especially in music, the pay is lower, the hours longer, and on average, music professors work six-day weeks. And to add to that, the administrative and paperwork requirements have effectively doubled over the past decade as a result of politically required documentation. As a result, many senior professors are retiring earlier, and taking lower retirement benefits, and they’re being replaced by much younger and fewer professors and more low-paid part-time adjuncts without benefits, especially health benefits, creating “greedier” full-time positions and more underpaid and insecure part-time positions.

But very few analysts – or politicians – seem to realize that current economic pressures are turning more, if not most, available jobs into either those that can’t pay the bills or barely do and those that are “greedy jobs.”

Is this really the future we want?

West of Cedar City, on land grazed by herds of sheep in the not-too-distant past, apartment and condominium buildings are springing up seemingly everywhere. That’s unfortunately not too surprising, given that last year Iron County tied for the fastest county population growth in the state of Utah. And those numbers understate the actual number of people, because the enrollment at Southern Utah University has doubled in the past 11 years to almost 16,000 students, and most of them (roughly 70%) don’t come from Iron County/Cedar City.

One aspect of all this home building I find most interesting is that, from what I can tell, over 80% of those apartments/condominiums are constructed of pseudo-stucco, i.e., a thin layer of mortar over one half inch OSB (Oriented Strand Board) clad in Tyvek (waterproof plastic). In my opinion, this isn’t exactly terribly permanent, but this growing impermanence in housing mirrors impermanence elsewhere.

This is especially true in the book business. I have a collection of mass market paperbacks, many of which are over forty years old. Some of them are a bit fragile, admittedly, but they’re readable.

On the other hand, since my publisher went digital, I’ve created back-up files for each book in place of hard copies. The only problem is that many of the back-up files are essentially “lost,” since the earliest were on thin floppies, the next were on 3 ½ inch hard floppies, the next on CDs. I never kept the older computers for obvious reasons. All of which means that, effectively, those fragile paperbacks are outlasting the electronic formats.

As others have pointed out, at least some of the data and records from the Mercury and Apollo space programs has been “lost” because the systems with which to read that data have been replaced by newer systems using totally different codes.

Somehow it seems rather amusingly odd that someone can read the words and songs of the Sumerian poetess/priestess Enheduanna written some 4300 years ago on a clay tablet, but more and more data and history are being recorded on electronic media that will vanish far sooner, either from power failures or planned obsolescence. One of the greatest cultural losses is likely to be in the area of classical music where the failure of the copyright system means that thousands of works are slowly moldering away because few have the time and/or resources to preserve them, and even those preserved “electronically” won’t last that long.

As for the semi-temporary apartments springing up everywhere, in the global scheme of things, they’re no great loss – except to whoever owns them when they collapse or are demolished in the comparative near future.

Sometimes, propaganda is blatantly false; sometimes it’s a mixture of truth and misinformation; and sometimes, what’s perceived as blatantly false is largely factually accurate.

Ted Koppel of CBS News revealed on Sunday, May 24th that Iranians are flooding the internet, and the world, with skillfully rendered, AI-generated, anti-American, and especially anti-Trump media, often featuring AI-rendered Trump Lego figures.

Koppel talked, if via a translator, with one of the individuals behind at least some of the anti-Trump renderings, asking that individual about the assertion that Israel had blackmailed Trump into making the attack on Iran by threatening to reveal Trump’s more direct connections to Jeffrey Epstein. The Iranian, predictably, claimed that the report was, in fact, accurate.

Whether or not that assertion is accurate, the fact that it’s been made public and that the Iranian anti-Trump propaganda has been disseminated so far to near a billion people worldwide are disturbing. Even more disturbing in this context is the fact that roughly half of the Epstein documents remain undisseminated and that much of the material that was disseminated is so heavily redacted as to be unreadable.

Given the stakes of the Iran conflict, the fact that Trump and his administration acted without any long-term plan or strategy and given how unwilling Trump’s Department of Justice is to comply with the court order to disseminate all the Epstein files, merely dismissing the Iranian assertion as false is hardly sufficient to remove the cloud of doubt created by that assertion, particularly given Trump’s long record of misstatement and prevarication and the slavish devotion of the political appointees running DOJ.

Trump’s continuing statements about a pending solution to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz are hardly reassuring, particularly given the pace of Iranian rearmament. While the growing threat of Iranian-backed terrorists in the Middle East and Iranian progress in developing a global nuclear threat provide some rationale for the initial February attack on Iran, none of those deal with the question of why the U.S. joined Israel almost immediately for a second attack, especially since it’s clear that Trump has been unable to provide any comprehensive reason for the second attack, beyond claiming that Iran should never be allowed a nuclear weapon.

So…whose claims are true, and to what degree, and which, if any, are blatantly false?

The Trump administration announced last Monday the creation of a $1.8 billion fund to compensate those who claim they were targeted by the Biden Justice Department and by Democrats. This act would forge a pipeline to funnel taxpayer money to President Trump’s allies.

The fund was created just after Trump withdrew his lawsuit demanding at least $10 billion against the Internal Revenue Service as an effort to skirt oversight by the judge on the case, who had expressed concern that the lawsuit against the IRS represented self-dealing between the president and a department run by his former defense lawyer, Todd Blanche.

Trump’s and Blanche’s moves stripped Judge Kathleen M. Williams, who had been overseeing the IRS case in the Southern District of Florida, of her appointed role in approving a formal settlement agreement. By dismissing the case in its entirety, Trump could reach an agreement with his own appointees without risking the rebuke of an impartial and independent arbiter.

Trump, his two sons and his family business, who sued the IRS together, would receive an apology but not be paid out of the new fund, officials said.

Trump and DOJ’s leadership have repeatedly accused Democrats of weaponizing federal law enforcement against their enemies, but they have failed to provide evidence of illegality, or political animus, in the two federal prosecutions of Mr. Trump or in investigations into his allies. Judge Williams had been considering dismissing Mr. Trump’s IRS suit on her own because Trump effectively controls both his personal lawyers bringing the complaint and the government lawyers who are supposed to respond to it.

In short, Trump is using Blanche to get a settlement for a lawsuit that never should have been brought and, if brought, would likely have lost, and settlement will direct $1.8 billion of taxpayer funds to whomever Trump and Blanche choose (if through a five-person board whose members Blanche effectively controls).

And to top it all off, the DOJ action blocks any IRS attempts to audit, investigate, or prosecute any tax matters involving Trump, the Trump family, or any Trump company… ever.

In terms of corruption of the legal system itself, this tops anything I’ve seen.