First-Time Buyers, Later Blessings, Generation Beta, ChatGPT Cheats ...
It's Free for All Friday!
It’s Free for ALL Friday! Each week I keep track of some of the off-the-path things I've found, and work extra-hard to make sure you never hit a paywall, using my own subscriptions, gift links, and other (legal) hocus-pocus.
When Older Renters Become First-Time Buyers
As some people age, they begin to think more seriously about building equity in their homes and having something to leave to their heirs.
I'm going to start with something unusual today -- an article I'm sharing purely because of a quote from one of the subjects of the article, which has stuck with me for two days because it's so great. As the headline suggests, it's about older renters who took the plunge in their 50s, 60s, or 70s and became first-time homebuyers.
One of the last people featured, a 56-year-old father of two, realized after buying that he was now paying $300 less each month than he had been for rent -- and building equity.
Should he have bought 20 years ago? Ten years ago? Think of all the money he could have saved. But that’s just not how he likes to look at things.
“I always tell people we can’t argue about when blessings arise,” he said. “I would rather it happened now than to have it never happen at all.”
A New Generation Is Here. Its Name Is Already an Insult
Parents of the newly minted Beta babies are navigating an awkward association; brushing off a ‘placeholder’ name.
Most generations get a reputation once they can talk and walk about in the world. The newest cohort already has a bad rap, and they haven’t even started eating solids.
Generation Beta officially arrived on Jan. 1, successors to Gen Alpha. While the name follows the conventions of the Greek alphabet, its connotation is less scholarly and more sus for some young parents and every school-age child. Beta is commonly used as slang for weak and passive.
The man responsible for this awkward moniker is Mark McCrindle, a social researcher and demographer who also coined Gen Alpha. His use of Greek letters was meant to be systematic and scientific, he said. Not descriptive, or suspicious.
The terms have “no inherent meaning,” McCrindle said, “yet people have ladened these labels with characterizations.”
I Used to Teach Students. Now I Catch ChatGPT Cheats
I once believed university was a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated.
I once believed my students and I were in this together, engaged in a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated over the past few semesters. It’s not just the sheer volume of assignments that appear to be entirely generated by AI—papers that show no sign the student has listened to a lecture, done any of the assigned reading, or even briefly entertained a single concept from the course.
It’s other things too. It’s the students who say: I did write the paper, but I just used AI for a little editing and polishing. Or: I just used it to help with the research. (More and more, I have been forbidding outside research in these papers for this very reason. But this, of course, has its own costs. And I hate discouraging students who genuinely want to explore their topics further.)
It’s the students who, after making such protestations, are unable to answer the most basic questions about the topic or about the paper they allegedly wrote. The students who beg you to reconsider the zero you gave them in order not to lose their scholarship. (I want to say to them: Shouldn’t that scholarship be going to ChatGPT?)
The ‘Airport Theory’ TikTok Trend Is Causing Passengers to Miss Their Flights
This is short but it's just funny and such a sign of the times.
TikTok is back with another absurd travel trend. And this time, you’ll risk missing your flight if you decide to try it. The “Airport Theory” TikTok trend is gaining traction, with supporters challenging the recommendation to arrive at the airport two hours before a domestic flight and three hours before an international flight. Instead, TikTok users are strolling into the airport late, clearing all airport hurdles with just 15–20 minutes to spare.
This harebrained idea has amassed millions of views on TikTok. One user, michael.dicostanzo, tried it at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, the world’s busiest airport. He cleared TSA PreCheck quickly, took a tram to his terminal, and made it to the gate in under 15 minutes. His video has 3.6 million views, with commenters noting that he didn’t check a bag, traveled on an easy day (Tuesday), and used PreCheck.
When these conditions aren’t met, does the Airport Theory still hold true?
I Took My Work Outside Every Day for a Month This Winter. Here’s What I Learned
I committed to taking my laptop outside every workday—no matter the weather—to see if the well-being I felt in nature during summer could extend year-round.
There were days it was glorious. I sought out sunny spots on my front porch and back deck. Some mornings, I watched the mist lift off the nearby mountain and the play of plant shadows. In the interstitial moments between computer tasks, I observed tiny snow specks drifting through the air or basked in the sun. I listened to the magpies and mourning doves, the drips from the roof, and the rustling of dry leaves.
There were also times I experienced inertia. Inside my house, in the cloistered warmth, it was hard to motivate to put on all my layers, slather on sunscreen, and gather all my work stuff. Sometimes it was downright unpleasant out there. One day, the sky was grey, wind blew up my pant legs, giant construction machines whined loudly down the street, and a neighbor’s windchimes unleashed a flurry of complaints. Another time, sitting on my front porch with all my gear, the mailman did a doubletake, as if to say what are you doing here? One afternoon, I narrowly missed getting buried by snow sliding off the roof. I felt like a weirdo at best and wondered if I was freaking out my neighbors.
Nonetheless, I had committed to a month, and I was genuinely curious. I kept going. One key to consistency was keeping it simple. Often I just went out and sat on a foam pad on my back stairs or in my camp chair, which I hid under an eave so it wouldn’t get frosty. A friend gave me some fingerless gloves. I made judicious use of hot drinks in thermoses.
Years After the Early Death of a Math Genius, Her Ideas Gain New Life
A new proof extends the work of the late Maryam Mirzakhani, cementing her legacy as a pioneer of alien mathematical realms.
In the early 2000s, a young graduate student at Harvard University began to chart an exotic mathematical universe — one inhabited by shapes that defy geometric intuition. Her name was Maryam Mirzakhani, and she would go on to become the first woman to win a Fields Medal, math’s highest honor.
Her earliest work dealt with “hyperbolic” surfaces.
While still in graduate school, she developed groundbreaking techniques that allowed her to start cataloging these shapes, before moving on to revolutionize other areas of mathematical research. She hoped to revisit her map of the hyperbolic realm at a later date — to fill in its details and make new discoveries.
But before she could do so, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She died in 2017, just 40 years old.
Now, two mathematicians have picked up the thread of her work and spun it into an even deeper understanding. In a paper posted online last month, Nalini Anantharaman of the Collège de France and Laura Monk of the University of Bristol have built on Mirzakhani’s research to prove a sweeping statement about typical hyperbolic surfaces. They have shown that surfaces once thought to be rare, if not impossible, are actually common. In fact, if you were to pick a hyperbolic surface at random, it essentially would be guaranteed to have certain critical properties.
“This is a landmark result,” said Peter Sarnak, a mathematician at Princeton University. “There’ll be a lot more that will come out of this.”
Tesla’s Fortunes Fall as Musk Rises in Trump World
CEO’s politics erode brand’s appeal among some core buyers of electric vehicles; ‘I used to idolize the guy’.
Few brands have their image as closely tied to their CEO as Tesla. For most of the electric-car maker’s history, that was good for business.
Elon Musk’s pledge to reduce the world’s reliance on fossil fuels and his push to broaden the appeal of electric cars attracted legions of buyers looking to make a statement—to declare their allegiance to his grand vision of techno-environmentalism.
Now that Musk has allied himself with Donald Trump and plunged into the deep end of national politics, many Tesla owners and would-be buyers are asking themselves what kind of statement it makes to get behind the wheel of a Tesla these days. Such doubts have begun showing up in worrisome numbers for the company.
Garth Ancier, a TV executive from Los Angeles, recalled discussing more than a year ago with two fellow owners what it felt like to be seen in a Tesla. “They said, ‘You know, I’m getting uncomfortable driving this car around because it’s like driving a big red MAGA hat,’” Ancier said.
Now Ancier wants to sell his 4-year-old Model X. “If not for his behavior, I’d probably stick with a Tesla.”
The percentage of Democrats who said they would consider buying a Tesla as their next vehicle declined from 23% in August 2023 to 13% in February, the data show. Over that same period, the percentage of would-be Republican buyers grew from 15% to 26%.
Some analysts said conservatives are more hesitant to pull the trigger on an EV purchase, which might make it more difficult to turn rising Republican support into sales.
Yesterday’s poll was kind of silly of me; I was just in a mood. For the record, 93% of our readers agree with Warren Buffett, in that they would NOT like to fall into a vat of hot beer.
Anyway, maybe we can use today’s last story, about Tesla and Musk, for a poll. Short version: Tell us where you land on Tesla.
By the way, if you’ve been reading this newsletter a VERY long time—which probably means you’re my wife (hi honey), or else maybe one of a few friends who were here all the way back in November 2019 when I had almost no subscribers!—you might remember that when Musk first announced the Cybertruck, I put down a $100 deposit. I later took it back.
“No Tesla - don’t like Musk” doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Never a Tesla, I vote with my pocketbook. the environmental impact of lithium batteries, explosions, and increased electricity demands negate any claims for reducing fossil fuel use. And I strongly disagree with how he is trying to dismantle our democracy.