On October 24, 1836, the earliest American patent was issued for a phosphorus friction match to Alonzo Dwight Phillips of Springfield, Massachusetts — October 24th is the anniversary of the firing squad execution of Norwegian traitor Vidkun Quisling, in 1945. His ignominious place in history was to have his surname become a noun. “Quisling” is now a moniker synonymous with treason and alliance with an invading army. — And on October 24, 1946, a camera on board the V-2 No. 13 rocket launched from White Sands, New Mexico captured the first photograph of Earth from outer space. — SurvivalBlog Writing … The post Preparedness Notes for Friday — October 24, 2025 appeared first on SurvivalBlog.com.

by Martin Armstrong, Armstrong Economics: Corporations with assets exceeding $100 million are seeing a surge in closures and bankruptcies. Trends in Large Corporate Bankruptcy and Financial Distress—Midyear 2025 Update found that filings began to increase in early 2023 and have continued to rise into 2025. Over the past year, 117 mega corporations filed for bankruptcy. This is […]

In the northern suburbs of Sydney, Australia, Adam Bushell has saved about $10 a month in waste collection fees since his local council swapped flat fees for a “pay-as-you-throw” system four years ago. While recycling is collected free of charge, microchipped bins for general waste are weighed, and households receive a monthly statement listing how much they threw out and what they owe. The new approach has changed the way Bushell thinks about household waste, not least when it comes to food.  “The pay-by-weight concept has made me very conscious of the amount of food that we waste and has really made me want to dispose of less,” says Bushell, who runs an electrical services company. “The personal financial cost definitely makes you think in a different way on what you discard. It makes it immediately, physically cost-effective to waste less.” The system works thanks to several factors, first and foremost the clear financial incentive and rules, says Graham Matthews, head of content at U.K. commercial waste management company Business Waste. “Residents know and understand that the less trash they produce, the less they will pay. The system adheres to the principle of ‘polluter pays,’ meaning those who produce pollution should bear the costs of managing it.”  Weighed down by negative news? Our smart, bright, weekly newsletter is the uplift you’ve been looking for. [contact-form-7] Over the last 30 years, pay-as-you-throw waste systems have been gaining traction across the Netherlands, Germany, Ireland, Belgium, France, Italy and Norway, as well as Taiwan, Japan, Canada and the U.S. In the U.S., where over 7,000 towns and cities have implemented such programs, they have been praised as one of the most effective tools for encouraging residents to throw out less — in some cases, reducing the amount of household trash by 30 percent, as Lily Baum Pollans, associate professor of urban policy and planning at The City University of New York, has observed.  Meanwhile, Professor Baum Pollans’ research on municipal food scrap programming in mid-sized cities across the U.S. has found that pay-as-you-throw is the biggest predictor of whether or not a city would have a curbside composting program. In short, linking cost saving to waste reduction works when it comes to encouraging individual households to be more environmentally responsible, and municipalities to be more innovative. “It comes down to neoclassical economics — the more you are asked to pay, the more you are willing to do to reduce the amount you pay,” explains Professor Baum Pollans. “We’re taught financial motivation from an early age, and the research does indicate that, at first, this is how people are motivated. But then, eventually, it results in new habits.” Some people now call it “pay-as-you-waste,” she adds, because they want to make it clear that you’re paying for the garbage you produce, rather than for a basic collection system. Bergen, Norway’s second-largest city, has introduced perhaps one of the most sophisticated forms of waste management. In 2016, the typical model of truck collection of trash bags and cans on the sidewalk was replaced with a network of underground tunnels running beneath the city center.  Bergen’s central residents are issued a key fob for opening collection hatches on the street. The fob keeps track of how many times an individual opens the hatch, with each household being allowed to use it eight times a month for free to dispose of general waste, after which they must pay. Items to be recycled can be disposed of for free. In 2022, six years into the program, the city recorded a nine percent decrease in residual waste, and a 28 percent increase in collected plastic. Pay-as-you-throw waste systems such as Bergen’s have been praised as one of the most effective tools for cutting household waste. “Financial incentives are more powerful than your own conscience. But the magic happens when you can align financial incentives with sustainable choices, and that’s when we will actually manage to change behavior the way we want,” says Tine Charlotte Holm, chief operating officer at Carrot, the software company behind Bergen’s system. Carrot has now taken its pay-as-you-throw technology into office and retail buildings. Holm says these kinds of locations have traditionally been notorious for not recycling or making efforts to reduce waste, in part due to previous flat fee structures with waste management companies, but also thanks to an attitude of, “if my neighbor isn’t doing it, why should I?” Now, using data to create friendly competition among neighbors seems to be working. West One Shopping Center in central London, for example, has increased its mixed recycling volume by 47 percent and reduced general waste by more than 40 percent since introducing Carrot’s system, which weighs and tracks each type of waste, determining how much the center should pay their waste management company.  It also reduced its waste collection bill by close to $2,000 per month after shopping center management convinced fast food retailers to implement separated waste bins, increasing the amount customers are able to recycle. The retailers can log into the platform to see how much waste each individual business is generating, creating friendly competition and a further incentive to reduce their volumes. “It’s about rewarding those who recycle and keep waste down, rather than punish[ing] anyone. It’s using positive reinforcement, and showing people and businesses that your action matters,” says Holm. The next piece of the puzzle, she adds, is tracking the journey of the plastic collected to find out where it ends up.  It hasn’t all been good news. As Business Waste’s Matthews points out, South Norfolk county in the U.K. attempted to adopt a pay-as-you-throw system in 2012 but the scheme was scrapped after its initial trial period, despite the county having equipped each of its 12 garbage trucks with $34,000 worth of scanning technology. Much of the technology failed and caused issues with weighing the trash, leading to inaccurate readings, missed collections and general confusion amongst residents, which resulted in a 250 percent surge of illegal waste dumping in the local area.  “The scheme clearly lacked the technological infrastructure to support pay-as-you-throw, and alongside this, the U.K. media helped to whip up hysteria, with headlines branding the scheme ‘Big-Brother Bins’ and ‘Spy Bins,’” says Matthews. While Carrot’s Holm believes there’s more to it than money, perhaps the effectiveness of financially motivated behavior change is simply the reality of the world we now live in. Or can values change over time, too? And does it even matter whether values change or not, if the behavior change creates a positive impact? In South Korea, thanks to the country’s pay-as-you-throw system, 95 percent of all food waste and 86 percent of all garbage is recycled. In Gyeonggi, just outside Seoul, apartment dweller Allie Park purchases color-coded bags from her local grocery store to separate her recycling, food waste and general disposables. Her friends living in apartments in central Seoul, meanwhile, place their garbage in vending machines that charge users by weight and are opened by tapping a credit card.  Park, who writes about trends in and around the South Korean capital on her Kosi Coso Substack, recycles and separates her food waste out of duty, rather than with the belief she’s saving the planet, and she feels she’s not alone. She also questions the effectiveness of the local recycling policies. “I am personally dubious as to whether even half of the so-called recyclables are actually reused or reborn into other materials.” Wait, you're not a member yet? Join the Reasons to be Cheerful community by supporting our nonprofit publication and giving what you can. Join Cancel anytime Kuo-Hi Lee, who lives in an apartment in the Mapo area of Seoul, uses the vending machine system to dispose of her garbage. She says that the pay-by-weight system, combined with plentiful options for cheap eats in Seoul, encourages people to eat out more to avoid food waste at home — a sentiment echoed by Park.  Having lived in Germany and China, Lee finds the pay-as-you-throw system in South Korea relatively complicated, and says that there is a generally held view that reducing and separating waste is an obligation to avoid high charges rather than something people feel motivated to do for the sake of the environment.  “I don’t feel we are really incentivized. Also people aren’t that engaged — they believe they did their part and the government takes care of the rest.” For Professor Baum Pollans, the biggest impact can be made at a corporate and commercial level — and that’s where she believes local governments can have the most influence in terms of how their laws and policies shape waste reduction on a larger scale. Pay-as-you-throw, she argues, is probably the most effective policy that a city can implement to eventually create more significant waste management changes. “[It’s] what drives waste management departments to innovate, and then they start thinking not just about recycling and waste reduction, but how to reduce the amount of materials that are produced in the first place, and implementing policies for that,” she says. “So slowly, over time, it’s not individual-by-individual, it’s city-by-city that you start to change the market. That’s where I see a lot of possibilities.” The post ‘Pay-As-You-Throw’ Helps Cities Cut Waste And Citizens Save Cash appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.

In a dramatic escalation of U.S. financial involvement abroad, Scott Bessent, Secretary of the Treasury under the Donald Trump administration, announced that the bailout of Javier Milei’s Argentina may reach as high as US $40 billion—effectively [...] The post US Treasury Doubles Argentina’s Bailout to $40 Billion Following Javier Milei’s Israel Visit appeared first on The People's Voice.

A roundup of mysterious, paranormal and strange news stories from the past week.

What memorable experience of pop culture can you recall from this year so far? When was the last time a movie, TV show, or musical release had everyone talking? Most of us struggle to answer. Even the things that do approach mass-culture saturation—like last month’s release of a new Taylor Swift album—lack the buzz they used to have and feel retread and uninspiring. Perhaps the biggest bona fide sensation in pop culture recently has been KPop Demon Hunters, a surprise hit on both Netflix and music charts. But this too will be quickly forgotten as the churn of streaming content moves on. With few exceptions, pop culture right now feels stagnant, forgettable, disposable, ho-hum, and low-key bland. There are ever fewer Big Things that shape cultural discourse; all we have now are ephemeral trending topics, TikTok crazes, and meme-sparking pseudo-events like this summer’s Coldplay fan cam incident. And when viral infidelity memes are the best we’ve got as a culture, something has gone terribly wrong. The stagnation has been long brewing. In The Decadent Society (2020), Ross Douthat’s definition of cultural “decadence” includes a “cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development.” Even as digital tech gives us unprecedented access to culture, precious little of it feels fresh or enlivening. Most feels stale and repetitive. We’re unmoved, bored, numb. Why is contemporary pop culture so blah like this? And what might this mean for Christianity amid the malaise? Technological Explanation: Algorithms, AI Slop, and Brain-Rot Junk Food Digital technology has created cultural stagnation on both the consumption side and the production side. Audiences are fragmented by algorithms and fed a numbing stream of “content” (note the linguistic shift from “culture” to “content” in the internet age) meant to capture their attention but not necessarily nourish them. Pop culture has largely ceased to be a meaningful source of water-cooler conversation or community building. It’s merely isolated consumption, encapsulated in the prophetic Apple iPod ads from the early 2000s: solitary shadows of people with music in their ears, dancing to their own thing. Even as digital tech gives us unprecedented access to culture, precious little of it feels fresh or enlivening. Most feels stale and repetitive. We’re unmoved, bored, numb. Digital technology’s “democratization” of culture making (bypassing gatekeepers; platform building via social media savvy) has diversified the cultural landscape, yes. But it has also created a wildly oversaturated explosion of content, much of it mediocre at best. If everyone is a culture creator via Garage Band, YouTube, or TikTok, the act of culture making loses prestige and cultural products become cheapened in their ubiquity. The glut is aggravated by the convergence of all content into video, as well as the ongoing ascendence of generative AI. When we open our feeds we’re mostly seeing video content we didn’t ask for and heaps of AI slop. The algorithm feeds us the equivalent of lunch-line mystery meat from the hair-netted cafeteria lady. Are we supposed to be impressed and captivated? It’s not working. We are digitally fatigued. Young people especially are highly aware of “brain rot” and growing more hungry for meatier, analog alternatives. Meanwhile, creative industries are struggling to penetrate increasingly skeptical consumer defenses. Some artists simply accept the fragmentation and create work that will only appeal to a specific niche—churning out ear-tingling candy for echo chambers. For artists seeking bigger audiences or broader cultural influence, often their only recourse is spectacle or shock: creating something so over the top, incendiary, or transgressive that it might just get attention. But even these bold swings have by now become so bourgeois and rote that they barely register. Audiences catch on to the marketing gimmicks of aging pop stars desperately trying to stay relevant. It all starts to feel sad and empty. Political Explanation: Beauty Bogged Down in Agendas Rather than telling good stories, many culture makers today are more interested in advancing their narrative. Rather than seeking to capture broadly appealing goodness, truth, and beauty, much in pop culture is now driven by partisan polemics, DEI representation quotas, or provocative moral transgression. Culture has become more a battlefield for ideological warfare than an arena of shared appreciation of excellent things. Pop culture has become more a battlefield for ideological warfare than an arena of shared appreciation of beautiful things. Consider the growing examples of LGBT+ propaganda in children’s entertainment, or Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, which has been breathlessly praised by the film critic community but is essentially a three-hour call to arms for leftist “resistance” in Trump’s America. Or note the selection of Bad Bunny as this year’s Super Bowl halftime show performer. Even five months before the event, the conversation is about the political implications of this choice—nothing about his music. For understandable reasons, everyday folks are leery of entertainment’s agenda because so much of it feels like preaching more than entertaining. We’re exhausted by this. And when artists can’t find motivation to create work that’s deeper or wider than politics, cultural stagnation naturally results. Spiritual Explanation: De-Storied Secularism At its core, cultural stagnation is downstream from spiritual emptiness. Consider movies as one cultural genre that’s particularly stuck. Hollywood is in a full-fledged crisis. The two factors mentioned above are certainly part of the problem. But the more fundamental reason is that Hollywood has no new ideas. It merely recycles the past and follows old formulas. Douthat says it well when he observes, “A society that generates a lot of bad movies need not be decadent; a society that just makes the same movies over and over again might be.” Cultural stagnation is downstream from spiritual emptiness. Audiences are growing tired of the endless recycling of IP (franchise sequels, prequels, reboots, remakes, and live-action versions of animated classics), yet these are the only sorts of movies that make money. Eighteen of the top 20 highest-grossing movies so far in 2025 are IP-driven movies. The original movie exceptions—Sinners and Weapons—are too infrequent to motivate Hollywood to green-light unproven stories. This cycle is killing cinema by slowly rendering it irrelevant. As Thomas Flight describes it in a recent long-form video essay, With almost no development of new original worlds, stories, ideas, IP, major blockbuster films have become a kind of cultural ouroboros. Cinema no longer creates the narratives that define the culture, instead it relies almost exclusively on its own past cultural influence or existing worlds, characters, and stories from other forms of media for its success. But Hollywood’s inability to develop new worlds goes beyond risk-averse business decisions. It stems from the broader malaise of a secular age. Compelling stories involve heroes and villains, goodness and evil, beauty contrasted with ugliness. But all these are undefinable without the moral foundation that’s either assumed or explicitly avowed in a Christian culture. That’s why so many movies now blur the lines between good/wicked and hero/villain—or rework these labels according to partisan political frameworks (e.g., white men usually the villains, intersectional minorities usually the heroes). Yet category-confusing drama is a bore. And politically motivated drama is annoying. Audiences intuitively want what secular creators increasingly can’t deliver: stories anchored in transcendent truth. Opportunity for Christians I was recently at a Paul McCartney concert in a massive stadium. As McCartney performed iconic Beatles songs like “Let It Be” and “Hey Jude,” I looked around at the 50,000 people singing along, many hands raised in a pseudo–worship pose. It struck me that this is the secular-culture equivalent of a religious experience. It scratched an itch rarely scratched these days: a hunger for mass-culture unity around beauty that brings people together, an appetite for something so good that it rises above fragmented narratives. Slickly repackaged nostalgia is the best our present stagnant culture can offer: retrieval of the bygone days when Western culture was still close enough to its Judeo-Christian heritage that it produced works of galvanizing wonder, beauty, and substance. But people are hungry for more than mere nostalgia. Even a stirring sing-along to “Hey Jude” is merely a passing pleasure. Who will rise to the occasion and create art that actually moves people—and changes culture? People are hungry for more than mere nostalgia. Christians have an opportunity here. The late-modern cultural rut is leaving people hungry for real encounters with beauty. The church can provide this. Perhaps this is part of why we’re seeing an uptick in church attendance among Gen Z in particular. When so much else in culture feels like hastily made, disposable slop, the weekly liturgies of Christian worship—largely unchanged for two millennia—feel substantive, solid, nourishing, and transformative. Christian art that unapologetically rehearses and flows from theological truth also has potential to fill the void. Perhaps this is why Christian music is having such a moment, why The Chosen broke records for the most translated season of a TV show ever, and why streamers like Prime Video are hungry for shows like House of David. In all these cases, it’s not just Christian art breaking through; it’s quality Christian art where excellence of craft makes the message compelling. In a culturally stagnant age that’s getting more dank by the day, Christianity can be the fresh, flowing, cleansing water that breaks the stalemate and brings replenishing life once again.