Alexa, I'd like some misinformation on the election

I don't have Alexa in my home. Or Siri. Or any other virtual assistant.

I'm my own virtual assistant. When I want to find something out, I go directly to the google. And so far, music-wise, I've held out on subscribing to Spotify or Sirius. If I want to hear music - which I do an awful lot - I press one of my many old-school CD's into my old-school boombox and hit play.

The only voice activated anything I do is hit the speaker button on my remote so I can quickly find a program I'm looking for.

I'm sure that once I really need assistive technology, I'll get me the whatever gen Alexa is out there, and a robot for Alexa to operate on my behalf. ("Alexa, have Robo fetch me a Biscoff Lotus cookie.")

For now, I'll do my info searches online, and fetch my Lotus cookies the old-fashioned way. Get up off the couch, walk into the kitchen, open the cabinet, and grab a couple of cookies.)

But that's just me, and I know that plenty of folks - some of whom I even know - do rely on Alexa.

And now we find out that, while Alexa might be fine for finding and playing George Strait's Amarillo by Morning, and for settling a bet about what film won the 1967 Oscar, it can actually be a misinformation engine. Which isn't such a good thing if the misinfo is about something important. (FYI: A Man for All Seasons won in 1967, and I'm assuming that Alexa would have provided the correct answer.)

As if we aren't already worried about AI, now there's this: 

Amid concerns the rise of artificial intelligence will supercharge the spread of misinformation comes a wild fabrication from a more prosaic source: Amazon’s Alexa, which declared that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. 

Asked about fraud in the race — in which President Biden defeated former president Donald Trump with 306 electoral college votes — the popular voice assistant said it was “stolen by a massive amount of election fraud,” citing Rumble, a video-streaming service favored by conservatives. 

The 2020 races were “notorious for many incidents of irregularities and indications pointing to electoral fraud taking place in major metro centers,” according to Alexa, referencing Substack, a subscription newsletter service. Alexa contended that Trump won Pennsylvania, citing “an Alexa answers contributor.”  (Source: Washington Post)

There is no - let me repeat that: NO - evidence of any fraud in the 2020 election. Authorities (and yes, there still is such a thing) have claimed that it may be the cleanest election we've ever held. Not to mention that virtually every instance of outright fraud I've heard of, like voting dead folks or double voting, produced an extra vote for DJT.

Spewing misinformation like this is truly frightening. 

Bad enough all the BS coming out of Fox (and worse: Newsmax et al.). Bad enough that Twitter has turned hard right and Mr. Musk himself is known to retweet complete and utter nonsense. Now, it's unfathomable that Alexa is adding lies, lies, and more lies to the mix.  

Yet here we have it:

Alexa disseminates misinformation about the race, even as parent company Amazon promotes the tool as a reliable election news source to more than 70 million estimated users.

Amazon declined to explain why its voice assistant draws 2020 election answers from unvetted sources.

A company spokesperson did say that these errors only went out a handful of times and were "quickly fixed."

After The Washington Post reached out to Amazon for comment, Alexa’s responses changed.

To questions The Post had flagged to the company, Alexa answered, “I’m sorry, I’m not able to answer that.” Other questions still prompt the device to say there was election fraud in 2020.

Ask the same question in a slightly different way and get the wrong answer? That's some fix. Not good. Not good at all. 

Voice assistants and advanced chatbots are only as accurate as the websites, news reports and other data they draw from across the web. These tools risk baking in and amplifying the falsehoods and biases present in their sources.

Easy enough to see the mayhem that could be caused by election misinformation. Not just continuing to spread the false narrative about the stolen election - the Big Lie - but, as the article goes on to mention, giving out false info on things like voting hours and polling places (which is something that bad actors - Republican operatives, in every instance I read of - were doing manually, via phone banking and handouts, in the 2020 election.)

Alexa, it sound like it's time for Amazon to start doing a better job of vetting sources. What are you going to do about it?

Has your duck gotten its flu shot yet?

A few weeks ago, I got my jab. Double jab, actually: next round of covid, annual flu.

What I did not get was vaccination against avian flu. That's because humans rarely get avian flu, and the humans who do come down with it have generally been up close and personal with birds. So avian flu vaccination? Strictly for the birds.

And among the birds it's for are the 64 million ducks of France. So France has embarked on a major campaign to get its extensive population of canards squared away. The initiative:

...aims to prevent the spread of a deadly variant of avian influenza that has forced French farmers to cull more than 30 million birds in the past three years, contributing to a downturn in the production of foie gras. (Source: NY Times)

64 million is an awful lot of ducks. It's almost the equivalent of France's human population. In contrast, the US has a bit over 30 million ducks, for a ratio of humans to ducks of over 10:1.

“A real glimmer of hope,” Éric Dumas, a duck farmer and the president of France’s foie gras federation, said in a statement after the agriculture minister, Marc Fesneau, visited his farm near Bordeaux to inaugurate the campaign.

The French government will be picking up most of the$80M euro ($84 USD) tab for the vaccination. That's beaucoup de sous, but:

That is a fraction of the more than a €1 billion the government paid in 2021 and 2022 to compensate farmers who had been required to cull their birds, according to a recent French parliamentary report.

I'm happy that the ducks will stay healthy, but I have mixed feelings about foie gras. (I'm no gastronome, but I will confess to having eaten it on occasion. I just don't love-love it, and don't tend to seek it out.):

Foie gras is the term for the liver of a duck or goose that has been fattened by forced feeding. For many the dish is a hallmark of French gastronomy; others say that the way it is produced constitutes torture and animal cruelty.

So, it's a pretty nasty business. (Side note: I associate foie gras with geese, not ducks, but there's greater than an order of magnitude more foie gras ducks than there are foie gras geese in France.)

One downside of the vaccination program - other than the fact that someone's (make that a lot of someones) is going to have to go to all these farms and inoculate 64 million ducks - is that, because the French ducks will be vaccinated, they won't be exportable to the U.S. Our Agriculture Department fears that symptoms of avian flu will be hidden as "vaccinated poultry may not show signs of bird flu, thus masking whether the virus is circulating."

But on the upside, there are concerns that, if it's not wiped out, "bird flu could mutate into a version that can be transmitted to humans." So by all means, vaccinate those ducks.

And it sounds like the US - even though we have nowhere near as many ducks as France does - might want to get on the vaccination stick here, too. 

But this would probably just bring even more anti-vaxxers out of the woodwork. 

Bonne chance to France! 

This is getting ridiculous

A few years ago, an issue in the Virginia gubernatorial race centered on Critical Race Theory and parents' rights to control what their kids were reading in school. The centerpiece on this issue was a mother whose son had apparently suffered greatly, nearly a decade earlier, by having to read Toni Morrison's Beloved for his AP English class. 

Beloved is disturbing. 

But if you're 18 years old and capable of taking AP English, and you get the vapors from reading Toni Morrison, then maybe you have no business taking AP English. Stick with Chemistry. Stick with Latin. 

Beloved, of course, appears frequently on banned book lists. So does her novel The Bluest Eye. So does The Diary of Anne Frank. And 1984. And Fahrenheit 451, which - oh, irony of ironies - is about book burning. 

But books that deal with LGBTQ+ issues are pretty much edging all other books out when it comes to getting banned. 

Thus we find ourselves (or at least would, if we lived in Alabama) at the point where this can happen:

“Read Me a Story, Stella” is a children’s picture book about a pair of siblings reading books together and building a doghouse. However, because the author’s name is Marie-Louise Gay, the book was added to a list of potentially “sexually explicit” books to be moved from the children’s section of the Huntsville-Madison County Public Library (HCPL) system. (Source: AL.com)

Talk about 'don't say gay.' If I were the type of coarse, non-refined lady who uses the sort of strong language that children under the age of 50 should never be exposed to, I'd say FFS. Or maybe WTF.

HCPL executive director Cindy Hewitt admitted “Read Me a Story, Stella” should not have been put on the list and was added because of the keyword “gay.”

“Obviously, we’re not going to touch that book for any reason,” Hewitt said...Hewitt insists there was never any intention to target the LGBTQ community. Instead, she was hoping to be “proactive instead of reactive.”

There were 232 other books "slated to be removed and potentially moved," so "Read Me a Story, Stella" was in good company.

It wasn't all LGBTQ topics that were on the chopping block. Another book earmarked for review is "The Hate U Give," which is about a Black kid who's killed by a cop. 

But of the 233 titles up for ban, 91 deal with LGBTQ+ topics. So those words about no "intention to target the LGBTQ community" ring a tad bit hollow.

Whether it's gay or Black or other themes that some people are objecting to - and I can't recall the details, but I read recently about some woman crusading against a book she hadn't bothered to read, but just knew in her heart of hearts, her mind of minds, was bad - the increasing number of books being banned is truly terrible.

No one's arguing that kindergartners should be exposed to porn, but by the time someone's in high school (maybe even junior high), there should be no books off limits for readers other than porn and violent trash that has no redeeming literary value. But what's porn? What's violent trash?

Guess I'm with Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who, way back in the 1960's, was asked about his litmus test for what constitutes pornography. Stewart famously answered "I know it when I see it."

On the other hand, while I trust my own judgment, do I want some prude-y smother-mother deciding that Beloved is too much for her sensitive 18 year-old to deal with, and, thus, should be banned from schools?

By all means, put the difficult reads in the adult section of the public library. But setting up a process where a book by an author named Gay can be swept up in a hunt for the ban-able is just ludicrous. 

FFS.

WTF.

Pets of a different color

When I think pets, I think dogs. 

I also acknowledge that there are plenty of folks who are cat lovers, so, pets also equal cats.

Widening the list, people have pet birds, pet fish, pet snakes, pet rats, pet gerbils, pet hamsters, pet turtles.

To each their very own pet choice.

So that goes for Marsi Darwin of Michigan who share her home with a chicken named Peanut.

Peanut was a complete and utter rescue.

Marsi and her husband Bill run a no-kill farm, and over 20 years ago, Marsi was about to toss what she thought was a rotten egg "into a pond for turtles to eat." Then to her wondering ears did appear but a teeny-tiny little peep. 

“I heard a second chirp, and I realized that the chick was alive and didn’t seem to have an egg tooth to get out of its shell,” she said, referring to the part of the beak a chick uses to crack open the egg from the inside.

Darwin looked closely and saw a tiny, barely visible crack, so she decided to give the chick a little help.

“I gently peeled her out of the egg, and there was this wet little mess, sitting in my hand,” she recalled. (Source: Washington Post)

The chick's mother wouldn't take her back, so Darwin decide to raise it, naming her Peanut because she was something of a runt. And all those years after Peanut's fortuitous chirp, 

...the bantam hen [now 21] is now earning recognition: Guinness World Records has named her the world’s oldest living chicken.

“The average chicken lives five to eight years, so it’s quite the achievement,” said Darwin.

I believe that this average chicken life refers to layers, not broilers and fryers. Most of them live - at best (at worst?) - a scant couple of months in the factory before heading off to their demise. In any case, Peanut has lived a mighty fine life, pet-wise, right down to the blueberry yogurt she gets for breakfast each day and the TV watching she does while snuggling up to Marsi. (She - Peanut, not Marsi - did spend a number of years living a relatively normal chicken life as a layer, but she made her way back into the house a while back and has never left.)

And now she's (Peanut, not Marsi) a record holder, the Darwins now aiming her toward breaking the Guinness record as the oldest chicken ever. That would be Muffy, who died in 2011 at the ripe old chicken age of 23 and a half years of age. Peanut, meanwhile, is the subject of a kids' book that Marsi (a retired librarian) has written:

“I hope to share Peanut’s message that even if you’re rejected or might feel like a misfit, you can still find someone to bond with and have a long, productive life,” she [Marsi, not Peanut] said.

These are still words to live by, but I still can't imagine bonding with a chicken.

I can't imagine bonding with a bull, either. But out in Nebraska, Lee Meyer not on only bonds with Howdy Doody, a Watusi-longhorn steer, but he (Meyer, not Howdy Doody) has even modified his car - an old Crown Vic police ve-HIC-le - so that Howdy Doody can ride shotgun. 

Meyer's says that his gentle giant, although weighing a literal ton, is more dog-like than raging-bull like:

Howdy Doody enjoys going on walks on a leash, getting treats and, yes, feeling the wind rush past his face when they go on rides. Howdy Doody also knows some commands, such as “back up” and “come here.” (Source: Washington Post)

And while Peanut likes her blueberry yogurt, Howdy Doody's special treat is ice cream.

“Howdy Doody is probably the most spoiled steer in all of northeastern Nebraska,” said Meyer’s wife, Rhonda.

The steer is something of a Nebraska celebrity, appearing in local parades.  And now that a video of a recent car ride has gone viral - with millions of views - his renown has gone international.

Meyer, by the way, didn't start out to be a rancher, or a bull chauffeur, for that matter. He's a retired machinist who got Howdy Doody, along with another longhorn and a half-dozen bison, so he'd have something to do in his retirement.

Bantam hen. Longhorn steer. Pets of a different color. To each their own. That said, Grace O'Malley - my brother Tom's sweet puppy - is my idea of a pet:

Pop-Tart Taste Tester? Who knew?

It doesn't seem like the type of item my mother would have fallen for. She was a scratch cook and baker, and a big believer in a hearty breakfast. Sure, sometimes we had dry cereal with fruit, but mostly it was bacon and eggs, pancakes and bacon, oatmeal with raisins. 

Plus my mother never fell for advertising. Nor did she ever fall for her kids begging and whining for something we'd seen advertised. Pffftttt to that. So what if Buffalo Bob Smith wanted us to buy something? So what if everyone else in Worcester had their hands and greedy little mouths on something?We were not, as my parents repeatedly reminded us, not everyone else. 

But she did, on occasion, buy Pop-Tarts.

Pop-Tarts came out in 1964, when I was in high school, and I remember loving them. 

I'm pretty sure the flavor was strawberry, and while the filling tasted nothing like strawberry, I thought they were just delish. 

It was even worth burning your tongue on when they popped out of the toaster and you took that first luscious, 'licious bite.  

Maybe I bought them when I was in college, but I have zero recall of actually going to a grocery store and throwing a package of Pop-Tarts in my cart. So I didn't like them all that much.

And now it's been decades since I had a Pop-Tart. And when last I had one, I came away with the realization that it tasted like a thin cardboard sandwich with some sort of non-descript sweet paste filling. 

Anyway, as I learned from an article I saw a few weeks back in the New York Times, despite my non-patronage, Pop-Tarts have managed to stay the course. Next year, Kellogg's will celebrate their 60th anniversary. And last year, despite my non-patronage:

...more than two billion were sold, according to the company. They’ve been depicted on art murals, exhibited in museums and parodied on “Saturday Night Live.” (Source: NY Times)

The article was written by Laura Holson and, while she did include a bit of Pop-Tart history - including the gem that Kellogg's had considered calling them "fruit scones" - her primary focus was on her family's experience as Pop-Tart taste testers.

There are, of course, taste testers for everything. 

It's just that you never think of it as something that a family would participate in. Oh, I guess it makes more sense than having a bunch of quasi-scientists in white coats munching and crunching, and jotting their observations on clipboards. Having a family try a foodstuff aimed squarely at kids sure makes sense. And if you're going to have a taste-tester family, why not one with eight kids, which the Holsons had. 

Holson has no idea how her family was chosen. She was just a kindergartner the year her family was enlisted to try out new flavors. She surmises that her mother answered an ad, figuring it would help her out with the food bills. 

To me and my siblings, Pop-Tarts were exotic. We were raised in a small agricultural community in the shadow of California’s Santa Cruz Mountains and got most of our food from the farms and dairies that dotted the outskirts of town. Processed food was rare in our house, and store-bought sweets rarer still, as it was cheaper to bake dozens of homemade cookies on a Sunday to be divvied up during the week.

Sounds familiar, other than that my mother baked almost every day, not just on Sundays. And we were in Worcester, not the Santa Cruz Mountains.  

The Pop-Tarts were delivered to our door in a cardboard box about the size of a footstool, with nothing on the outside to indicate flavor, frosting or even that it was from Kellogg’s. The individual packages inside were marked with only a number.

...One sister recalls that our father locked the Pop-Tarts in the basement for safekeeping. This makes sense. Food left unattended in a big family tends to disappear quickly, and my parents guarded the Pop-Tarts the way Harry Winston watches over its diamonds on Oscar night.

...On tasting nights [the Holsons didn't treat them as a breakfast food]. we would gather around the kitchen table after dinner. Then my father would appear with the box of Pop-Tarts and place it gently on the counter with the same care he laid baby Jesus in the crèche on Christmas Eve. My mother would tear open the bags and dole out one Pop-Tart apiece. She did not toast them (which is kind of the point, isn’t it?), and the flavor was kept secret until the big reveal.

After every did that taste test, their mother would ask them questions about their reactions, and then the kids would fill out forms, giving the Pop-Tarts grades for attributes like taste and texture. 

We were good students and took our job seriously, considering our appraisals with the same thoughtfulness as a “Top Chef” judge. In our minds, at least, this was important work. I may be exaggerating here, but if you like Frosted Strawberry or Frosted Brown Sugar Cinnamon — two of Kellogg’s best-selling flavors — you may have our family to thank.

It's interesting to note that none of the Holson sibs are current Pop-Tart eaters. Growing up will do that to you. 

Me? I would have been thrilled if our family had been Pop-Tart taste testers, or taste testers for other items, as long as it wasn't something yucky like creamed corn. And ultra-proud. I was even proud when I read that WORC, Worcester's rock 'n roll station, was often the test market for new records, as "our" teenagers were apparently a good proxy for kids nationwide. It's claimed that WORC was the first station to play a Beatles song. (Snob that I was/am, by the time I was in high school, I had graduated from listening to WORC to tuning into WBZ in Boston, the Top 40 station that was considered cooler and more sophisticated than anything in Worcester. 

The only family I knew of who came close to the Pop-Tart tasters was that of a guy I used to work with. His mother was a location finder for an advertising agency, and his family's kitchen was used for some of the Jell-o pudding ads with Bill Cosby. 

But Pop-Tart taste tester? Who knew?

Doesn't sound all that passive to me

I live in an old building, built in the early 1860's. My condo is in a tacked on back wing, but it's no youngster. It was constructed in 1918. What is now my kitchen was a porch that was converted around 1980. 

It is not the most energy efficient building in the world, that's for sure, but it's solidly built. My heating/cooling is provided by a heat pump, a comparatively efficient method. Which is not to say that I don't have my moments. Last winter, when we had a nasty, brutish, but blessedly short cold snap, I had to set the temp to 72 to get it to keep things at 65 degrees. Brrrr. And a few years aback, after a prolonged but not so nasty and brutish cold spell, I had a monthly electric bill for $900. Grrrr. 

Other than in my greenhouse kitchen, I have shades/blinds on all my windows, which helps keep things pretty well regulated. And in my kitchen, I replaced some of the windows a few years ago and the change in winter warmth was remarkable.

All in all, I keep my home comfortable. I like to sleep cool, and I don't mind sitting around with a fleece and/or a shroud thrown over my shoulders. (Good practice for the (hopefully) moderately distant future.)

Back in my working days, I don't recall the environment being particularly comfortable/uncomfortable one way or the other - other that there tended to be thermostat battles between the men and women, as the men in suit jackets - ah, those were the days - wanted it super-chilly in the summer, and chillier than comfortable in the winter.  Sure, sometimes we had suit jackets on, too. But we also wore dresses, and skirts or slacks and blouses. I don't know any woman who didn't keep a sweater or two in her desk drawer to toss on when it was too damned cold. 

I'm sure that there are still raging thermostat battles. Even if men aren't suited up, men in general prefer it cooler indoors than do women.

But I wonder how those battles will play out in Passive Buildings.

Passive Buildings?

I never heard of it, either, until I saw an article on a new mixed use building (residential and office):

...in downtown Boston has become the largest “passive house” office space in the world, according to the Passive House Institute in Germany.

The 812,000 square-foot Winthrop Center office space passed multiple tests to ensure walls and windows insulate the building efficiently. The insulation and air-tightness are the main reasons the building uses 65% less energy to heat and cool compared to similar buildings. (Source: WBUR)

Winthrop Center is the silvery skyscraper - at 53 stories, a skyscraper by Boston standards, anyway - in the picture. (Personal aside: to the right, the reddish building is the Bank of America which is where, when it was the First National Bank of Boston, I met my husband.)

I'd never heard of passive buildings. Using 65% less energy sounds anything but passive. 

What's meant by passive is that a building is heated by passive means, such as collecting solar heat, rather than conventional "active" means, like the big old furnace in the basement. 

Oddly, it's only the office floors on the building that are certified as passive, not the residential floors. Not sure why that would be the case, other than that construction costs for passive buildings are higher than conventional new builds. But it seems odd, as a) everyone wants to be more energy efficient; and b) anyone who'll be living in the Winthrop Center is pretty darned well off.  Maybe the residential side will be certified passive at a later date. 

Anyway, this is a quibble. One of the big deals about the Winthrop Center Passive House office is the scale it's been implemented on. Passive Houses are usually just that: houses. Not big buildings. 

“It is an example for many other developers on how to do this, and it can be done,” said Rebecca Tepper, Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs secretary.

“We now have an opt-in specialized stretch code and we have many towns who have opted in. That's going to result in more and more buildings and houses like this,” she said.

In the city of Boston, buildings account for 70% of all carbon emissions. (In Massachusetts, they account for 30%.) So, yay, for trying to cut that down.

May all new builds follow the Winthrop Center model.

The problem here is that we have a lot of old buildings. And my neighborhood (Beacon Hill) is especially old. My block has had some gut renos over the last decade, but all those gut jobs were of buildings that went up in the 1860's when mine did. The only "new build" that comes to mind is the River House, a "modern" apartment building on Pinckney Street that, if I've got this right, is about 70 years old. 

Wonder what it would cost to retrofit this old house??? 

Something tells me this fellow isn't cut out to be a spy

A few weeks ago, a tweet from Pete Strzok came across my Twitter timeline. (Pete is a former FBI agent whose anti-Trump text exchanges with FBI lawyer Lisa Page, while the two were carrying on an affair, became a matter of great notoriety. The two became frequent targets of Trump's tweeting wrath, and he still goes after them now and again. Drummed out of the FBI, Pete now writes, teaches at Georgetown, and frequently shows up on MSNBC. His voice is quite similar to that of another Peter: Buttigieg. Although Pete B is cuter, they even vaguely resemble each other. For the record, I'm a fan of both.)

Anyway, Pete tweeted: Hard to envision more inculpatory evidence.  This comment was followed by a screen shot of an excerpt from a Department of Justice filing outlining charges against former U.S. Army Sergeant Joseph Schmidt.  

Schmidt's google searches and click throughs included "chinese consulate" "soldier defect" and "can you be indicted for treason" 

Pete's next tweet, Oh Wait, was accompanied by another highlighted screen shot from the filing:

Oh Wait is right. 

In early October, Schmidt was arrested after deplaning a flight from Hong Kong to San Francisco. He's been indicted for "retention of an attempt to deliver national defense information," and is facing 10 years in prison and a hefty fine for each charge.

Schmidt, who is 29, left the military in 2020: 

During a trip to Istanbul the same month he left  military, Schmidt made nearly 30 Google searches related to defection and spilling military secrets, ranging from “countries with most negative relations with US” to “what is China’s intelligence agency?” and “soldier defect,” according to an FBI investigative report.

Other search terms included “subreddit spying” and “looking for a subreddit about spy stuff.”

Schmidt also queried Google Maps for driving directions from Beijing’s airport to the headquarters of China’s Ministry of State Security, which has a similar role to the CIA.

On Feb. 24, 2020, Schmidt sent a message to the Chinese Consulate in Istanbul requesting a meeting, calling himself a United States citizen looking to move to China.”

“I also am trying to share information I learned during my career as an interrogator with the Chinese government,” he wrote.

“I have a current top-secret clearance, and would like to talk to someone from the Government to share this information with you if that is possible.” (Source: NY Post)

All that's missing is evidence of Schmidt using Maxwell Smart's shoe phone to call information for Xi Jinping's number.

While in the Army, Schmidt led an intelligence squad, which apparently didn't have intelligence as a job requirement.

But Schmidt, in reaching out to the Chinese consulate, does claim that he was trained in interrogation techniques, that he'd been a spy handler, and that he had training in "surveillance detection and other advanced psychological operation strategies."

He also mentioned that he wanted to meet someone face to face to spill the spy tea because he was concerned that using email might not be all that secure.

Guess not. 

While he was trying to pique Chinese internet, Schmidt continue googling, searching for "What Do Real Spies Do and How are they Recruited."

For starters, ex-Army Sgt. Joseph Schmidt, real spies don't make incriminating online searches. 

Nor do they stuff info into a doc titled "High Level Secrets," which I guess was a companion piece to "Important Information to Share with Chinese Government."

I'm all for giving files clear names so that you know what's in them without having to opening them, but, sheesh. Guess this guy never heard the word "discretion."

Unfortunately for Schmidt, he separated from the service just as the pandemic was starting, so couldn't find the job of his dreams which was, I guess, spy. Or failing that, find any old job in China where he could keep trying to achieve his goal.

Schmidt also tried to get a Chinese ID card firm to "reverse engineer” a smart card used to access the US military’s internal intelligence network “where top secret documents and information are kept.” In approaching the firm, Schmidt touted his card as "very rare" and guaranteed to help the Chinese access U.S. defense information systems.

Head's up professional that he was, he also ginned up a 28-slide PowerPoint preso that included classified info. 

After eventually securing a work permit to stay in Hong Kong, Schmidt had written to his sister that he was disenchanted with U.S. policy and was never coming back home. 

“I don’t talk about it often, but I learned some really terrible things about the American government while I was working in the Army, and I no longer feel safe living in America,” he wrote, according to the report.

Not saying that the American government hasn't done some terrible things, but how is it that Schmidt wasn't familiar with the government of China?

No word on why Schmidt had decided to come in from the cold and return to America, but it looks like his visit might end up a good long one, and be mostly behind bars. 

Maybe he'll learn a useful skill in prison. He clearly didn't learn much about spying from his time in Army intelligence. 

Come on and zooma, zooma, zooma zoom

Remember the truly prehistoric days of conferencing?

You sat around the conference table staring at the Polycom SoundStation - which looked like some sort of supersonic drone - while the person setting up the con call - generally an admin, back in the days when there were admins -  tried several times to get things to work and then, each time there was a "ping," had to ask "Who just joined?"

During the conference, the person running the meeting had to keep asking those attending remotely whether they had anything to say.

While the meeting was in full swing, there was always at least one incident of background noise, often one of the folks on the phone having a convo with someone who wasn't in the meeting. And we'd all have to yell "turn on your mute."

Back in the day when we were Polycoming, I worked for a company that was meeting-mad. You could literally run from one meeting to the next from 7:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. It felt like high school, minus the bells on five-minutes before the hour. You picked up your notebook (paper based), a phone the size of a walkie-talkie, and your PDA and marched down the corridor to your next meeting.

Because we had people all over the map, meetings frequently involved remote folks. But sometimes, even those who were in our building chose to call in to a meeting. 

One notorious in-the-building caller-in was a colleague named Sam who would be loudly thumping away on this desktop throughout the meeting, while we all kept reminding him to stop typing or turn on mute. 

Anyway, those audio-only meeting systems weren't great. Remote people never really felt that they were part of it. And the worst thing about having them was that, all of sudden, there was an expectation that, even if you were on vacation, you could call into an "important" (as if!) meeting. 

And then there were video conferencing systems.

Sure, they'd been around forever - when they'd been low function and high cost - but, with the Internet, they came up in function and down in cost.

I can't remember the name of the first video conferencing system I ever used - PictureTel, maybe - but I do remember that the latency was terrible, with lots of juddering jittering. 

Time marched on, and there were any number of new and improved video conferencing systems, the most prominent being WebEx.

Not that WebEx didn't have some competition. In fact, I did some marketing consulting for one of them, a small software company in NY State, run by a bunch of genius emigres from Poland who had created a highly secure system used by the defense department, and who were now trying to commercialize it. The Polish geniuses were great, but unfortunately you needed to be a genius (just not a Polish one) to understand how to use the product. But we had us some fun. 

Blessedly, I rarely ever had to use their system. But while most folks used WebEx, there were enough other systems out there that I'd run into. And have to learn a new UI: where's the mute? how do I chat? 

And then there was Zoom.

Was there Zoom before covid? I'm too lazy to look it up, but once covid hit, Zoom was everywhere. 

That first Covid Christmas, I hosted a smaller-than-usual Christmas Eve for family, and spent Christmas Day zooming with friends in Dallas, and friends in Maine. 

The first year or so of covid, I was still working - very part time, but pretty regularly - and client meetings were all zoomed, even with local clients where I used to go in.

My writing groups started to meet on zoom. Board meetings at St. Francis House were zoomed as well. 

Throughout that first scary, pre-vaccine year, I zoomed with family and friends. 

And people pretty much got used to it.

These days, I'm only in one writing group, which is hybrid. It meets just up the street at the Boston Athenaeum, so I go in person. But more than half the members zoom in. I would definitely prefer fully in-person sessions, but time marches on.

These days, I only have one client, and we never meet. So I don't zoom with them.

These days, I'm off the St. Francis House board, and I volunteer on site, up close and personal. But I'm active in another nonprofit and we meet every couple of weeks via Zoom.

These days, I mostly see friends and family in person. Thankfully. (Although we're more likely to phone, I occasionally zoom with remote f&f. We know what each other look like, plus most of those calls are one on one.)

The pandemic was very good for Zoom.

Zoom enabled millions of people to do their jobs, take classes and socialize remotely during the height of the pandemic. (Source: Washington Post)

No surprise that among those millions of homeworkers were Zoom's employees.  

But in recent months, the company joins a growing number of tech companies that have told employees to return to the office after promoting flexible and remote policies. Companies say office work increases collaboration, a sense of culture and ultimately promotes collaboration and innovation. Some executives have even threatened termination for employees who don’t follow the new policies. But many workers are pushing back on the office policies with some going as far as quitting their jobs over the change.

Zoom calls its plan a “structured hybrid” policy, which requires employees who live in a 50 mile radius of an office to return two days a week. The two days are determined by each team. But Zoom said even with the policy in place, 65 percent of workers are still remote because many don’t live near an office. The company also said it’s not focused on how it plans to enforce the policy, rather it’s dealing with employee issues on a case-by-case basis.

I'm with Zoom on hybrid. If I were working, I'd have preferred a 3 office/2 home model, but anything that gives employees some flexibility - and release from the burden of onerous commuting - would be just fine. And I say this even though, as a city girl, I see what happens to downtowns when there are fewer workers coming in everyday. Shops and restaurants that relied on those workers go out of business. And that's in Boston, which hasn't been as ghost-towned as some other cities. 

Zoom says that it will continue to try to make accommodations for those who can't/won't come into the office at all. 

And some folks are definitely aggrieved by the back-to-the-office mandates. 

My guess is that employees who are the most highly valued, the most highly productive, will be cut plenty of slack, as well as those with disabilities that just plain make it easier to work remotely, while others may have to just suck it up and come in as required.

It'll be interested to see how this works out over the next few years. 

I'll be watching remotely...

Have yourself a merry little Samhain

Well, I'm in Ireland, which is definitely appropriate, since this is where Halloween was invented. Other than knowing that the Irish pretty much came up with Halloween, and that the holiday's roots were in pagan Celtic festivals, I wasn't all that up on the subject. 

Fortunately, I found a handy-dandy 2021 blog post from Heather Thomas at the Library of Congress that pretty much filled in all the gaps in my knowledge.

First off, what became Halloween started out as Samhain (that's saw-win to yez), "a pagan religious celebration to welcome the harvest at the end of summer, when people would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off ghosts."

In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III landed on November 1 as a day to honor saints. Not sure whether Pope G was aware of Samhain, but, thanks to St. Patrick et al., Christianity had long since come to Ireland. And, of course, the Church always liked to established holy days to coincide with pagan-based celebrations. And, of course, some of the traditions of those pagan-based celebrations were incorporated into the religious holy days. (Christmas trees, Easter eggs). 

With All Saints' Day observed on November 1, it was just natural to get something going on it's eve. That would be All Hallows Eve, which over time saw its pronunciation mushed into Halloween. 

And naturally some pagan-based traditions made their way in.

Carving Jack-o-Lanterns came from Ireland, but originally what was carved was a turnip, not a pumpkin. I'm all for carving turnips and taking them out of the food chain, but pumpkins actually look better. Anyway, the tradition:

...is allegedly based on a legend about a man named Stingy Jack who repeatedly trapped the Devil and only let him go on the condition that Jack would never go to Hell. But when Jack died, he learned that Heaven did not want his soul either, so he was forced to wander the Earth as a ghost for eternity. The Devil gave Jack a burning lump of coal in a carved-out turnip to light his way. Locals eventually began carving scary faces into their own turnips to frighten away evil spirits.

Ghosts are associated Samhain, as the "Celtic people believed that during the festival, spirits walked the Earth." Eventually, the Christian holiday expanded into All Souls' Day on November 2nd. All Souls' Day - unlike All Saints' Day - never turned into a holy day of obligation. So it wasn't a day off for parochial schools. We did, blessedly, have November 1st off, giving us plenty of time - after we hit an early Mass - to loll around sorting through our trick or treat candy troves.

Costume-wearing began as scary costumes, as, during Samhain, folks wanted to disguise themselves so they wouldn't be taken for ghosts. Scary costumes are still donned, but so are non-scary costumes like Elsa and Elmo. 

There are competing versions of how trick-or-treating came about. It may have come from Samhain, when the Celts "would leave food out to appease the spirits traveling the Earth at night," which morphed into people who decided that it wasn't all that bad to get themselves dressed up as a spirit if they could get some of that food (or drink). 

Another theory of the case is that trick-or-treating came from the Scottish tradition of souling, which had kids and poor adults going from home to home asking for food and money in exchange for praying for departed souls on All Souls' Day. This was eventually replaced by guising, with prayers dropped out and "tricks" (including songs and jokes) dropped in.

A third theory takes us from Ireland and Scotland to America, where some argue that trick-or-treating was brought to us by German-Americans, via their "belsnickeling" practice, a "Christmas tradition where children would dress in costume and then call on their neighbors to see if the adults could guess the identities of the disguised." The kiddos who fooled the grown ups were given a treat. 

I'm a bit skeptical here. As a half-German-American, I've never heard of "belsnickeling," and I'm pretty sure that if this had been a real thing, my German-American mother (who knew everything about everything) would have mentioned it when we were telling her that the Irish invented Halloween.

Thanks to the Celts, black and orange are Halloween's signature colors because "black represented the 'death' of summer while the orange symbolized the autumn harvest season." Makes sense to me. 

Unlike bobbing for apples, which never made much sense to me. Too high a degree of difficulty for too little a payoff. Turns out the bobbing for apples comes from an old Roman courting ritual associated with a festival in honor of Pomona. The timing for the Pomona celebration roughly coincided with Samhain, so when the Romans showed up in ancient times, bobbing for apples became a thing. 

Beggars' Eve (October 30th), which I guess is known in most places as Mischief or Devil's Night, is when - back in my day - boys who thought they were too old for Halloween went out and soaped car windows and TP'd trees. This tradition came to America with Irish and Scottish immigrants. 

Giving out candy on Halloween is mostly a product of post-war candy companies encouraging the practice. Prior to that, "fruit, nuts, coins, and toys were just as likely to be given out."  

Most houses of my childhood were definitely on the candy end of the give outs - thankfully. But one couple ("old folks", Irish immigrants) gave out apples. (Yawn! I could get an apple by opening the fridge.) One family gave out popcorn balls wrapped in orange or black cellophane, another - the father had a Continental Baking route - gave out Hostess Snowballs. And two families where the fathers worked for pharma gave out little plastic ball-bearing puzzles that were giveaways for some company they repped for.)

When I think Halloween, I, of course, think candy corn, which was invented in the US of A. I know it's terrible, but I really do have to have some. I couldn't count on it being available in Dublin, so I smuggled some in.

Happy Samhain! (And thank you, Heather Thomas.)

Rent a mom??? O tempora, o mores...

I didn't have kids, and, although I once was one, that was a very, very, very long time ago. And, as I learned in Latin III, which I took a very, very, very long time ago - when I was, in fact, a kid - O tempora! O mores! Which is Cicero for the times and the customs, they are always a-changing. 

We observe them a-changing is many different ways, including the emergence of new businesses that didn't exist when I was young. Influencer, anyone?

One of them new businesses is actually not that new.

In fact, Tammy Kumin founded her rent-a-mom company, Concierge Services for Students, in 1993. Which is snack dab in the middle of the era when, if I had had kids, I would have had kids. Of course, if I had had kids, I like to think that they wouldn't have needed a rent-a-mom: they would have had me. And I like to think that my kids, by the time they were old enough to be away at school, would have been skilled enough to make their own damned haircut appointments and done their own damned grocery shopping. 

But, since she's been in business now for 30 years, Tammy Kumin obviously identified a need and has been successfully fulfilling it for a good long time. 

When Kumin's business got off the ground, it was focused primarily on international students, where having someone in loco parentis for their kiddo - especially if they're away for pre-college, does make sense. (In loco parentis? Between this and a bit of Cicero, that high school Latin is sure coming in handy!) 

And, of course, if you're not handy, it might be worth it to have someone available to jump "on a plane in the wee hours to bail" your kiddo "out of a Miami jail," or hold your kid's hand in the ER. Even at the cost of $10K a year. 

But most of what Kumin and her staff of four rent-a-moms do is a bit more pedestrian than posting bail or helping a kid with an ER visit. 

For their money, parents can depend on their away-from-home offspring receiving regular food deliveries, academic assistance, beauty and spa appointments bookings, aid in making dinner reservations and signing up for gym memberships, apartment hunting, furniture building, party planning, doctor referrals, summer storage, as well as banking and bill payment support — just to name a few. (Source: NY Post)

Food deliveries? Spa appointments? Dinner rezzies? Party planning? 

FFS. I don't care whether these kids are high school or college age, shouldn't they be able to make their own dinner reservations?

“There are all kinds of things that come up for kids who are studying away from home,” said Kumin. “We’re there for them and they know it. They’re totally comfortable to let us know what they need — all five of us — we all know exactly what’s going on with each kid, how they live, their families, everything.”

However, her job isn’t to replace a young adult’s mom. Instead, she says she’s merely an extension of their mother’s love.

My mother loved me. I loved my mother. But, once I left home for college, there was no way in hell that I would have expected her to run my errands for me. In fact, when I was a kid, it was the kids who ran errands for their parents. Which is how we learned how to do things. 

When I was in first grade, I remember being sent down the block to buy light bulbs at the electric repair shop. Two years later, when I was eight and old enough to cross Main Street, I was frequently dispatched to the grocery store to pick up an onion or whatever else my mother found herself in need of. At 10, I was going door-to-door on a snowy February afternoon, collecting money for the Heart Fund - which was something my mother had signed up for. And so on and so forth. 

Given my family circumstances - my father suffered from kidney disease throughout my high school and college years, and died during my senior year in college - I probably had more responsibility than a lot of other kids my age. But everyone I knew growing up learned how to do plenty of things on their own.

Childhood to adolescence includes - or should include - a progression of learning how to take care of tasks that, once you've mastered them, put you well on the way to responsible adulthood. 

I am literally chortling out loud at the thought of being away at college and asking my real mother, let alone a rent-a-mom, to run out to the grocery store for a can of soup because I hated what they'd served for dinner in the cafeteria.

I understand that Kumin's service provides more, and that she does provide comfort and joy - even home-cooked meals at Kumin's house - to kids away from home, especially international students.

But then there's the 18 year old kid from New York whose family paid for her services:

“If I was homesick or needed a haircut or a point of comfort, and my parents were four hours away in New York, Tammy was there in 15 minutes,” said the high school senior. 

"Needed a haircut." Res ipsa loquitur.

I guess the good news is that this kid has aged out of the services and is now able to take care of things like haircuts on his very own own.

I paid a visit to Kumin's website, and here's what they have to say for themselves:

Sending your child off to school in a different country or state is emotional along with stressful. CSS is here to take the burden of your worries off your shoulders by offering a comprehensive concierge service for students. From pre-prep to post graduates our experienced staff will handle all aspects of getting your student settled into their home-away from home. Our team will available to your student 24 hours a day 7 days a week in case of emergencies from medical appointments to trouble on campus. 

I get the "in case of emergencies," especially if parents are far away. But then there's the list of the services her company provides:

PERSONAL SERVICES
Laundry/Dry Cleaning
Grocery Shopping
Food Deliveries
Dinner Reservations
Beauty/Spa Appointments
Gym Memberships
Car Services
Doctor Referrals
Hospital Assistance
Party Planning
Package Services
Travel Arrangements
Summer Storage
Banking, Bill Payment, and Insurance
Legal
Transportation

I'll give them that Doctor Referrals, Hospital Assistance, Summer Storage, and Legal. Even Banking, Bill Payment, and Insurance. These are things that parents might want the rent-a-moms to assist with, especially for high school and "pre-prep" kids, even college and older if the families are overseas, although in the digital age, most of these transactions can be handled remotely. 

But I really draw the line at items like Party Planning and Grocery Shopping. 

These aren't rent-a-mom tasks. I can't think of one mother I know who'd be doing this for their college-aged kids. (Okay, if your child is sick, you might hop on line and order groceries for them. Wait. I take that back. If your kid's too sick to place an online grocery order, they probably should be in the infirmary or at home.)

No, most of these don't require a mom's involvement - rent-a-mom or real mom. They're tasks that someone who's rich and spoiled would have someone else take care of for them.

There are no Latin words that come to me now. Just oy!

Oh, dear. You don't know whether to laugh or cry.

When I first read this story, a month or so ago, my first reaction was Dr. Yuck. 

Sure, Scott Burke is a retired physician, but who wants to find out they'd ever had anything to do with a doctor who was involved in a sordid sex, drugs, and rock and roll guns situation on his par-tay boat, which was docked in Nantucket Harbor. (Not that  amything unusual about sex and drugs on Nantucket. But I'm guessing that the sex doesn't usually include making porn films. And guns? Definitely not what I imagine would be the jam of the toffs on Nantucket.)

In early September, Nantucket police got a call from a guy saying that he believed a friend of his (a 33-year-old woman) had OD'd on the good ship JessConn (a yacht out of the

Caymans, by way of Key Largo). The fellow had been FaceTiming with his friend, who told him that she was on a boat where they were shooting porn videos and doing drugs a-plenty. Then the FaceTime session - or maybe it was the young woman - blacked out. 

So, a call to the cops. 

They found the woman "awake but extremely lethargic" and took her to the hospital. They also found a handgun, a bag full of cocaine, and "two clear packages containing 'multiple blue pills." Multiple blue pills? Well, those could have been entirely innocent. Or not.

Overall:

After receiving a search warrant, investigators seized a number of items from the yacht, including more than 43 grams of cocaine and 14 grams of ketamine, $2,300 in cash, two guns and ammunition, and a pair of priority overnight FedEx envelopes, according to court papers. (Source: Boston Globe)

As far as I know, there's nothing illegal about being in possession of FedEx envies. For all we know it contained nothing more than those little blue pills. The innocent ones.

Burke was arrested.

At the police station, he told investigators the woman “was an employee of the boat” who was hired three to four weeks earlier, the affidavit said. He said a second woman had been staying on the vessel and that she had been drinking and taking Adderall.

“Burke also denied any knowledge of any illegal narcotics on the yacht,” police said.

At a hearing, Burke's attorney said that, just prior to his arrest, Burke had entertained more than a dozen guests on his boat, some of them who were guests of crew members. The crew members had taken off to go to the wedding, and the lethargic woman - a friend of a crew member - wasn't heading to the wedding, so asked to stay on board.  

It was a "'disgruntled ex-boyfriend'" who called the police and triggered the search. 

Anyway, the charges against the good doctor are pretty harsh:

Burke is charged with cocaine trafficking, possession to distribute ketamine, illegal gun possession, and possession of a large capacity feeding device, records show. (Source: Boston Globe)

Oh, and woman on board - and a couple others - may have been working girls, and may or may not have been involved in the porn video making.

Overall, the story was so sordid, so yucky, that I got the creeps at the thought of Scott Anthony Burke as someone's doctor, even if he had retired from practice. (Not that I harbor any fantasy that having MD after your name confers goodness or nobility on anyone. I've read plenty about doctors who are also criminals. Just recently, there was news about a local rheumatologist who'd been giving female patients uncalled for pelvic and breast exams for years. And the last time I hero-worshipped a doctor was at age 12, when I was in love with Dr. Kildare.)

Still, the thought of such a louche character being a doctor. Well, yuck.

But Burke - who last I looked was out on bail - has a highly-regarded past at odds with any current debauchery.

In court, [attorney Hank] Brennan said Burke was a successful surgeon for 35 years and described him as a “humanitarian” who has traveled to Haiti and Rwanda to provide medical services to people in need. Brennan said his client has given “an enormous portion” of his wealth away through donations to colleges and scholarship programs.

“There is a lifetime history of a humanitarian nature that shows the character of this man,” Brennan said.

Well, what's a defense attorney going to say? So there's that.

But there's nothing in Burke's past to suggest that he'd end up a drug-running, gun-toting, porn-maker. And it's hard to think of someone traveling to hellholes like Haiti and Rwanda to help out people who are profoundly suffering being a total scumbag. (Am I being naive here? It just seems so at odds.)

Oh, he did move out of direct humanitarian work to go into business, having founded an insurance company that's involved with helping the un- and underinsured pay for healthcare if they've been injured in a car accident. Admittedly, this sounds a bit ambulance chasing, but it's not illegal. (Burke is no longer involved in the company, but both of his children - the Jessica and Connor of JessConn name/fame - do work there. Both of them seem entirely reputable, at least according to LinkedIn.)

But wait, there's more.

[Attorney Hank] Brennan said Burke, a divorced father of two adult children, is suffering from late-stage cancer and likely won’t live long enough to see the case resolved.

Burke takes medication and meets regularly with a Miami doctor, but “it is conceded that he will not survive,” Brennan said. (Source: Yet another Boston Globe story)

Yesterday, I wrote about mega-billionaires who want to live for ever.

Maybe only-a-millionaire Dr. Burke just wants to play out his string by indulging in carnality. 

People react to their impending death in different ways. 

A few days before he died, I overhead my husband on the phone canceling a credit card. He was explaining why he was canceling the card: "I'm going to be dead pretty soon, and I don't want my wife to have to deal with this." (Of course, Jim didn't have access to a yacht...)

Maybe Burke has always been a creep. But maybe he's just mad as hell that he's dying at the age of 69 and is all about the last ditch fantasies. 

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. 

Fame! I gonna live forever! Baby, remember my name!

Ask me when the time comes, but I really have no desire to live forever.

Sure, I'd like to be around long enough to see how a few things turn out (including, I must admit, my own life). And I'm not in any hurry to exit stage left, thank you. 

But I'm pretty sure there'll come a point when I'm worn out, slowed down, and fed up. And when that time comes, I hope that I'll bow out gracefully - or with as much grace as someone who's worn out, slowed down, and fed up can muster. 

This is, of course, just me, and I'm sure there are many folks out there who'll be fighting loose and wobbly tooth, and split and pitted nail, to stay above ground.

Not surprisingly, some of them are billionaires.

After all, you can't take it with you, and if you have a lot of "it" burning a hole in your pocket, I can see how you might want to hang around and keep spending. Imagine how immense your bucket list would be if you had near-infinite money?

Why wouldn't one of those bucket list items be "live forever?" Why wouldn't you want to spend some of your near-infinite money on the secret sauce, the magic elixir, the DNA manipulation that would help you stay alive?

Not surprisingly, some of these billionaires are investing some of their loot piles in biotechs looking for a science-based version of the Fountain of Youth. 

Jeff Bezos put some of his enormous stack o' chips on Altos Lab, "an anti-aging startup," where he's in the excellent company of fellow multi-multi-multi-billionaire Larry Ellison of Oracle fame. 

Altos, of course, is not explicitly focused on keeping Bezos and Ellison alive so they can compare loot piles. (Bezos has a few more bucks than Ellison, but they both have well over $100 billion. Remember when we used to think that being a billionaire put you in the wealthy category? Good times!)

They are looking for ways to improve cellular health and resilience through a process called cellular rejuvenation. The group's goals are to reverse the occurrence of injury, disabilities and age-related diseases so people can live longer and healthier lives. (Source: Yahoo)

Yay to reversing the ravages of injury, disabilities, and age, but the suspicion is that Ellison and Bezos are laser-beaming on the age-related end of things, especially for Ellison, who's 79. (Comparatively, at 59, Bezos is a fine broth of a lad.)

Bezos is hedging his live-forever investments by joining Peter Thiel in betting on Unity Biotechnology. 

The company's mission is to create "transformative medicines to slow, halt or reverse diseases of aging," according to the company's website. The company's initial focus is on therapeutic remedies for age-related neurological conditions and various ophthalmologic diseases.

As billionaires go, Thiel is pretty meh, estimated to be worth a paltry $10-ish B. Still, he's made some smart money plays, so his money sense is pretty good.

Ellison also has a couple of side bets.

OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman has put some money in Retro Biosciences, which is mucking around with rejuvenating T cells. (An aside: I misread Sam Altman as Sam Bankman Fried.)

There are also opportunities for OpenAI's ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence (AI) platforms to find novel ways to combat aging, such as discovering new drug combinations or exciting therapies that can prevent age-related diseases.

No one with be shocked to find that Mark Zuckerberg is also in the hunt. Alongside Priscilla Chan (Zuck's wife) and Sergey Brin, he helps fund the Breakthrough Prize which awards "scientific advances, including anti-aging developments.

Bezos and Zuckerberg aren't waiting for some breakthrough to keep them going. Both of them are avid fitness buffs, and Zuckerberg was in some recent back-and-forth with Elon Musk that at one point looked like it was going result in a cage match between the two guys.

Curiously, Musk - who's worth almost as much as these other guys combined - isn't investing in anti-aging companies:

Musk, an outlier in the billionaires-funding-aging club, has said in interviews on the subject, "I certainly would like to maintain health for a longer period of time. But I am not afraid of dying. I think it would come as a relief."

I can assure Elon Musk that it would come as a relief to many of us. 

Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive, stayin' alive.