It’s the most important story in the country, with every talking head aghast, and every reply guy shaken to his core: I applied for a mortgage last week, and now receive robo calls and texts offering me a mortgage every other minute, thus totally bricking my phone. Which got me thinking. In this alarming age of bi-partisan consensus on the topic of “we hate the technology industry and genuinely want you guys to suffer,” why not… fix stuff? Our boys are definitely smart enough. Yeah, the prospect of building an AI supergod is exhilarating. But there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit here. Rather than focusing on the latest “replace my graphic designer with a shittier graphic designer” wrapper, for example, consider ending spam. Permanently. Like what is the nuclear option for spam? Because friend, if you destroy the bots — if you simply make our lives better? The people will give you the world.

Last week, as President Trump moved to axe Harvard’s remaining federal contracts, announcing plans to redirect the cash toward trade schools, a lot of folks in science started panicking about the future of American R&D. Honestly, though? (PhD biophysicist and former NASA scientist here): maybe it’s time university research — yes, even at fancy places like Harvard — got a little guillotine action. Academia has stopped being helpful to the real world, and instead has become a machine for gaming publication counts and grant funding. If we’re genuinely worried about keeping up with China, we need fleets of robots assembling drone motherships. We need embryo gene editing factories. We need armies of welders throwing up new semiconductor fabs. Is the mark of greatness really some dead PDF no one reads? Come on, homies, we’ve gotta stop obsessing over padding CVs and start upgrading our CIV.

Costco dropped earnings Thursday. Main takeaway: this company has its shit together. Sales and memberships are up. It’s adding warehouses. It’s extending gas station hours. To mitigate tariff impacts, it’s rerouting sourcing for Kirkland Signature, which is already leading to significant discounts. The company raised prices in some areas (like flowers) and took hits to margins in others (like pineapples) to piss off customers less. And you know what? It’s working. Meaning, members are still enjoying their largely-not-Chinese-stuff-that-isn’t-shitty and $5 rotisserie chickens enough to renew their memberships and brave parking lot chaos. To top it all off, while other retailers are crying and sobbing (screaming and puking, even), CFO Gary Millerchip had this to say on Thursday: “Raising prices is always seen as a last resort.” Legend. Keep up the good work, Costco.