2025: What happened to the drones?

Also: Why are young people so pessimistic? Jeff Bezos is concerned about a misinformed public. How Honey steals from your favorite creators

Happy new year, everyone! Did you make resolutions? Of course you didn’t — they’re stupid and useless.

I didn’t make this

It’s weird, we’re not hearing much about the drone invasion anymore. Did the Iranian mothership head home for Chanukah? Did all the TikTok moms who bought drones for their dear hubbies for Christmas conclude that the buzzy lights in the sky were just dudes messing around?

Maybe Republican politicians found a new panic to exploit, like Turo. ICYMI, on New Year’s Day, we saw two men use trucks (a Ford pickup and a Tesla Cybertruck) that they rented on Turo for acts of terrorism.

If you think about it, it’s very weird that two US military veterans who served overseas both committed acts of terrorism within a few hours of each other, using the same car rental service, and they never even met or coordinated. Just a weird coincidence.

You know what’s not a weird coincidence? Military service is far-and-away the greatest common factor among US mass murderers with extremist motivations. And because of their training, they’re more likely to successfully kill a lot of people.

Since 2011, the number of extremist crimes committed annually by US military members or veterans has increased by more than 500%, compared with the prior 20 years. Some of this likely reflects how many more US service members saw actual live combat in the 2000s versus prior decades, and a lot of this also probably reflects the rise of social media to recruit people to extremist causes. This seems like something the VA should address more effectively!

Why are young adults so pessimistic?

My daughter is back from college, and it took less than 24 hours for her to assert that she already knows more than I do about several issues of importance. This is annoying but also a healthy development in the maturation of a young person, and I fully support it.

Coming home for a month over the holidays is deeply challenging for a college student. Imagine: You’ve been living “on your own” for four months, surrounded by people your age with zero parental supervision. You’ve been keeping your own hours, imbibing whatever substances you want, ultimately responsible for your own care.

Then suddenly you’re back in your childhood room, crammed into the now-undersized psychological box that is your teenage context. Your parents may foolishly revert to parenting instead of respecting you as the worldly adult you believe yourself to be. These are the conditions under which good kids transform into monstrous assholes.

I recall being immensely proud of myself for living “on my own”¹ for four months, and unduly self-assured that I’d unlocked the solutions to the world’s problems that old people were just too stubborn to understand. How insufferable I must have been during all my college breaks.

My kid has brought some of this attitude back from her semester out-of-state, but she’s generally handling it better than I did. We still mostly enjoy her company. Except for the occasional attempt to shock us or argue over an issue in which she has new confidence, she’s pretty much the same cool, independent teen who left the nest in August.

But we’re really lucky. Not all the kids are doing so well.

I’ve been reading a lot lately about how fucked up young people are. Let’s start with this vignette from a review of the book Infantilised: How Our Culture Killed Adulthood, written by a criminology professor at the U of Copenhagen.

An older boss was correcting a younger female employee. “There is no P in ‘hamster’,” said the boss. But “that’s how I spell it,” the 20-something objected. The boss suggested they consult a dictionary. The employee called her mother, put her on speakerphone and tearfully insisted that she tell her boss not to be so mean.

Business publications are full of stories of managers dealing with fragile young employees. Jonathan Haidt wrote a best-seller about the national crisis of Gen Z fragility. A survey back in May showed that 26% of Zoomers have brought a parent to a job interview. (Don’t do that.)

College lecturers — even at elite universities — say their students will not read books. Why are we even having these silly battles over school libraries? It’s 2025, and we’re afraid that kids — who have the entire Internet at their fingertips — might discover wild ideas in books?

Olds are also aghast at reactions to the assassination of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione. The wailing got even louder when Emerson College released a poll that showed adults under 30 were evenly split over whether the murder was acceptable. (The other age groups were not so equivocal.)

But it’s not just Gen Z, with their pivotal COVID year at home, that’s apparently failing. America’s 30-year-olds are also significantly less likely to live apart from their parents, be married, or have kids than a few decades ago. Young men in particular are struggling, and the gender gap that we hear so much about has been acutely reversed among people under 35. Depending on your political ideology, you may consider these outcomes to be forced by economic conditions (housing scarcity, regressive taxes, inflation, student debt), or chosen due to social conditioning (sexual confusion, woke ideology, the phones, the choice to take on student debt). But it’s probably all of the above in different measures.

The WSJ last week threw a haymaker at Millennials, positing “What Happens When a Whole Generation Never Grows Up?” (gift link.) This was an interesting and balanced article that inspired a chorus of “F*** YOU, WALL STREET JOURNAL” replies on social media from people who didn’t or couldn’t read the story behind the paywall.

The essence of the article is that 30-somethings are actually doing quite well, economically — better than their parents in fact. But they don’t feel like they are because their standards are absurd. Avocado toast every day!

“Our expectations are so much higher today,” says Melissa Kearney, an economist at the University of Maryland whose research focuses on children and family. “Generations before us didn’t expect to have large houses where every kid had a bedroom and there were multiple vacations.”

Now, the article also notes that the median Millennial doing well means that a lot of them are doing quite poorly. And comparing income or net worth to prior generations doesn’t really address some of the core issues, like housing costs that make young people feel priced out forever.

Now, to be clear, it could be that the American boom-times narrative of “kid moves out of the house at 18 and buys a home in their 20s” was actually the unrealistic standard. The American Dream is as dishonest a marketing campaign as “change your oil every three months” or “an engagement diamond should cost a man three months’ salary.”

Even my 14-year-old son pointed out to me that living with your parents and not owning a nice car are only equated with failure in the USA. I guess we should hold his room for him.

If you read online personal finance forums, you’ll find thousands of young people commiserating that they can’t figure out how to afford the future that their parents expected for them. And you’ll also read a lot of frustration with their parents’ outdated guidance on how to get there. (“Take a job in the mailroom, show up early for your shift every morning, and you’ll be a vice president within 10 years.”)

But it’s not just money that’s freaking out young people. They’re also worried about other future uncertainties, including climate change, gun violence, economic displacement, drones in the sky — you know, the existential stuff. While some people see these as hysteria about low-probability disasters, it’s hard not to feel that we’re spiraling toward dystopia as we enter the most disruptive phase of this Crisis Era.

As a parent, I feel like I have a responsibility to my children to express a confident vision of the future. In fact, these actions we falsely associate with “growing up” — getting married, producing children, taking on a jumbo mortgage — are themselves pure expressions of this confidence. But it’s the broad failure of this confidence that’s driving the global collapse of birth rates to well below replacement.

There’s a bigger picture thing going on, that we’ll definitely explore in a future issue. For the past 60 years or so, industrialized countries like the USA transitioned from making things to doing things. The making-things jobs were highly unionized, so when we lost those jobs, workers lost their power to demand a living.

This new service economy created a lot of jobs that paid jack shit. But it also created a massive number of profit-generating jobs that required years of education, training, and experience, and thus these jobs paid very well. This new overclass of highly paid workers started in the big coastal cities, but they’re now in cities all over the country. They’re also the Democratic base.

Now we’ve passed the midpoint of the 2020s, a decade that began with a world war-level global catastrophe, and it’s clear that something is changing dramatically in our economy. Technology has exceeded a point beyond where it’s creating and enabling more white collar overclass jobs, to devaluing and destroying more of them than it creates. But people (like my kids) are still engaging in very expensive educations to enter a “new economy” that’s actually old and dying.

And meanwhile, physical jobs that require years of training have become wildly profitable for workers and much harder for technology to disrupt. It’s possible that by the end of the decade, the economic, political, and cultural power of plumbers, nurses, and foremen will rival that of coders, designers, and lawyers. It’s already happening.

Identity politics isn’t dead. But do we know how to see the real identities?

Rangelife Shorts

Slop on top. Drew Gooden has been one of my favorite YouTubers for years, and last week he dropped a terrific and very funny video called YouTube is Obsessed with AI, which gets into YouTube’s terrible gen AI features, and also the awful AI videos that are taking over the internet. (A lot of people seem to like this slop, which makes sense when you consider how many children and adults spend five hours a day watching videos on their phones.)

Lo and behold, the next night I went searching for a trailer for Noah Hawley’s upcoming Alien series for FX, and the top result on YouTube was… a fake trailer with fake AI actors saying fake lines.

The Honey scam. Have you used Honey? It’s a browser plug-in that claims to scour for promo codes so you’re always paying the lowest possible price on anything. I tried it out a few years ago, and it never successfully delivered a discount. Since it’s free I wondered exactly how it was making revenue, especially after PayPal bought it for $4 billion. So I deleted my account.

Well, a YouTuber looked at the code and realized that Honey money comes from hijacking referral codes. When a publisher or creator recommends a product and sends you to a site to buy it, normally they’d get a cut of the sale. This is a really important revenue source for the online content economy.

But if you click the Honey button when you’re checking out, Honey takes over and steals that cut from the publisher, even if they don’t do anything for you. Now a YouTuber is suing in what will likely become a class action. In the meantime, you can do your part by deleting the Honey app if you have it.

Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post is laying off dozens of reporters. Meanwhile, Bezos is also steaming mad about misinformation that he was planning to spend $600 million on his wedding. So mad that he retweeted a fellow billionaire on the misinformation billionaire network, X. If only we had credible institutions that reported on real news instead of fictions, Jeffrey.

If I were a centibillionaire, I might buy one of the world’s most trusted newspapers and run it as a nonprofit for the benefit of humanity knowing stuff. But that’s just me.

(Related: Pultizer-winning WaPo editorial cartoon resigns because they killed her cartoon about oligarchs kissing Trump’s ring.)

TikTok is probably shutting down in the USA in 12 days. To illustrate how huge this is, more people in the US will watch TikTok this week than football. Imagine if the federal government shut down football. Trump filed a brief with SCOTUS asking them to let him take a shot at negotiating TikTok’s survival. Trump has already won fealty from Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and of course X. But the biggest social network is still there for him to win and thus complete his takeover of new media.

Trump told the truth (kind of). In the wake of the terrorist attacks on January 1, Trump posted to Truth Social: “When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true. The crime rate in our country is at a level that nobody has ever seen before.”

Both New Year’s terrorists were US-born veterans — literally the opposite of the criminal immigrant stereotype.

But Trump is correct that the crime rate in our country is at a level that nobody has ever seen before. Murders in the USA appear to have dropped by 16% in 2024, the single greatest decline in history, breaking the record of 13%, which was set way back in… flips through record book… 2023.

Philadelphia saw murders drop by 40%, New Orleans by 28%, DC by 29%. Here in San Francisco, you’d have to go back to 1960 to find a year with so few murders. This is an incredible national accomplishment! I assume the voters noticed and rewarded incumbents appropriately.

Trash Day in Florida. This brave guy didn’t get the memo that you’re supposed to leave alligators alone, but he gets an A+ for a successful approach to humane gator removal while staying frosty the whole time. (This video is from 2021, but I figure most people haven’t seen most of the internet yet.)

A good omen that seems evil. Birds are cool when they’re murmurating.

TV Too High. I discovered the longstanding subreddit that’s entirely photos of TVs mounted way too high. Reddit: where all your pet peeves have a community.

Happy new year, y’all.

1. “on my own” = in a dorm, three hot meals prepared and served to me every day, on-campus health services, precious few bills to manage aside from long distance phone calls