¶It is the inefficiencies of British and European football clubs’ day-to-day operations that particularly excite American businesspeople, sports finance analysts told CNBC.

¶Clubs are traditionally run with fans in mind, and typically, most are loss-making entities. Revenue maximization has rarely been the priority of British teams.

¶Do you want your team’s owner to chase profitability or championships? That’s a relevant question for the professional sports I’ve followed for years (MLB, NHL, NFL, NBA). Sounds like it’s relevant in soccer, too. My teams tend to worry more about the former than the latter, unfortunately.

¶The plan would see FIFA set up a new entity, called FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE), that would bundle all the money-making operations associated with the soccer World Cup — including broadcast rights, sponsorship, ticket sales and licensing fees — and sell a significant stake in the new operation to private investors. FIFA is valuing the new commercial venture at around $20 billion.

¶After news of the plan broke on Tuesday, FIFA confirmed it is working with U.S. investment bank JP Morgan to set up the new entity. Thrive Capital, an investment company founded by Joshua Kushner, brother of Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, is leading the search for investors.

¶And there it is.

¶My soccer fandom is nascent at best, so I’ll leave the debate over whether FIFA should seek investment to those more familiar with the sport and its management and governance.

¶But putting the Trump-Kushner fingerprints on the game? Disgusting.

¶The grift knows no bounds.

¶“It’s a steady drumbeat of potential flashpoints heading into (the) Trump-Xi summit planned for September,” said Samm Sacks, a senior fellow at the New America think tank focused on Chinese technology policies.

¶So we’ve banned, partially or completely, Chinese communications and networking gear (Huawei), EV’s, drones (DJI), and now humanoid and quadraped robots. Do these bans reflect legitimate national security concerns or efforts to protect, and perhaps prop-up, second-place companies in these new industries? Or are they merely bargaining chips? We may learn more when Chinese President Xi visits the United States this fall.

¶Ohio State is entering a new corporate partnership with JPMorganChase that includes jersey patches for all 36 of the Buckeyes’ teams and will yield nearly $17 million per year for the athletic program, sources told ESPN’s Pete Thamel on Tuesday.

¶THE JP Morgan Chase Ohio State University.

¶Disney is overhauling the Carousel of Progress for the first time in 30+ years. When I first saw the news of an update, I assumed they would just drop a scene from the beginning of the timeline and tack a new one on the end. Round and round she goes! That’s not the case, though. Carousel is getting a complete overhaul. Scenes of the 1900s, 1920s, and 1940s are being dropped, meaning we’ll no longer see a blown fuse take out the neighborhood’s electricity, hear the dad’s plan for a rumpus room, or watch the oven burn the Christmas turkey because of everyone’s disbelief at grandma’s video game score (550!).

¶Hopefully, and undoubtedly, the new scenes of the 1960s, 1980s, and beyond will include the same campy and authentic humor that seems to land with everyone. I’m not sure how I feel about 1969, my birth year, being the opening scene, though.

¶Progress!

¶I’ve always loved Carousel and look forward to seeing the updates. It doesn’t get much attention but it’s iconic Disney and I’m glad to see the company give it a great big beautiful tomorrow.

¶Microinfluencers average a 3.2% engagement rate, almost triple the 1.1% rate for macroinfluencers (more than 1 million followers), according to growth marketing agency ATTN. And though macroinfluencers generate roughly six times more revenue, their associated costs can reach about 18 times higher, according to an American Marketing Association study.

¶The age of the microinfluencer is upon us. Why? Higher engagement and lower costs.

¶The biggest threat to research universities from recent federal policy shifts aimed at them is not that those changes chase promising American scholars abroad but that they discourage the world’s best and brightest from coming here to do their work.

¶[Harvard President Alan Garber] said his assessment of the state of research in America reflects the fact that the ability to attract talent from everywhere to work alongside U.S. scientists has long been a difference-maker for the nation as a global leader in research and innovation.

¶Citing anti-immigration policies as “the biggest threat” seems obvious but the impact on American scholars should not be dismissed as quickly as Garber does here. American scholars, and would-be American scholars, are making career-defining decisions now as Trump’s assault on science funding continues. This undoubtedly will “chase promising American scholars abroad”. And it will, and probably already has, lead others out of science and math altogether. Casting those exoduses as secondary to the anti-immigration side of the equation might be part of the problem.

¶The U.S. Department of Education will continue to be in charge of the statutory responsibilities over special education as required by federal law, but this shifts the day-to-day operations to HHS. 

¶“It adds another layer of complexity because two departments are involved, and one is still going to have the ultimate responsibility for this other department underneath it, but then how does a parent of a child with a disability who has an issue navigate that?” Marks asked.  

¶Aside from raising concerns about returning to a medical model of special education, Trump’s dismantling of the Department of Education is actually adding layers of government to the delivery of education services, at least for special education. That’s ironic, considering his painting of the Department as “an unneeded layer of bureaucracy that burdens local schools” was a foundation of the entire effort.

¶The researchers describe vertebrate eyes as the product of an unusual evolutionary detour. An ancestor first lost its paired eyes after becoming largely inactive, retained a simple central eye, and later used parts of that structure to build a new and more advanced visual system.

¶The researchers argue that its evolutionary remains survive today as the pineal gland, a small organ located deep within the vertebrate brain. Although humans do not use the pineal gland to see images, it remains connected to the body’s response to light and darkness.

¶The eyes of vertebrates are quite different from those of others, like insects. Our retinas developed from brain tissue; theirs from skin. And, under this new “cyclops” theory, ours may trace back to a small one-eyed ocean-dweller with a simple ability to detect night and day. Our cyclops ancestor may still be with us, too, as the researchers behind the paper in this article argue that the pineal gland, which regulates our circadian rhythm and sleep-wake cycles, is its evolutionary remains.

¶Sort of gives new meaning to the expression “in my minds eye”.

¶The government spent hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase equipment needed to train pilots to fly the 747-8 plane so quickly, on top of the approximately $400 million cost of the upgrades that the administration has publicly acknowledged. The Pentagon has tried to mask the total price tag — including from Congress — by taking the funds from a classified budget for nuclear modernization.

¶If only there was a way to assign a dollar figure to Trump’s ego. Then there’s the opportunity cost of foregoing “nuclear modernization”, whatever that is.

¶The latest mission looks to pin down whether her plane is on the same island.

¶“The evidence supporting the Nikumaroro Hypothesis remains compelling, and the only way to answer this question is to go to Nikumaroro, inspect the Taraia Object firsthand and follow the evidence wherever it leads,” Pettigrew said in a news release by Purdue University.

¶In archival satellite images, the mysterious image first appears in 2015, a year after a massive tropical storm shifted the sands. Ric Gillespie, an aviation accident investigator who has been writing about Earhart for decades, told Costello on TODAY in 2025 that the image captured by satellite is a downed coconut tree, not the famous plane.

¶This is pretty exciting and will be interesting to watch. I didn’t know about the Taraia Object (or Nikumaroro for that matter) until I watched Today’s reporting of this story this morning. Plane fuselage or coconut tree? We’ll see.

¶If the Taraia Object is indeed a plane, it stinks that the human remains found on the island in 1940 are long gone. Hopefully, in that case, enough survived to identify it as her plane.

¶Working together is the only way out of the shit we’re living in, in every aspect of life. Working together. Say it again and again until you do it. Underneath the mess, the beauty of the web is there still to build on, but only if we momentarily suspend our search for great wealth, and instead seek our humanity. Working together is the way.#

¶This post from Dave Winer goes a long way to explaining why I still cobble on web stuff, including this site. It reminds me of my “we had the web and it was glorious” post from a couple years ago.

¶We had the web and it was glorious. Anyone with some basic technical skills, or the desire to learn them, could buy a domain and start publishing content on that domain in a matter of hours, if not minutes. But they took it from us. Not in the traditional sense, mind you, because technically we still have it. We can still publish content at will. No, their taking is little more devious. They built their silos and made it even easier for people to publish content…in the silos. And they let people do this for no money (not for free, mind you). And then they junkified all the great content with ads and algorithms and infinite scrolling and piss-poor organization that makes it damn near impossible to find your old content and that of others.

¶I continue to build the publishing system for this site because it’s fun, and I continue to publish content here because it’s fun. I feel like a modern day HAM Radio operator at times, though, practicing an old technology for…fun. Maybe that’s the ultimate fate of the web, a relatively small group of people building on old technologies for fun. The silos don’t need to come down, we just need the basic technology to survive and remain accessible so that those who want to cobble can.

¶Cultural activities can strengthen social connections, encourage healthier lifestyle habits, and support better mental health, all of which may contribute to slower physiological aging.

¶An interesting correlation. Increasing cultural activities may not cause a slowing of physiological aging, but a sudden or gradual decrease in participation in such activities may signal a shift in a person’s physiological aging.

¶When those backup tariffs expire this week, the administration will step in again with new tariffs, ones the courts have consistently said that presidents have the authority to impose. Those could generate nearly $ 1 trillion over the next 10 years.

¶Over that period, our increasingly untenable national debt is likely to put even more fiscal pressure on future presidents. Regardless of who wins in 2028, the desire to avoid the wrath of the bond market may be at a high.

¶Mr. Trump’s successor will have options. The next president could keep some tariffs while rebalancing where the revenue comes from – and they should.

¶Trump monetized the American consumer and the revenue stream is currently being hardened. I’d probably be fine with that if I had confidence that the money would be used for things like paying down the national debt, avoiding the Social Security insolvency currently predicted for 2032, and investing in science, research, and development.

¶Pardon my skepticism, but, for various reasons, I have doubts.

¶This almost feels like a The Graduate “Plastics” moment, but with three words: photonic integrated circuits.

¶If the technology is commercialized, a single programmable optical chip could perform several tasks, including controlling signal speed and switching between different functions.

¶In that sense, the chip could operate in a way similar to a software-defined system, with its behavior adjusted according to changing needs.

¶This flexibility could help data centers and AI servers process information more efficiently while reducing energy consumption.

¶I think there’s a great future in photonic integrated circuits. Think about it. Will you think about it?