DOUBLE JEOPARDY = Damned if you Do or Don't!!

When Hurricane Melissa came barreling through, Jamaica didn’t just have sandbags and a prayer — it had a financial snorkel.  Last year the island issued a $150 million catastrophe (“cat”) bond , and because the deal pays out when certain storm parameters are met, Jamaica stands to get money in hand within days to fix roads, power and phone lines.  It’s the sort of tidy civic planning that makes accountants weep tears of joy while meteorologists continue to look guilty. Why This Feels Like Clever Planning (and not just luck) Jamaica’s risk team designed the bond to trigger on objective meteorological thresholds — namely the storm’s central air pressure when it made landfall over pre-defined geographic “boxes” around the island.  Florian Steiger , CEO of Icosa Investments , put it plainly: “They are linked to the central pressure of the hurricane when it makes landfall.”   That third-party verification is what turns subjective damage assessments into a fast, for...

We all love a shortcut.  Coffee machine > espresso snobbery.  Grocery pickup > actual walking.  And lately, ChatGPT and its generative-AI cousins have become the office’s new espresso — perky, fast, and suspiciously calming when the deadline monster appears.  The problem is the perkiness comes with a side of mental mush: convenience may be the new cognitive cashew that crunches your prefrontal cortex into a very polite nut butter. When 2,000 professionals were about their AI habits, the answers received were the kind of answers that would make neuroscientists frown and product teams do victory laps.  88% admitted they’d used ChatGPT or a similar LLM to write for them.  Even better (or worse): 63% said they felt “foggy” or “weirdly uncreative” afterwards.  The common response?  Open ChatGPT again. Rinse and repeat.  Replace “creative spark” with “cached suggestion.” Enjoy the convenience. Lose a little neural independence. If y...

If you heard a roomful of teenagers shout “67!” at precisely the same second and didn’t know why, congratulations — you just experienced the sociolinguistic miracle of 2025 .  Dictionary.com recently announced that “67” is its 2025 Word of the Year , declaring the choice a kind of “linguistic time capsule” that captures the cultural currents of the year.  Translation for adults: a number became a feeling, and now it has a plaque! What Even Is “67”? Short answer: nobody quite agrees — and that’s the point.  The term, always pronounced “six-seven” (never “sixty-seven,” per the dictionary), functions as an interjection that can mean “so-so,” “maybe this,” “maybe that,” or simply “I’m in on the joke.”  Dictionary.com ties it to ' brainrot slang ' — intentionally nonsensical, delightfully absurd, and designed to create in-groups.  As Steve Johnson, Ph.D., director of lexicography for the Dictionary Media Group at IXL Learning , put it: “It's part inside joke, ...

Satellites, like tattletale cousins, do not forget.  New imagery from the European Space Agency ’s Sentinel-2 satellites has tracked a significant U.S. naval buildup in the Caribbean: the amphibious ready group centered on the USS Iwo Jima and the guided-missile destroyer USS Gravely are now stationed within striking distance of Venezuela .  In plain English: a lot of steel, jet fuel and diplomacy nervously checking its inbox. The deployment follows U.S. airstrikes on vessels the administration says were cartel-operated and linked to Caracas , and it underlines Washington’s stated aim to go after what it calls “ state-enabled narco-trafficking networks .”  The presence of the Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group and the Gravely — now roughly 124 miles from La Orchila Island , site of key Venezuelan airbases and radar arrays — has intensified speculation that the Pentagon is postured for limited strikes, precision raids, or at least an aggressive round of maritime “we’...