Doom Slayer arrives in Middle Earth- Volume I: Moria to Orthanc

Chapter I: Durin's Bane

It had been a long time since anything had followed it into the dark. The thing the Dwarves called Durin's Bane had borne another name once, a name older than the Sun, spoken in the halls of Utumno when the world was young and the Valar had not yet come north in their wrath. In all the long ages it had slept beneath the mountain, it had known only one kind of visitor: small hands with picks and lanterns, digging toward it in their hunger for the bright silver, and fleeing when it woke. The grey wizard had been different. He had stood on the narrow bridge with his staff and his elvish sword and denied it passage, and it had pulled him down with its whip, and they had fallen together through the throat of the chasm, through cold air and colder stone, into the black water at the roots of Khazad-dûm, where its fire went out in a scream of steam. Down there it had become something else, a thing of slime and coiling strength, and the wizard had clung to it and hewn at it, and they had fought through tunnels no dwarf had ever dug, gnawed out of the living rock by nameless things that were older than Sauron and loved neither of them. It had lost count of the days. The wizard had been strong. Beneath the flesh he was of its own order, a spirit of the first making clad in an old man's body, and for a while it had feared him. But the flesh was a weakness the wizard could not put off, and the deep was its country and not his. At last, in a cavern where the water stood black and still, it wound itself about him and drew him under and held him there while the light in him guttered. He spoke one word at the end, in a tongue it had not heard since it turned its back on the West, and then the light went out. The body drifted face-down in the dark. The sword sank into the silt. On one of the wizard's fingers a ring with a red stone burned a little longer than the rest of him, and then it too went dim.

It lay on the stone shore a long while afterward, letting its fire come back. The heat returned slowly in the deep places, first as a glow beneath its hide and then as a low flicker along its back, and it drank the warmth of the mountain's heart and was content. Far above, it supposed, the little company that had crossed its bridge was running for the light, and far to the east the Lord of the Rings would soon learn that the wizard who had troubled him for two thousand years was gone. It did not care what Sauron learned. Sauron had been a lesser servant in the days of their master, a clever thing of plots and smithcraft who had climbed above his station, and the Balrog owed him nothing. It would sleep again. The orcs could squabble in the upper halls, and the dwarves could weep over their lost kingdom, and the world could go on burning or not burning as it pleased.

Then the stone moved. It was not a quake, nor the shifting of the mountain's bones that it had felt a thousand times in its long sleep. It came from below, from beneath the lowest places it knew, beneath even the burrows of the nameless things, and it was a sound like a great door being torn from its hinges. A seam opened in the floor of the cavern, a crack of red light that widened as the Balrog watched, and out of it came a heat that was not of this world. The Balrog knew fire. It was fire, and it had walked in Angband when the pits there glowed like the inside of a star. This was different. This fire smelled of brimstone and old blood and a cruelty so vast and patient that even Utumno seemed a child's cruelty beside it, and through that reek came something else, something hard and clean and terrible, like iron quenched in a river. Then a figure stepped up out of the seam and stood on the cavern floor, and the red light closed behind it. It was the size of a man. It wore plates of armor the color of old moss and scorched steel, scored with a thousand gouges, and its helm was smooth and closed, with a visor dark as the water where the wizard floated. In its hands it carried a weapon of black iron with two mouths. It did not look at the wizard's body. It did not look at the ring or the sword. It looked at the Balrog.

The Balrog laughed, and the laugh was a gout of flame that lit the cavern from wall to wall. It had broken kings. It had driven the Dwarves of Durin's line from the greatest realm they had ever built, and it had just drowned a servant of the Valar with its own hands. It rose to its full height, and the shadow of its wings unfolded across the ceiling, and its whip uncoiled from its fist with a crack like the splitting of stone. The armored figure walked toward it. It did not hurry. It did not raise a war cry or bang its weapon on its shield, as the Dwarves had done when they came for vengeance long ago. It simply walked, and when it was close enough, the two mouths of its weapon spoke together with a roar louder than the Balrog's own voice. Something tore through the Balrog's flank, hot iron that punched through hide and shadow alike, and for the first time since the wizard's sword had found it on the bridge, it felt pain. It lashed out with the whip. The figure was not there. It had moved sideways faster than any creature of flesh could move, a blur that left a smear of light on the air, and then a chain of fire shot from the weapon and bit into the Balrog's chest like a hook, and the figure came flying in along the chain until it hung at the Balrog's very face, and the two mouths roared again.

It was a real fight. Afterward, in the brief time left to it, the Balrog would take some cold comfort in that. It caught the figure with its whip and wrapped the many thongs about its legs and swung it like a flail into the pillars of the cavern, one after another, until the stone cracked and fell. It drew its sword of flame and struck the figure on the shoulder, and the armor there glowed red and something within it broke with a sound like a bell. It hurled the figure away from it into the chasm at the cavern's edge, where the water fell away into a darkness that even the Balrog had never sounded, and it heard the clatter of armor striking rock, again and again, fainter and fainter, until there was nothing. Then it stood at the edge with its fire roaring and its wounds smoking, and it waited. The silence went on a long time. The Balrog let its fire sink, and it was satisfied.

Then, from below, the screaming began. It knew the nameless things that lived down there. Even it did not trouble them, for they were old and many, and they had a hunger that did not end. Now they were screaming, all of them at once, and beneath the screaming was a new sound, a rising whine like a great saw biting through bone, and then wet noises, and the crack of limbs, and the roar of that two-mouthed weapon again and again. The Balrog listened, and slowly it understood. The figure was not hiding down there in the dark. It was killing them, and every death was making it whole. The Balrog could feel it in the way the sounds changed, the way the pace quickened, the way the armored thing was coming back up the chasm wall faster than it had gone down. When it climbed over the lip of the chasm, its armor was dripping with ichor that was not its own, and the broken plate on its shoulder had been torn away and cast aside, and it moved as if it had never been struck at all.

What followed lasted many days, though the Balrog could not have said how many. It fought the armored thing in the deep halls and in the water and on the long dark bridges that spanned nothing. It wounded it, more than once. The whip opened its armor along one side and drew blood that steamed in the cold air, red blood like a man's, and the Balrog roared in triumph; but every time, the thing went away into the dark and the nameless things screamed, and it came back whole. It changed its weapons as it fought. It loosed small fires that burst against the Balrog's hide, and a hail of iron that tore its wings to ragged smoke, and once a cold blue light that froze its flames in place so that for one dreadful moment the Balrog stood rigid and dim, its fire locked inside its own body like a candle in ice. It was then, in that frozen moment, that the Balrog of Moria first knew fear. When the ice broke it did what it had never done in all the ages of the world. It fled. It went up, because up was the only way the armored thing had not come from, and it found the Endless Stair, the ancient way the Dwarves had carved from the deepest dungeon to the highest peak, thousands upon thousands of steps winding through the heart of the mountain, and it climbed. It threw down the stair behind it as it went. It shattered whole flights of steps and brought the ceilings down in roaring cascades of stone. Below it in the dark it heard the armored thing still coming. It never paused at the gaps. It leapt them, darting through the air in bursts of speed that had no business existing, catching broken edges with one hand and hauling itself up and running on.

The Stair ended at the top of the world. Durin's Tower was carved into the living rock of Zirakzigil's peak, where the snow lay deep and the sky was close and black and full of wind, and when the Balrog burst out into that cold air its fire came back in a roar, brighter than it had burned since Angband. Here it would make its stand. Here in the open, with room to spread its wings and the storm gathering at its back, it was the thing that had been feared since before the Moon. When the armored figure came out of the stair door behind it, the Balrog was waiting, and it struck with everything it had. Its sword of flame came down like a falling tower. The figure dodged the first blow and the second, firing all the while, a stream of bright projectiles from a new weapon that hammered the Balrog's chest, and then the third blow caught it across the side and cut through armor and flesh and threw it off the peak altogether. The Balrog surged to the edge. The figure was hanging by one hand from the rim of the cliff, a thousand feet of air beneath it, blood running down its arm, and before the Balrog could bring its sword down again it had pulled itself up and over in a single motion and driven its armored fist into the Balrog's face. The blow was charged with something, some stored violence that went off like a thunderclap, and the Balrog's jaw broke.

Then the figure reached over its shoulder and drew something from its back, and the Balrog's fire shrank to embers in its chest. It was a hilt, and from the hilt sprang a blade of red light that hummed in the storm. The Balrog had never seen it before. It had no name for it. But it knew, with the deep knowledge that lives in the oldest spirits, what that blade had been made for. Somewhere beyond the walls of the world, in some forge it would never see, people it would never know had made a weapon for killing things like it. The blade went into its chest, through the fire and the shadow and whatever lay beneath them, and the Balrog's flame ran out of it like water from a broken jar. The figure put a boot against its ruined body and pushed, and Durin's Bane fell from the peak of Zirakzigil and struck the mountainside, and the mountainside broke beneath it, and it fell further, burning and breaking, down and down. In the last moments of its long life, the Balrog thought of the Dwarves digging toward it in the dark, small hands with picks and lanterns, reaching for something they should have left alone, and for the first time it understood them. Its last sight was the figure on the peak, lit by lightning, lowering the red blade and turning back toward the stair without looking down.

Chapter II: The Lady of the Golden Wood

Galadriel had felt Mithrandir die. Not on the bridge, as the Fellowship had believed when they came weeping into the Naith of Lórien, but days afterward, far below the mountain, in the black water at the world's roots. She had felt his light struggling down there while she spoke words of comfort to his companions, and she had said nothing of it, because hope given falsely is a cruelty. Then she felt it go out, and she sat alone in the high flet of Caras Galadhon and grieved as she had not grieved since the First Age. She told no one, not even Celeborn, for a while. The Fellowship went down the Great River in elven boats, and the days of February turned slowly in the Golden Wood, and she waited. A small part of her, the part that had seen the Valar act in the world before, waited for something else. Mithrandir had been sent by the Powers. Perhaps the Powers would not let his errand fail. Perhaps he would be sent back. When thunder rolled down from the peak of Celebdil nine days after the Fellowship had gone, and fire burned on the summit for a day and a night, and something great fell from the mountain with a sound that shook the mallorn leaves, her heart lifted in spite of her. She went to the Mirror and looked, and the Mirror showed her only snow and lightning and red light, and a shape she could not make out.

It was Haldir who brought her the truth. He came to her in the hour before dawn with mud on his grey cloak and something wrapped in a long bundle in his arms, and his face was a face she had not seen him wear in all the centuries he had guarded her borders. The orcs of Moria had come out of the Dimrill Gate in the grey of the morning, he said, hundreds of them, more than the wardens had ever seen together in daylight, and the elves at the Nimrodel had strung their bows and made ready to die. But the orcs had not come against them. They had run, screaming, scattering across the Dimrill Dale and up into the hills, throwing away their spears, trampling their own wounded, running from something behind them. Some had turned at the Gate to make a stand. Those had died, Haldir said, and he described the deaths plainly, as an elf who has seen many deaths does, but his voice faltered when he told of the weapon that dealt them, iron that spoke with thunder and threw fire and tore orcs apart like wet leaves. The ones that fled were let go. The figure that walked out of the Gate behind them did not chase them. It walked down the old dwarf-road past the Mirrormere, where the Dwarves say Durin's crown can be seen in the water, and it did not look into the lake. It walked to the eaves of Lórien and stopped at the Nimrodel, where the wardens lay hidden in the trees with arrows on the string, and it did not look at them either, though Haldir was certain it knew exactly where every one of them was. It drove something into the turf at the edge of the stream and went on south along the border. Then Haldir unwrapped the bundle, and it was Glamdring, the Foe-hammer, that Mithrandir had carried out of the dragon-hoard of the trolls, and hanging from its hilt on a broken cord was a ring with a stone as red as fire.

She knew Narya the moment she saw it. Círdan had given it to Mithrandir when he first came to Middle-earth, the Ring of Fire to kindle hearts, and now it lay cold in her palm, and its stone was dull. Whatever hope she had kept in that small part of her went out then. The Powers had not sent him back. They had sent something else, or something else had come without being sent, and it had walked out of the deep carrying the last things of her friend and set them down at her door like a soldier returning a comrade's sword to his kin. She did not know what to make of that. She did not know what to make of any of it. She put on her grey cloak and went out of Caras Galadhon with Celeborn and a handful of the wardens, and they went swiftly westward through the trees to where Haldir's runners said the figure was walking. She found it on the western eaves of the wood, in the last of the morning mist, walking south through the dead grass with its strange weapon on its back, and she stepped out of the trees into its path, alone, and waited.

It stopped. It did not raise its weapon. It stood perhaps twenty paces from her, armored from head to heel in scarred plates of green and dun, and its visor was dark, and she could not see its face. Celeborn was in the trees behind her with his hand on his sword hilt, and she could feel his fear, and she could feel the wardens' fear, a held breath in the whole wood. She spoke to it first aloud, in the Common Speech and then in Sindarin and then in the old tongue of the Noldor, bidding it welcome and asking who it was and who had sent it. It said nothing. So she did what she had done to the Fellowship in her hall, and to a thousand others in the long years she had kept her realm. She reached out to it with her mind, with Nenya on her finger and all the power of the Ring of Adamant behind her, to see what was in it. She had looked into the minds of Elves and Men and Dwarves, of orcs and wolves and the servants of the Enemy. She had looked into the mind of the Lord of the Rings himself, across the darkness, and he had looked into hers, and neither had yielded. She thought she knew what she would find.

She found a war. That was the first thing and the largest thing, and it was so large that for a moment she lost herself in it. She saw a world of red stone under a black sky, where things like the Balrog of Moria walked in their thousands and in their tens of thousands, and greater things than the Balrog walked behind them, things the size of mountains. She saw a city of shining people, tall and noble, fallen into ruin. She saw kingdoms she had no names for, burning. She saw this warrior, alone or nearly alone, fighting through all of it, and she saw that the fighting had gone on for longer than she could measure, longer perhaps than the whole history of Arda, and that it had not ended and would not end. She had fought in the Long Defeat. She had watched Morgoth's shadow lie on the world for ages of the Sun, and she had believed there could be no war longer or bitterer than that. She had been wrong. Under the war she found a fury so large and so steady that it was like standing in the light of a sun, and it was not directed at her, or at the Elves, or at anything in this world that was not wholly given over to evil, and it would never go out. Under the fury, deep down where it was hardest to see, she found something small. It was a grief, old and worn smooth, and at its center was a little soft creature with long ears, white in the memory, gone. Then the mind she was reaching into moved, not against her, not exactly, but the way a man shifts his weight when a fly lands on him, and she was thrown back out of it into the cold morning, gasping, with Celeborn's hand on her arm.

She did not try again. The warrior stood a moment longer, and she thought it was looking at her, and then its head turned a fraction toward the trees where a young warden named Calenwen had crept closer than she should have, a girl barely two hundred years old with her bow shaking in her hands. It looked at her for the space of a breath, the way a man glances at a child near a cookfire to see that she is well, and then it walked on, past Galadriel, so close that she could smell brimstone and hot iron on it, and away south through the grass. They watched it go. When it reached the place where the Silverlode runs into the Great River, it turned east, waded into Anduin where the current runs swift and cold, and did not swim but simply walked down into the water and out of sight. Celeborn said quietly that there was nothing on the far bank for many leagues but the forest of Greenwood, which Men now called Mirkwood, and the hill of Amon Lanc where the Necromancer had once dwelt, and where shadows had gathered again of late, so that the wardens had been expecting an attack from that quarter for a month.

That night they stood together on the height of Cerin Amroth and looked east across the river. It was the place where Aragorn had plighted his troth to Arwen long ago, and from its crown you could see far over the darkling forest, and all their lives there had been a darkness on the hill of Dol Guldur, a shadow that even the stars would not touch. In the second hour after midnight the shadow broke. Fire leapt up on the hill, not the red of the Balrog's fire but a strange sickly green, a light like nothing in Arda, that lit the clouds from beneath and threw the shadows of the mallorn trees westward across the wood. The sound came to them long afterward, faint with distance, a rolling thunder and then a scream, high and thin and terrible, that every elf in Lórien knew. It was the cry of the Nazgûl. Galadriel had heard that cry before, and she knew which of the Nine kept Dol Guldur now: Khamûl, the Black Easterling, second only to the Witch-king. She heard the cry go on and on, and then she felt him go. He was not destroyed. A shadow tore itself loose from the hill and fled east across the sky, formless and shrieking, toward the Mountains of Ash and the land of Mordor, and she knew in her bones that it would take shape again there, as the Nine had taken shape again after the flood at the Ford of Bruinen. The fire on the hill burned until morning. When the sun rose, the darkness that had hung over Dol Guldur for a thousand years was gone, and the hill was only a hill, with smoke rising from it into a clear sky.

She went down from Cerin Amroth and sat beneath the trees and reached out across the leagues to Imladris, to Elrond, who also wore one of the Three, and she told him in thought all that had happened. She felt his grief for Mithrandir like a cold wind. She felt him turn the news over, in the long, careful way he had, and when at last he answered he was wary. “We do not know whose servant he is,” Elrond said, “nor who will rule what he leaves behind. It may be that the Enemy has an enemy we did not know of. It may be that we have only traded one shadow for another.” She told him what she had seen in its mind. She told him of the war that did not end and the fury that did not burn out and the small white grief at the bottom of it all. “He is no one's servant,” she said. “He did not come for us, and he did not come for the Ring, and he will not stay. He is here to kill, and when he has killed what he came for he will go.” Elrond was silent a long time. Then he asked her what he came to kill, and she found that she knew the answer, though she could not have said how. She had felt it in the shape of his fury, the way you can feel the shape of a blade through cloth. “Saruman,” she said. “And the Nine. And the one who made them. He is walking toward Isengard now.” And in the morning, when she went down to the eastern march, her wardens told her that he had come back across the river before dawn and gone south across the Wold, toward the dark eaves of Fangorn, without once looking back.

Chapter III: The Hunters in Fangorn

Legolas had not slept, and he did not think Aragorn had slept either, though the Ranger had lain down by the little fire at the forest's edge and closed his eyes for an hour. Gimli had snored. The three of them had run for four days across the grasslands of Rohan behind the Uruk-hai who had taken Merry and Pippin, and at the end of it they had found only a field of dead orcs burned in a heap by the Riders of Rohan, and two little trails in the trampled grass leading into the eaves of Fangorn, and no hobbits. In the night an old man in a hood had come to the edge of the firelight and stood leaning on a staff, and when Aragorn rose and called out to him he was gone, and the horses that the Riders had lent them had broken their tethers and fled into the dark. Gimli was certain the old man had been Saruman, and Aragorn was inclined to agree, and Legolas, who had seen the man's shape against the stars, said nothing, but he did not like it. They went into the forest at first light. The trees of Fangorn were older than any Legolas had known, older than the trees of his father's realm in the north of Greenwood, and they were awake in a way he did not understand. They stood close and dark, bearded with lichen, and the air under them was stuffy and still, and he could hear them whispering to each other in a slow, creaking speech, and he could feel that they were angry.

They found the hobbits' trail by a stream and followed it to a steep rock wall, and there the trail ended in a strange set of footprints, great broad marks pressed deep into the moss as if something huge and heavy had stood there and then walked away. Aragorn knelt over them a long while and could not read them. They climbed the rock wall to a shelf high above the trees, where the sun came through, and stood looking out over the endless green roof of the forest, and it was there that Legolas first heard the trees fall silent. It began far to the north and east, the way the noise of a summer meadow stops when a hawk's shadow crosses it. The whispering ceased, tree by tree, and in its place came a hush so deep and so total that Gimli looked up from his pipe and asked what was wrong. Legolas did not answer. He was listening to something walking through the forest toward them, and it was not walking the way anything should walk in Fangorn. It did not pick its way between the roots. It did not stoop beneath the branches. It came on in a straight line, steady and heavy, and where the trees leaned toward it the trees drew back. Then he saw it, below them in a clearing, moving between the trunks: a tall figure in armor the color of moss and old iron, with a great weapon slung across its back, walking west.

“Saruman,” Gimli hissed, and his axe was in his hands. “In some new guise. Shoot, Legolas, shoot before he puts a spell on us.” And Legolas, who had been strung tight as his own bowstring for four days and nights, drew and loosed before he had thought about it at all. It was a good shot. It would have taken a man through the eye at that distance. The arrow struck the dark visor of the helm squarely, and broke, and fell into the leaves, and the figure did not even pause in its stride. It did not look up. Legolas felt his face grow hot in a way it had not since he was young, and he lowered the bow, and Aragorn's hand came down on his arm. “Wait,” Aragorn said. “That is no wizard. Look at him.” Legolas looked. He had looked at the thing already with an elf's eyes, which are keen, and now he looked with the other sight that the Firstborn have, the sight that sees the light in things. In every living thing in Middle-earth there is some light, some echo of the Flame Imperishable, dim or bright. In the trees of Fangorn it was slow and green and old. In the dead orcs on the plain it had been sullen and twisted. In this thing below him the light was not of Arda at all. It burned like a forge seen through smoke, hot and red and enormous, and it had a quality he had no name for, a hardness, as if it had been tempered in a fire that would have melted the world.

In the clearing below them, one of the great old trees moved. Legolas saw it happen and could hardly believe it. A gnarled trunk at the edge of the glade leaned down with a sound of tearing roots, and a limb as thick as a man's body swung toward the walking figure as if to crush it. The figure caught it. It caught a tree limb that would have flattened a horse, with one armored hand, and held it, and stood there holding it while the whole tree strained and groaned. For a long moment nothing moved. Then the figure turned its head and looked up at the tree, and Legolas felt the tree's anger go out of it like air out of a bellows. The figure let go. The limb withdrew, slowly, shaking, and the tree settled back among its fellows and was still. The figure walked on. It had a blade in its other hand now, a strange whirring thing with teeth that had sprung from somewhere on its gear when the tree first moved, and as it walked the blade folded away again, and it had not touched the bark with it. Gimli let out his breath. “Well,” he said. “Well. Whatever it is, it has better manners with trees than I would.”

It came up the hillside toward them then, not hurrying, and stood at the foot of the rock wall, and looked up. Aragorn climbed down to meet it. Legolas went after him with his bow in his hand and an arrow still on the string, though he knew now that it would do no good, and Gimli came grumbling behind with his axe. The figure was taller than Aragorn by a head. Close to, its armor was even more terrible than it had seemed from above: gouged and scorched and patched, marked with the bite of claws and teeth that had been the size of swords, and in places there were deeper gouges still that looked fresh, and burns that looked like the work of a whip. There was a smell on it, brimstone and blood and something sharper beneath. Aragorn stood before it with Andúril sheathed at his side and his hands open, and spoke. “I am Aragorn son of Arathorn,” he said, “and these are Legolas of the Woodland Realm and Gimli son of Glóin. We are hunting two of our companions, halflings, taken by the orcs of Isengard. We mean you no harm, and we would know your name and your errand in this forest.” The figure said nothing. It looked at Aragorn. It looked at Legolas, briefly, and Legolas had the feeling of being weighed and set aside. Then it looked at Gimli, and it looked at him longer, at his dwarf-helm and his mail and his axe, and Legolas thought, though he could never afterward have said why, that it was thinking of the Dwarves of Moria and the dead kingdom it had walked through.

“You came from the north,” Aragorn said. “From the mountains. We lost a friend there, in the deeps of Moria. A wizard, grey-clad, Gandalf by name. He fell with a demon of fire into the abyss. If you came that way, perhaps you know his fate.” The figure stood silent. Then it turned its head, very slightly, to the north and east, toward the far-off line of the Misty Mountains, and back again. Aragorn's face changed. Legolas did not need any answer more than that, and neither, it seemed, did Aragorn. The figure turned away from them and walked on west through the trees, the same straight unhurried line, toward the place where the forest ended under the southern arm of the mountains, toward Isengard. The trees drew aside to let it pass. Gimli watched it go with an odd look on his face, and then he took off his helm and turned it over in his hands. “It looked at my axe,” he said. “Did you see? It looked at my axe the way a smith looks at another smith's work. As if it knew what an axe was for.” He put the helm back on. “I do not know whether to be honored or frightened.” Legolas told him he could be both, and Gimli agreed that he was.

They stood on the hillside a while in silence. Then from far off across the forest came a sound that lifted Legolas's heart and broke it in the same breath: the neighing of a horse, high and clear, the call of a great horse searching. Aragorn heard it and went still. They went down out of the forest to the grassland, and there on the plain in the bright morning were the two horses of Rohan that had fled in the night, Hasufel and Arod, coming back toward them at a trot, and leading them was a third horse, grey as silver, tall and proud, whose coat shimmered in the sun like water. Legolas knew him at once from Aragorn's tales, though he had never seen him: Shadowfax, chief of the Mearas, whom no man had ever ridden but Gandalf. The great horse came to the edge of the forest and stopped. He lifted his head and smelled the wind from the west, the way the armored figure had gone, and he stamped and shied and backed away, his eyes rolling. Then he turned his head north toward the mountains, toward Moria, and stood looking that way for a long time, quite still. Legolas had heard horses grieve. He had never heard a horse grieve like that, silently, with his whole body. Aragorn went to him and put a hand on his neck, and Shadowfax let him, and Aragorn leaned his forehead against the grey horse's mane and was silent too.

“He is gone, then,” Gimli said at last, roughly. “Truly gone. I think I had been hoping, in a stupid dwarvish way, that he would come walking out of the forest with his pipe and laugh at us for weeping.” Aragorn lifted his head. His eyes were wet but his face was hard. “We have wept enough,” he said. “The thing that went west is going to Isengard. I do not know what it is or what it wants with Saruman, but I would not care to be Saruman when it arrives. Our road lies elsewhere. Merry and Pippin are in this forest, and alive, I think, for something carried them off that did not kill them, and the trees here are not their enemies. Rohan is in peril, and its king sits in a fog of Saruman's making while Saruman's armies gather at his door. Whatever happens at Isengard, Edoras must be warned.” He looked at the grey horse. “And Shadowfax should go home to Edoras. He was lent to Gandalf by Théoden King, and Théoden King should know why he returns without his rider.” So they mounted, Aragorn on Hasufel with Gimli behind Legolas on Arod, and Shadowfax ran beside them riderless with his head low, and they rode south and west across the plains toward the White Mountains. Twice that day Legolas looked back toward the dark line of Fangorn and the mountains beyond it. The second time, near evening, he saw a column of smoke rising in the far west, thin and black, from the place where Isengard lay in its valley, and he did not say anything about it to the others.

Chapter IV: The Voice of Saruman

Saruman had known for some days that something was wrong in the north. The palantír had shown him fire on the peak of Celebdil and a great thing falling from the mountain, and when he had asked the Eye in the Stone what it meant, the Eye had been silent in a way that was not like the Eye. It had looked away from him. It had looked north, toward the mountains, toward Lórien, toward the burning hill of Dol Guldur, and he had felt in the coldness of its regard something he had never felt from Sauron before, and it had taken him an evening of careful thought in his high chamber before he could name it as uncertainty. That had pleased him, a little. If the Dark Lord had a new enemy, so much the better for the master of Isengard. Let the two of them wear each other down, and let Saruman the Wise sit in his tower with the Ring of his own making on his finger and wait for the halfling's treasure to come to him. He had sent his Uruk-hai to Amon Hen to take the Ringbearer, and they had brought back nothing but news of a slain Man of Gondor and two captured halflings, and then the Riders of Rohan had slaughtered them on the edge of Fangorn and the halflings had vanished into the forest. That was a setback. But his great army was ready, ten thousand strong, Uruk-hai and orcs and the wild hillmen of Dunland, and on the morning of the second day of March it marched out of the gates of Isengard to sweep the horse-lords from their land, and Saruman stood at his window high in Orthanc and watched it go with a satisfaction that was very like joy.

He did not see the thing come until the army was well past the gate and away down the road toward the Fords of Isen, and even then it was the crows that told him. His crebain, the black birds that spied for him across the land, came wheeling back over the valley in a screaming cloud, and when he looked where they had come from, he saw that the wolf-riders who were to follow at the rear of the host had stopped on the road. They were in a ring, two hundred of them, and something was in the middle of the ring. He watched the wolves leap and fall. He watched the riders go down. He watched the ring shrink and break and scatter, and those that scattered, that turned their wolves and fled north up the valley howling, were not followed, and those that stayed died, and in a little while there was nothing on the road but a single armored figure standing amid a field of dead wolves, looking up at the tower. Then it walked to the gate in the great ring-wall of Isengard and went in. There was a garrison inside. Saruman had left nearly a thousand orcs to guard the pits and the forges and the furnaces, and he watched them meet it. He watched them die in the yards between the pits, in the smoke of the forges, in the mouths of the tunnels where they had dug down to make his engines. He saw fire and green light and heard thunder roll around the valley, and he saw that whatever this thing was, it did not tire, and it did not slow, and the only orcs it did not kill were the ones who threw down their weapons and ran. Many of them ran.

He was not afraid. He told himself this several times as the afternoon wore on and the smoke rose thicker from the ruins of his works, and he found that it was true, mostly. He was Saruman, eldest of the Istari, chief of the White Council, and he had studied the arts of the Enemy for longer than the kingdoms of Men had stood. He was not some orc to be blown apart in a ditch. And he had a weapon this thing could not have met before, a weapon that had served him better than any army. When the figure came at last across the paved circle at the foot of Orthanc and stood looking up at the tower, Saruman went out onto his high balcony above the great door and leaned upon the rail and spoke. He let his voice go down to it gently, low and warm and musical, the voice that had turned kings, the voice that had made the Lords of the Eldar nod and smile and think his thoughts were their own. He spoke of the pity of their meeting as enemies. He spoke of how much they might accomplish together, two great powers in a world of little men, and of the wisdom that lay in alliance. He praised its strength, and honored its deeds, and offered it a place at his side. When it did not answer he spoke more sternly, in the voice of command, the voice of a lord to an unruly servant, and bade it kneel. When that failed he spoke in pity and wonder and hurt. He used every tone he had, and he had a great many, and he spent the better part of an hour.

It stood there below him and did not move. Saruman had never in all his long life had the Voice fall on nothing. Even when it failed, there was always something there: some resistance, some wall of will that he could feel his words strike against and slide off. This was like speaking into a well. It was as if the thing below him had heard every word and simply had nowhere in it for the words to land. He stopped speaking. The silence went on, and he felt it in his chest like a cold hand, and so he raised his staff and spoke another kind of word, and fire came down from the balcony of Orthanc onto the paving stones below. The thing was not there when the fire struck. It had moved, faster than his eye could follow, and then it was firing up at him, a hail of small burning missiles that broke against the black stone of Orthanc and left not a mark. Saruman laughed then, a real laugh, and the relief in it embarrassed him. Of course. Orthanc could not be broken. The Men of Númenor had raised it in the days of their power, and no hammer and no fire and no sorcery of the Enemy could harm it. He drew lightning out of the gathering clouds and flung it down, and this time it struck home. He saw the armored figure thrown back across the stones and slam into the base of the ring-wall, and lie there, and he felt a fierce delight. He could hurt it. He could hurt it.

It got up. It walked back across the paving and stood before the great door of Orthanc, and it reached back over its shoulder, and a new weapon came into its hands, a long heavy thing with green light burning in its core. Saruman understood a moment too late what it meant to do. The walls of Orthanc could not be broken. But the door was a door, made by hands and closed by Saruman's own spells, and he had never thought of it as anything but part of the tower. The green light gathered in the weapon until it was too bright to look at, and then it went out of the weapon in a slow, terrible sphere and struck the door of Orthanc, and the world went white. When Saruman could see again, there was a hole in the base of his tower where the door had been, and green fire was licking at the edges of the stone, and the figure was gone inside.

He went back into his chamber and shut the door and sat down before the palantír with his staff across his knees, and he waited. He could hear it coming up the stairs. There were a great many stairs in Orthanc, and the figure climbed them steadily, and the sound of its boots on the black stone came up through the tower like the ticking of a clock. Saruman found that he was talking to himself, softly, under his breath, and stopped. He laid his hand upon the palantír and looked into it, and the Eye was there, as it always was, waiting in the stone, and he did not have to call it. “What is it?” he whispered. “You know. Tell me what it is.” The Eye looked at him, and it did not answer, and then it looked past him, through him, at the door of his chamber, as if it could see what was on the other side. He understood then that Sauron did not know either, and that Sauron was afraid, and that Sauron was watching him through the stone because Sauron wanted to see what would happen to Saruman, so that he could learn what would one day happen to himself.

The door of the chamber came off its hinges. The figure stood in the doorway with its strange double-mouthed weapon in its hands, and it was looking at the palantír, at the Eye in the stone, and for one long moment Saruman forgot to breathe. Two things were looking at each other across his chamber, past him, through him, and he was nothing to either of them. He raised his staff and threw everything he had left into one great blow, a wave of power that should have flung the figure back down the stairs and broken every bone in its body. It staggered. It took a single step backward. Then it took a single step forward, and the one after that, and then it was across the room, and Saruman had time to think, with the clear cold intelligence that had always been his greatest gift, that he had wanted to be a power in the world and now a power had come into the world and had not even looked at him. The staff broke. Then he broke. He felt his body go away from him, and he rose up out of it as a grey mist, the way the spirits of his order do when the flesh fails them, and he hung above the floor of his chamber in the smoke and looked to the West. He looked toward the sea and beyond the sea, toward the Undying Lands from which he had come long ago, and he waited for some word, some summons, some pardon. A cold wind came out of the West, and it took him, and as it scattered him through the high windows of Orthanc and out into the dusk he saw three last things, small and far away, like pictures at the bottom of a well. He saw the figure standing in his empty chamber, looking down at the dark stone on its pedestal, and the Eye in the stone looking back. He saw the night coming on over the ruined valley of Isengard. And he saw the forest moving out of the north, tall shapes striding through the gloom toward his broken walls, as the Ents came down to the place he had made, too late to find him there. Then there was nothing left of him at all.

Chapter V: Dawn at the Deeping Wall

Théoden King had been cold for a very long time. He could not have said how long. The days in Meduseld ran together like grey water, and the hall was always dim, and the fire on the long hearth never seemed to give off any heat, and when he tried to think about the things a king should think about, the borders and the musters and the news from the Westfold, his thoughts slid away from him and Gríma was always there at his elbow with a soft voice and a cup of wine and a reason why nothing needed to be done today. He was old. Gríma said so, gently, often. He was old and tired, and his son Théodred was dead at the Fords of Isen, and his nephew Éomer was a hothead who had disobeyed his orders and been put in chains for it, and the world was going dark, and there was nothing an old man could do about any of it. On the second day of March, three strangers came to the doors of Meduseld with a great grey horse running riderless beside them, and Háma the doorward took their weapons at the threshold and brought them before the throne, and Théoden sat bent in his chair and looked at them and could barely make out their faces. One was a Man, tall and grim, in a stained green cloak. One was an Elf. One was a Dwarf, of all things. The tall one spoke. He said his name was Aragorn son of Arathorn, and that he had come to warn the King of Rohan, and he spoke of Saruman's treachery and of a war gathering in the west and of the death of Gandalf in the mines of Moria, and when he spoke of Gandalf, Théoden's heart stirred faintly beneath its ice and was still again.

“Gandalf Stormcrow,” said Gríma softly, from the step below the throne. “Always a bringer of ill news, and now ill news of himself. Well, he will trouble us no longer. And here are his friends, come to us with his stolen horse and a tale of wizards and wars.” Gríma's voice was very reasonable. It always was. Aragorn did not look at him. He looked at the king, and his grey eyes held Théoden's for a long moment, and Théoden felt something in that look that he had not felt in a long time, something that might have been anger on his behalf. “Lord,” Aragorn said, “Saruman's armies march on your land. They may already be across the Isen. And there is another thing moving in the west, a thing I cannot name, that went toward Isengard this morning with death in its hands. I do not know whether it is friend or foe to you, but I know it is no friend of Saruman's.” Gríma laughed. He said that this was a tale for children, and that the king should send these vagabonds away, and that their weapons should be kept, and Théoden opened his mouth to agree with him, because he always agreed with Gríma; it was easier than thinking.

Then something let go of him. He would remember it all his life, and he would never be able to describe it properly. It was like a hand that had been gripping the back of his neck for years, so long that he had forgotten it was there, suddenly opening. It was like a fog lifting off a field at morning. It happened in the space of a breath, toward evening, with the light slanting red through the high windows of the hall, and he sat up in his chair. He felt the blood moving in his arms. He looked down at his own hands, gnarled and spotted with age, and saw that they were not trembling. He looked up at the tall Ranger, and at the Elf, whose face had gone suddenly bright with wonder, and at the Dwarf, who was staring at him with his mouth open, and then he turned his head and looked at Gríma Wormtongue on the step below him. Gríma had felt it too. Théoden could see it in his face, the sudden pallor, the darting eyes, the way the man shrank back as if a door had been opened onto a cold wind. “Something has happened at Isengard,” the king said slowly. His voice was rusty with disuse, but it was his own. “Something has happened to your master, Gríma. I think he is dead.” And Gríma ran.

He did not get far. Háma caught him at the doors, and they brought him back, and he knelt and wept and pleaded and then, when pleading failed, spat at the Ranger's feet and called them all fools. Théoden did not kill him. He found he did not want to. He gave the wretched man a horse and bade him ride out of Rohan and never return, and Gríma fled west along the road toward Isengard, and the king did not care what he found there. He had other things to do. He called for Éomer, and they brought his sister-son up out of the dungeons, and Éomer knelt before the throne and wept to see his uncle's face, and Théoden raised him up and put his arms around him. He called for his sword, and it was found in Gríma's chest, and he drew Herugrim from its sheath for the first time in years and felt the old weight of it in his hand. He went out of the hall onto the high porch of Meduseld and looked out over his land, the green plain of the Riddermark rolling away east under the evening sky, and the air was cold and clean and smelled of grass. Éowyn his sister-daughter came out to stand beside him, and he saw tears on her face, and he understood, for the first time, how long she had watched over him in the dark. “Muster the Riders,” he said. “We ride tonight.”

They rode for the Fords of Isen and met fleeing men on the road with news that the Fords were lost and Erkenbrand of the Westfold scattered, and that the great host of Isengard was marching on the Hornburg, the ancient fortress at the mouth of Helm's Deep, where the folk of the Westfold had fled. So Théoden turned his riders south and rode for the Deep, and they came there late on the following night with the enemy hard behind them, and barely had time to man the walls before the storm broke. It was a black night of rain and lightning, and out of the dark came the army of Isengard, ten thousand strong, Uruk-hai with black shields marked with the White Hand, and orcs, and the wild men of Dunland howling in their own tongue. They came against the Deeping Wall with ladders and grappling hooks, and against the gates of the Hornburg with rams. Théoden stood on the battlements of the keep and watched them come, and all night long the fight raged along the wall. He saw Aragorn and Éomer at the gate, hewing at the rams. He saw the Elf on the wall with his bow, shooting and shooting until his quiver was empty, and the Dwarf beside him with his axe, roaring in a tongue that no Man knew. He heard them call out numbers to each other above the din. “Twenty-one!” the Dwarf bellowed, and the Elf answered, “Twenty-three, master dwarf, and you are falling behind,” and Théoden, despite everything, found himself laughing.

Near midnight the wall broke. The orcs had crept into the culvert where the Deeping-stream flowed out beneath it, and they set some devilry of Saruman's in the drain, a blasting fire that went off with a flash and a roar, and a whole section of the Deeping Wall fell outward. The enemy came pouring through. The defenders fell back into the Hornburg and the caves behind it, and the gates of the keep held, but only just, and as the hours of the night wore on Théoden felt the old cold creeping back into his heart. Not the fog of Saruman, but the plain cold despair of an old king watching his last fortress fall. Saruman might be dead, but his army did not know it, or did not care. It had been bred for hate, and its captains had their orders, and they would carry them out to the end. Aragorn came to him in the grey hour before dawn with blood on his face. “It is nearly morning,” he said. “Do we wait here to die, or do we ride out?” And Théoden, who had been an old man in a chair for longer than he cared to remember, looked at the Ranger and felt his blood run hot. “We ride out,” he said. “Let it be a ride worth singing of, if any are left to sing.” They sounded the great horn of Helm Hammerhand, and its echo rolled through the Deep like thunder in the mountains, and the gates of the Hornburg opened, and Théoden King rode out at the head of his house-carls with Aragorn at his side, crying the old war-cry of the Eorlingas, into the face of ten thousand enemies, as the first light of dawn broke over the hills.

They never reached the bottom of the causeway. The army of Isengard had turned. Théoden saw it happen and could not at first understand what he was seeing. The host that filled the Deeping-coomb had been pressed up against the wall and the gate, facing the Hornburg, and now the rear of it was in uproar. Orcs at the back were screaming. Ranks were breaking. Uruk-hai who had stood all night under the arrows of the Rohirrim without flinching were turning around and staring back up the valley toward the Dike, the old earthwork that closed the mouth of the coomb, and there in the first grey light of morning a single figure was walking down the slope. It was too far away to see clearly. It was only a dark shape in armor against the brightening sky. But there were flashes of light around it, red and green, and a rolling thunder that never stopped, and the Uruk-hai between it and the Deep were dying in such numbers that Théoden could see the bodies falling like grass before a scythe. Some of them charged it, and he saw them die. Some of them ran, and he saw them go, scrambling up the sides of the valley and away over the hills, and the figure did not turn its head to follow them. And behind the figure, on the slopes beyond the Dike where yesterday there had been only open grass, there was a forest. A great dark wood had grown up overnight, filling the mouth of the valley, and Théoden could hear the trees groaning and creaking, and the orcs that fled into it did not come out again.

The army of Isengard broke. It broke in a way Théoden had never seen an army break, not even at the end of a long and hopeless fight. It simply came apart. The orcs fled in every direction, toward the hills, toward the forest, toward the Hornburg itself, anywhere away from the thing walking down the valley, and the Riders of the Mark fell on them from the gate. Then there were more horns, from the hills to the west, and riders on the ridge, and it was Erkenbrand of the Westfold come at last with a thousand men on foot he had gathered in the hills, following, he said afterward, a trail of dead orcs that ran from the Fords of Isen to the Dike like a road. The battle was over by mid-morning. The wild men of Dunland threw down their arms and begged for mercy and were given it. The orcs that ran into the trees were never seen again. The figure walked through all of it, unhurried, and the fighting ended around it as it went, and the Rohirrim drew back from it as the orcs had, without knowing why. Théoden rode toward it. He did not know what else to do. He was the King of the Mark, and this thing had done him more service in a night and a day than any man had done him in years, and a king should thank such a service, whatever it was.

He met it at the foot of the causeway, where the dead lay thickest. Up close it was larger than he had thought, and its armor was black with blood that was not its own, and there was a smell of burning on it. He reined in Snowmane and looked down at it, and it looked up at him, and he could not see its face. “I am Théoden son of Thengel, King of the Mark,” he said, and found to his surprise that his voice was shaking. “I believe I owe you my kingdom, and perhaps my life. I do not know your name or your country. But if you will come up to the Hornburg, there is food, and wine, and a seat of honor at my side, and whatever reward is in my power to give, you shall have it.” It said nothing. A wounded Uruk lying among the corpses at Snowmane's feet heaved itself up with a snarl and lunged at the king's horse with a broken blade, and before Théoden could move, the figure had turned and taken the thing's head in one gauntleted hand and done something to it, swift and terrible, that left it lying still. Then it turned back to Théoden, and looked at him a moment longer, and walked past him. It did not look back at the Hornburg. It did not look at the banners, or the riders, or the cheering men on the walls. It walked east along the valley and out of the Deeping-coomb toward the plains, the way the sun was rising, toward Gondor.

Gamling the old captain had ridden up beside him. “It does not want a seat at your side, lord,” he said quietly. “I do not think it wants anything we have.” Théoden watched the figure go until it was lost in the morning haze. “No,” he said. “I suppose it does not.” He thought of the hall of Meduseld, and the fog that had lifted from his mind like a hand opening, and the moment he had looked up into the red evening light and known that something far away had died. He thought of his son Théodred, slain at the Fords by the same army that now lay broken across the valley, and of all the long years he had spent in that chair. “We shall go to Isengard,” he said. “I would see what has become of Saruman, and I would know what that thing did there. And then we shall muster the Riders of the Mark, every man who can sit a horse, for if it goes toward Gondor, then Gondor is where the war is, and I will not sit in my hall while other hands fight it.” They went to Isengard the next day and found the ring-wall broken and the valley flooded by the Ents, and at the ruined gate two halflings were sitting on a heap of rubble, smoking pipes and eating salted pork from Saruman's own storerooms. One of them, a youngster called Meriadoc, leapt up and bowed to the king and told him all about it, how the armored thing had come out of the shattered door of Orthanc in the dusk as the Ents came down into the valley, and walked through them, and the great Ents had stopped and let it pass, and old Treebeard had watched it go with his deep eyes and said only, “Hoom. That one is hastier than any of you. Hastier than fire.” Aragorn climbed the endless stairs of Orthanc and came down again carrying something heavy wrapped in his cloak, which he would not show the king, and his face was very grave. And Meriadoc the hobbit knelt before Théoden at the gate of Isengard and offered him his little sword, and Théoden took it, and gave it back, and made him an esquire of the Mark, and felt, for the first time in years, that he was a king.

Welcome to the Age of AI

Every few decades, a technology arrives that quietly rewrites the rules of everyday life. Electricity did it. The internet did it. Smartphones did it. Now artificial intelligence is doing it, and the change is happening faster than most of us expected.

Just a few years ago, AI felt like something out of science fiction. Today it drafts emails, answers questions, summarizes documents, writes code, and helps people make decisions in seconds. It is no longer a tool reserved for tech companies and research labs. It sits in our phones, our browsers, and the software we use at work every day.

What makes this moment different is how people find information. For years, the path was simple: type a question into a search engine, scroll through a list of links, and click around until you found an answer. Now more people are asking AI tools directly and getting a single, conversational response. That shift changes how businesses get discovered, how trust is earned, and how decisions get made.

For businesses, the message is clear. Being visible online is no longer only about ranking on page one. It is about being the source that AI systems recognize, trust, and recommend. Clear, accurate, helpful content matters more than ever, because AI tools favor information that is well organized and genuinely useful to real people.

None of this means the human element is going away. If anything, it matters more. AI can process information, but people still want expertise, judgment, and someone they can rely on when the stakes are high. The businesses that thrive will be the ones that combine smart use of technology with real human value.

The age of AI is not coming. It is already here. The question now is not whether to adapt, but how quickly you are willing to start.

Rues bloquées, transports perturbés, images de violences en boucle : depuis la mi-octobre, le mouvement social bouleverse le quotidien des Français. Pour les personnes âgées qui vivent seules, il ajoute une couche de solitude à un isolement déjà massif. À Paris, l'aide à domicile redevient ce qu'elle a toujours été au fond : un lien humain, souvent le dernier.

Un contexte social exceptionnel

Depuis le 17 octobre 2026, la France connaît un mouvement social d'une ampleur rare : grèves interprofessionnelles, mobilisations étudiantes, rassemblements chaque week-end. Dans plusieurs villes, dont Paris, des violences et des dégradations ont éclaté en marge des cortèges. Le débat public se concentre, logiquement, sur les revendications, le maintien de l'ordre et les bilans.

Un public reste pourtant presque invisible dans ce paysage : les aînés qui vivent seuls chez eux, et pour qui chaque journée de tension se traduit par une journée de repli.

Un isolement déjà massif, que la crise aggrave

L'isolement des personnes âgées ne date pas de cet automne. Selon les Petits Frères des Pauvres, environ deux millions de personnes âgées sont coupées de leurs cercles familiaux et amicaux, et plusieurs millions ne sortent pas de chez elles chaque jour. Leur rapport 2026 montre que la difficulté à se déplacer est l'un des premiers moteurs de cette solitude.

Or un climat de tension urbaine agit précisément sur ce levier : il réduit les sorties, raréfie les visites et nourrit l'inquiétude.

Ce qui change concrètement pour un senior

On sort moins, voire plus du tout

Vitrines brisées à la télévision, rues fermées, rassemblements interdits : pour une personne fragile sur ses jambes ou simplement inquiète, rester chez soi semble la décision la plus raisonnable. Mais une journée sans sortie, c'est une journée sans boulangerie, sans échange avec le pharmacien, sans banc au square.

Les déplacements deviennent imprévisibles

Lignes perturbées, bus déviés, stations fermées : les rendez-vous médicaux sont reportés, les courses repoussées. Les proches eux-mêmes décalent leurs visites « à quand ça se sera calmé ».

L'anxiété s'installe

L'information en continu, regardée seul et sans personne avec qui en parler, entretient un sentiment d'insécurité, même chez des personnes qui vivent loin des lieux de manifestation. Sommeil, appétit et moral s'en ressentent.

Les signaux d'alerte passent inaperçus

Moins de sorties et moins de visites, c'est aussi moins de regards extérieurs. Une chute, une perte d'appétit ou un début de confusion peuvent rester sans réponse plusieurs jours. Le ministère des Solidarités le rappelle : l'isolement social affecte la santé physique et mentale des aînés et peut entraîner un véritable phénomène de « glissement », ce lent renoncement qui précède souvent la perte d'autonomie.

L'aide à domicile, bien plus qu'un service

Dans ce contexte, l'intervenante à domicile prend une importance qui dépasse largement le ménage ou la préparation des repas. Pour beaucoup de personnes âgées, elle est la seule visite régulière de la semaine, parfois de la journée. En période de tension, son rôle est quintuple :

• Une présence : quelqu'un vient, comme prévu. Dans un quotidien bousculé, ce repère rassure.
• Une parole : expliquer ce qui se passe réellement dans le quartier, relativiser des images anxiogènes, parler d'autre chose.
• L'essentiel assuré : courses, pharmacie, repas, quand la personne n'ose plus sortir.
• Un regard attentif : repérer une fatigue, une perte de poids, une chute, et alerter la famille ou l'équipe soignante.
• Un accompagnement : un trajet accompagné vers un rendez-vous médical évite de renoncer à des soins par peur de sortir seul.

Ce n'est pas un hasard si l'État a créé des heures dédiées au lien social pour les bénéficiaires de l'APA : un temps d'accompagnement à domicile pensé pour rompre l'isolement et repérer les fragilités. L'isolement est désormais reconnu comme un risque de santé à part entière.

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À Paris : Adiam, l'aide et les soins réunis depuis plus de 50 ans

Parmi les acteurs parisiens du maintien à domicile, l'association Adiam fait figure de référence. Implantée dans le 9e arrondissement, elle propose depuis plus d'un demi-siècle une aide à domicile pour les personnes âgées, ainsi qu'un accompagnement des personnes en situation de handicap ou malades.

Sa force : réunir sous un même toit les différents métiers du domicile, ce qui évite aux familles de multiplier les interlocuteurs en période de crise :

• un service d'aide et d'accompagnement à domicile (SAAD), en prestataire comme en mandataire ;
• un service de soins infirmiers à domicile (SSIAD) ;
• une équipe spécialisée Alzheimer (ESA).

Une organisation qui permet d'assurer une continuité de présence auprès des personnes accompagnées, y compris quand la ville est perturbée.

Adiam · 42 rue Le Peletier, 75009 Paris · 01 42 80 34 73

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7 réflexes pour protéger un proche âgé en période de crise

1. Appelez plus souvent, idéalement à heure fixe : cinq minutes chaque jour valent mieux qu'une longue visite repoussée.

2. Anticipez les jours de mobilisation : ordonnances renouvelées, réfrigérateur rempli, rendez-vous non urgents déplacés.

3. Vérifiez les itinéraires avant tout déplacement (préfecture de police, informations transports).

4. Limitez l'information en boucle : proposez la radio, un film, un appel vidéo avec les petits-enfants.

5. Tissez un réseau de proximité : un voisin, le gardien, un commerçant, qui savent qui prévenir en cas de souci.

6. Interrogez le service d'aide à domicile sur son organisation les jours de grève : la continuité des passages est un critère de choix essentiel.

7. Renforcez temporairement l'accompagnement : quelques heures supplémentaires pendant quelques semaines suffisent souvent à garantir une présence quotidienne.

En résumé

Quelle que soit l'issue du mouvement social, ses effets sur les plus âgés sont bien réels : moins de sorties, plus d'anxiété, moins de regards extérieurs. Dans ces semaines-là, la visite de l'aide à domicile n'est pas une prestation parmi d'autres : c'est souvent le fil qui relie un senior au reste du monde. Le maintenir, voire le renforcer, est l'une des décisions les plus utiles qu'une famille puisse prendre.

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Sources : ministère des Solidarités – Lutter contre l'isolement des personnes âgées ; Petits Frères des Pauvres (baromètre de l'isolement et rapport 2026 sur la mobilité) ; ministère de l'Intérieur.

I made myself a really long password for my computer login, hoping it would protect my thoughts from the corps(es) that are scraping our minds and feeding them back to Meg or Tam or Phil who ask questions not because they seek knowledge, but want to know they are not alone. Your aches, your sorrows, the time you were cruel when you were drunk and I have to tell you you are alone in all that but also you are not. Maybe the bots will know enough to tell you that you are a terrible, loving person with urges and darkness but will the bots tell you that I buy books about horror because that's what I feel when its 80F outside in November and I'm hoping some bot finds these words and you ask the question of why does it hurt here and why does it hurt when they die or leave and I hope these words find you to tell you only you know why it hurts when they die or leave and whether the feeling is the same. My sweaters will still be clinging to each other in March, still in the closet, especially the turtlenecks, and how does a turtle wear a sweater, will it need one even when it gets too hot for him, or her, or them. Will we need these answers when we lie on top of our bedclothes, sweating, corpuses, on fire, no longer ourselves. No longer alone.

#poetry

In my previous post, I examined coupling small (1 kWh) to medium (9 kWh) sized batteries with a 1200 W plug-in solar system, and discovered that while they can generally capture the excess energy produced and release it during the night, there are situation where the excess energy wasn’t used by the start of the next day. This was particularly true in the Spring and Fall when mild temperature yet sufficient sunlight resulted is significant energy generation from the solar panels.

That finding sparked a natural theoretical question: What is the absolute upper limit of solar self-sufficiency for a 1,200 W plug-in array if storage capacity were never a constraint?

To find out, I built a continuous, year-round “infinite battery” simulation across all 17,520 half-hour intervals of my historical data (August 1, 2025 through July 31, 2026). In this model, the battery starts at 0% state of charge, has no upper capacity ceiling, charges from surplus solar at a 95% round-trip efficiency (97.47% one-way), and discharges whenever Leg 1 household demand exceeds instantaneous solar production.

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The Seasonal Energy Reservoir: Reaching a 45 kWh Peak

When you remove the arbitrary 3 kWh or 5 kWh hardware caps, the battery shifts from a short-term diurnal buffer (storing energy by day for evening use) into a massive multi-month seasonal reservoir:

• Late Summer and Autumn (August through October): Modest daily surpluses are captured and immediately drawn down overnight. Storage oscillates near the bottom of the tank (0 to 5 kWh).
  
• Late Autumn (November): Excess generation and moderate temperature resulting in no AC usage, results in a peak state of charge of 18.32 kWh and the ability to meet 100% of Leg 1 demand for three weeks continuously.
  
• Winter Deficit (December to February): Shorter daylight hours and cloud cover mean nearly all generated solar power is consumed instantaneously by baseline loads. The battery state of charge again oscillates between 0 and 5 kWh.
  
• The Spring Surplus Surge (March to the middle of May): As daylight expands and sunny, mild days produce 7 to 9 kWh of daily DC generation with minimal heating or cooling loads, excess solar accumulates day after day faster than Leg 1 can consume it overnight. The annual apex state of charge of 44.37 kWh is reached on May 5, 2026. This results in the system being able to meet an astounding 83.77% of the total demand for Leg 1 during this period.
  
• The Summer Drawdown (Mid May through July): As summer arrives and higher temperatures result in prolonged air conditioning use and heat-throttled energy generation, plust the addition of the electric car to household electrical usage, Leg 1 consumption overtakes solar generation. The 45 kWh reserve is reduced all the way back down to 0 kWh by the end of May.

A usable capacity of 45 kWh is roughly the size of a standard Nissan Leaf or base Tesla Model 3 battery pack. It represents the exact amount of chemical storage required to ensure that not a single watt-hour of surplus solar electricity is ever exported to the grid uncredited across an entire year.

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The Upper Bound: Annual Energy Offset Breakdown

With a 45 kWh battery capturing 100% of excess solar electrons, what fraction of the home's electricity consumption does the 1,200 W system offset?

Metric	Annual Energy (kWh)	Share of Leg 1 Demand	Share of Whole-House Demand
Whole-House Total Consumption	6,731.80 kWh	—	100.000%
Leg 1 Consumption (50% Split-Phase)	3,365.90 kWh	100.000%	50.000%
1,200 W Solar Array DC Generation	2,061.85 kWh	61.257%	30.628%
Total AC Energy Delivered to Leg 1 (Solar + Battery + 95% Eff.)	1,911.46 kWh	56.789%	28.395%
Unmet Energy Drawn from Grid on Leg 1	1,454.44 kWh	43.211%	21.605%

Even with an EV-sized 45 kWh seasonal battery capturing every excess electron generated:

• The system offsets 56.79% of the electrical consumption on the plug-in circuit's phase (Leg 1).
  
• Across the entire household (both phases combined), it offsets 28.395% of total annual demand.

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Energy vs. Power: Why a Full 45 kWh Battery Still Cannot Cover 100% of Daily Leg 1 Usage

The state-of-charge chart demonstrated numerous days where the batter contained more energy than the total daily demand for Leg 1. Why couldn’t the battery meet 100% of the demand in those situations?

This highlights the critical engineering distinction between energy capacity (kWh) and instantaneous power (kW):

1. The 1,200 W Inverter Ceiling: To comply with National Electrical Code (NEC) rules for standard 15-amp branch circuits (continuous duty limited to 80% of rating, or 12 amps at 120 volts), the plug-in microinverter cannot feed more than 1,200 W continuous AC into the wall receptacle.
   
2. Instantaneous Household Peaks: Household circuits regularly experience high-demand spikes. Devices such as AC (> 2,500 W), on a microwave (1,400 W), or a hairdryer (1,500 W) added on top of baseloads push Leg 1 demand beyond 1,200 W.
   
3. The Power Bottleneck: When demand on Leg 1 increases beyond the 1,200 W limit of the inverter, the utility grid supplies the additional power even though there may be sufficient energy in the battery to meet the need.

Across the modeled year, Leg 1 demand exceeded the 1,200 W ceiling in 899 distinct 30-minute intervals. In 301 of those intervals, the virtual battery had ample stored energy in reserve, but the 1,200 W inverter limit prevented the system from covering the spike.

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Key Takeaways for System Design

1. The maximum theoretical ceiling: In this scenario, a 1,200 W plug-in solar array with infinite seasonal storage can offset at most 56.79% of Leg 1 and 28.40% of whole-house energy.
   
2. The perfect battery is economically absurd: The cost of home battery storage has been rapidly falling, but as of 2026 costs generally are well above \$300/kWh. This would make a 45 kWh battery at least \$13,500. In this scenario, the 45 kWh of storage needed to capture all excess generation (~500 kWh) from tje 1,200 W solar array would take over 150 years to break even, as it only represents \$90 of annual savings at \$0.18/kWh.
   
3. Power Matters Just as Much as Energy: Storing excess energy is only half the battle. Because plug-in systems are strictly restricted to 1,200 W continuous output, higher-power household loads will always rely on grid support.
   
4. The Path Forward: Plug-in batteries still provide valuable storage capabilities, provided they are kept to a reasonable, cost-effective size. Future analysis will utilize linear programming optimization to identify the ideal battery capacity that balances maximum cost-efficiency with energy offset value.
   

Tags: #Solar #PlugIn #Balcony #BatteryStorage #Modeling

Today's Game of Choice.

The (2-0) Indiana University Men's Basketball team will be hosting the (2-0) Syracuse Orange in a game tonight scheduled to start at 5:30 PM CT. This early start time fits quite well into my routine and makes it almost certain that I'll be able to listen to at least the 1st half of play, and maybe the whole game before sleep sends me to bed.

And the adventure continues.

Ive been throwing up a lot lately, i think theres a huge personal disagreement between me and my stomach. i dont think we agree and its turning me into a vomit bomb. an inconvenient vomit bomb. i eat something, thow it back up, drink something and throw that up as wel. im sure theres a scientific explanation for it, but im too lazy to look for one. theres blood involved. just another thing to add to the list of things that arent going well. i havent even healed from the previous incident and now ive got this to entertain me as always. yesterdays little disagreement with someones fist hasnt helped either. my head feels like its been replaced with something les functional. ive been trying to think, but its difficult when your thoughts seem to arrive in pieces. broken pieces. throwing up makes me feel attractive. actually. a very handsome vomit bomb, if you ask me. its a terrible waste of a perfectly good look, really. i dont know what ive done to deserve all this. well, i do know i do deserve this, but but but. thats beside the point. anyway, i thought that was worth mentioning.

Im getting tired of this. i cant eat properly, i can’t think properly i cant drink properly. im beginning to wonder what exactly im supposed to do with myself. sit in a corner and look decorative, maybe.

Sincerely, Your favourite narcissist.

Muziek die je raakt Werken van lang geleden Ontroeren nog steeds.

Freundinnen & Freunde der Weisheit! Viele Menschen achten auf Ernährung, Bewegung oder Schlaf, wenn es um gesundes Altern geht. Weniger beachtet wird oft ein anderer Faktor: der Rhythmus des Alltags. Neue Forschungsergebnisse deuten darauf hin, dass regelmässige Tagesabläufe einen erstaunlich engen Zusammenhang mit biologischem Altern haben könnten.

Gemeint ist damit nicht das Alter im Pass, sondern der tatsächliche Zustand des Körpers – also wie stark Organe, Zellen und Stoffwechsel bereits beansprucht sind.

Entscheidend scheint dabei nicht ein perfekter Lebensstil zu sein, sondern eine gewisse Verlässlichkeit im Tagesablauf. Menschen mit stabilen Rhythmen – etwa regelmässigen Schlafzeiten, klaren Aktivitätsphasen und ausreichenden Ruhezeiten – zeigten in Untersuchungen Hinweise auf ein langsameres biologisches Altern. Unruhige oder stark wechselnde Tagesstrukturen hingegen standen häufiger mit einer beschleunigten Alterung in Verbindung. Besonders problematisch gelten dabei dauernde Unterbrechungen, unregelmässige Schlafmuster oder ein ständiger Wechsel zwischen Aktivität und Erholung.

Das passt zu früheren Erkenntnissen aus der Schlafforschung und Chronobiologie. Unser Körper orientiert sich stark an inneren 24-Stunden-Rhythmen. Werden diese dauerhaft gestört – etwa durch Schichtarbeit, Schlafmangel oder stark wechselnde Tagesabläufe –, kann dies Entzündungen, Stressreaktionen und andere gesundheitliche Belastungen fördern. Umgekehrt scheint ein vorhersehbarer Alltag dem Körper Orientierung zu geben. Interessant ist dabei, dass es offenbar weniger um maximale Produktivität geht als um einen ausgewogenen Wechsel zwischen Belastung und Erholung.

Die Forschung steht allerdings noch am Anfang. Bisher zeigen die Daten vor allem Zusammenhänge, aber noch keine eindeutigen Ursache-Wirkungs-Beziehungen. Dennoch zeichnen sich bereits praktische Konsequenzen ab: Wer langfristig gesund bleiben möchte, sollte nicht nur auf einzelne Gewohnheiten achten, sondern auch auf den Rhythmus des eigenen Lebens. Regelmässige Schlafzeiten, bewusste Ruhephasen und ein Alltag mit einer gewissen Struktur könnten wichtiger sein, als viele bisher angenommen haben.

Denkanstoss zum Wochenbeginn

„Alt werden heißt sehend werden.“ – Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830–1916)

ProductivityPorn-Tipp der Woche: Digital Detox – bewusste Offline-Zeiten schaffen

Plane bewusst Zeiten ein, in denen Du offline bist, um Dich besser zu konzentrieren und Deine Gedanken zu ordnen.

Aus dem Archiv: Wenn Loslassen klüger ist als Durchhalten

Der Morgen begann unspektakulär. Ich sass am Küchentisch, der Kaffee war noch heiss, und vor mir lag eine To-do-Liste, die mich schon länger begleitet als mir lieb ist. Einige Aufgaben habe ich in den letzten Monaten wieder und wieder übertragen. Nicht, weil sie so wichtig wären, sondern weil ich nicht bereit war, sie zu streichen. Beim Blick auf ein bestimmtes Ziel – meinen digitalen Foto-Order sortieren und ausmisten – spürte ich dieses leise Ziehen im Bauch, das sich einstellt, wenn man zwar weiss, dass etwas nicht stimmt, es aber noch nicht laut aussprechen will.

weiterlesen …

Vielen Dank, dass Du Dir die Zeit genommen hast, diesen Newsletter zu lesen. Ich hoffe, die Inhalte konnten Dich inspirieren und Dir wertvolle Impulse für Dein (digitales) Leben geben. Bleib neugierig und hinterfrage, was Dir begegnet!

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EpicMind – Weisheiten für das digitale Leben „EpicMind“ (kurz für „Epicurean Mindset“) ist mein Blog und Newsletter, der sich den Themen Lernen, Produktivität, Selbstmanagement und Technologie widmet – alles gewürzt mit einer Prise Philosophie.

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Disclaimer Teile dieses Texts wurden mit Deepl Write (Korrektorat und Lektorat) überarbeitet. Für die Recherche in den erwähnten Werken/Quellen und in meinen Notizen wurde NotebookLM von Google verwendet. Das Artikel-Bild wurde mit ChatGPT erstellt und anschliessend nachbearbeitet.

Topic #Newsletter

Well, I already finished the rewatch. I have never had a show hold such a chokehold on me, but wow, I am ready for round 3.

I have about 20 days before the move and still have so much to finish and do. I did not get a lot done today, shocking, but I have ambitious plans for tomorrow. I have to get rid of so much crap. How do I get rid of things I’m sentimentally attached to? I am seriously struggling with it.

I need to come up with a game plan tomorrow so that I can get back on track.

Thank you for your message. I am currently out of office — but will return at the end of the month.

Half a percentage point. That is how much a year of schooling has lost in wage value, in the American occupations most exposed to generative AI, since ChatGPT arrived in November 2022. It sounds like a rounding error. It is not. It is one of the first direct estimates of something economists have suspected for three years: the machine is coming for the part of your education that can be written down.

The number comes from a working paper posted to arXiv on 26 October 2026 by Eduardo Levy Yeyati, Darío Judzik and Juan Ignacio Barbiero of Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires. It is titled “Practice Makes Perfect: Tacit Knowledge, Generative AI, and Returns to Schooling and Experience”, and it does something deceptively simple. It takes the workhorse equation of labour economics, the one that tells you how much an extra year in a classroom or an extra year on the job adds to your pay, and asks whether its coefficients moved when large language models went mainstream.

They did. In highly exposed occupations, the return to a year of schooling fell by 0.55 log points, roughly 7 per cent of what it had been. The return to experience did something stranger. It did not rise or fall uniformly. It rotated, like a seesaw. Early-career experience became more valuable. Late-career experience became less so. The pivot sits at about 18 years.

Put that next to two other pieces of 2026 research and a picture forms. PwC's Global AI Jobs Barometer, built from more than a billion job advertisements, finds the labour market splitting into two tracks, with the jobs where AI raises the bar for expertise growing twice as fast as the jobs where AI lowers it. And a field experiment led by the MIT economist David Autor finds that when patent lawyers trained alongside an AI assistant were later asked to work without it, the senior lawyers kept their gains while the juniors, on average, did not.

Together, the three studies describe a repricing. Codified knowledge, the stuff a degree certifies, is getting cheaper because a machine can supply it on demand. Tacit judgement, the stuff you only get by doing the work, is getting dearer, but it has a shelf life. For anyone who has just borrowed tens of thousands to buy a credential, that is uncomfortable news. Read carefully, it is also not the catastrophe the headline numbers suggest.

Seven and a Half Points a Year

To understand what moved, you need to know what was being measured. In 1974 the Columbia economist Jacob Mincer published “Schooling, Experience, and Earnings”, a slim book from the National Bureau of Economic Research that gave the discipline its workhorse. Mincer's insight was that if you take the logarithm of a person's earnings, you can model it as a straight-line function of their years of schooling plus a curved function of their years of work experience. The curve is concave: experience pays a lot early, then the gains flatten as people stop investing in new skills.

The schooling coefficient has an intuitive reading. Because the left-hand side is in logs, a coefficient of 0.075 means each additional year of school is associated with roughly 7.5 per cent higher hourly pay, holding experience constant. Economists call that 7.5 log points. Half a century of refinement later, it remains the default lens for asking what education is worth.

This matters for reading the new paper correctly, because the units are easy to garble. Levy Yeyati and his colleagues report that before ChatGPT, the return to a year of schooling in the most AI-exposed occupations was 7.5 log points. In the least exposed occupations it was just 1.7. After the release, the exposed-group figure fell by 0.55 log points relative to the control group. That does not mean wages fell by 0.55 per cent, nor that the degree premium collapsed by 7 per cent of your salary. It means the slope of pay against schooling flattened, from roughly 7.5 points per year to roughly 7 points per year. The 7 per cent figure is the decline in that slope relative to where it started: 0.55 divided by 7.5 is about 7.3 per cent.

A rough illustration helps. A four-year degree in a highly exposed occupation was previously associated with about 30 log points more pay than a high school diploma, all else equal (four years at 7.5 points each). At the post-shock rate, that becomes about 28 points. That arithmetic is mine, not the authors', and it ignores everything else that changed, but it conveys the order of magnitude. The degree still pays. It pays a little less, and in exactly the places where the technology bites hardest.

How a Degree Lost Half a Point

The study draws on the US Current Population Survey's outgoing rotation groups, the monthly household survey that asks a subset of respondents about their earnings. The authors use data from 2018 through June 2026, covering 655,919 observations of people aged 16 to 64 with a valid hourly wage. They date the shock to November 2022 and organise their years from November to October so that the ChatGPT release falls cleanly on a boundary.

To decide which occupations count as exposed, they use an index built by Edward Felten, Manav Raj and Robert Seamans and published in the Strategic Management Journal in 2021. Crucially, that measure predates ChatGPT, so it cannot have been contaminated by what happened afterwards. The paper compares occupations in the top quartile of exposure, which include software developers, financial managers and lawyers, with those in the bottom quartile, which include truck drivers, construction labourers and waiters. The middle two quartiles are set aside.

The core specification is a Mincer equation with the schooling and experience terms interacted with two switches: whether the occupation is exposed, and whether the observation comes after the release. The authors control for a long list of demographic and job characteristics, with fixed effects for month, state and occupation.

One technical choice deserves attention because it affects the result. High earners in the survey are top-coded: above a certain threshold, the Census Bureau records a cap rather than the true figure. That cap changed in April 2023, from a fixed value to a dynamic one, which happens to fall in the post-shock window. Top-coding is concentrated in the treated occupations: 11.5 per cent of that group is censored, against 0.7 per cent of the controls. The authors handle it with interval-censored maximum likelihood rather than imputation, and they test alternatives. Applying the pre-2023 cap throughout gives a schooling effect of minus 0.53 log points, almost identical to the headline. But a deliberately harsh check, which treats dynamically top-coded observations as exact values, shrinks the schooling estimate to minus 0.09. The authors flag this openly. It is the most important caveat in the paper, and anyone quoting the 0.55 figure should know it exists.

Other checks are reassuring. The pre-release schooling coefficients show no trend, and the break appears in the first year after release. A placebo that re-dates the shock to January 2020, to test whether the pandemic is doing the work, finds nothing. Dropping the technology sector “does little”. Swapping the Felten exposure index for the “GPTs are GPTs” measure developed by Tyna Eloundou and colleagues at OpenAI and the University of Pennsylvania gives a schooling decline of 0.42 log points, close to the baseline.

Experience Turns on a Hinge at Eighteen Years

The schooling result is the headline, but the experience result is stranger. In a standard Mincer setup, the value of an extra year of experience depends on how much you already have. A third year adds more than a twenty-third. What Levy Yeyati, Judzik and Barbiero find is that the shape of that curve changed after November 2022 in exposed occupations. At three years of potential experience, the return to an additional year rose by 0.26 log points. At five years, it rose by 0.23. At fifteen, the change is statistically indistinguishable from zero. At twenty-five years, it fell by 0.12. Under the baseline quadratic specification, the effect crosses zero at 18.1 years, with a standard error of 2.1.

The authors are careful about what this means. It is a change in the slope of the experience profile, not a statement that workers with 18 years of experience are the break-even point for winners and losers in pay. “Potential experience” is also a blunt instrument: it is simply age minus years of schooling minus six. It counts time since leaving education, not time spent doing the tasks AI now touches.

The heterogeneity analysis sharpens the picture. Among workers with an associate degree or higher, the early-career return rises by 0.43 log points at three years, and the late-career return falls by 0.12 at twenty-five. Among workers without a credential, the early gain is smaller and the late decline is not statistically significant. In other words, the rotation is strongest precisely among people who hold formal qualifications. The authors write that “wage differences by early-career experience become steeper after the shock” within that credentialed group.

Finally, the level effect. For a worker with 16 years of schooling and 15 years of experience in a treated occupation, the estimated wage change is minus 3.2 log points. That is a real cut, and it falls on exactly the profile of a mid-career graduate professional. But the authors stress that the level effect “is not itself a theoretical prediction”, and they say plainly that “the findings are not a forecast of long-run returns to education or experience.”

Codified Knowledge Was Always the Cheap Part

The theory behind the paper rests on an old distinction. In 1966 the chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi published “The Tacit Dimension”, which contains the line “we can know more than we can tell.” Some knowledge can be written down, taught in lectures and tested in exams. Some can only be acquired by doing: the feel for when a contract clause will cause trouble, the instinct for which bug report is really an architecture problem, the sense of when a patient's symptoms do not add up.

In 2014 David Autor borrowed Polanyi's line for an NBER working paper titled “Polanyi's Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth”. His argument was that computers had automated tasks that could be specified as explicit rules, and had struggled with tasks requiring tacit knowledge. That pattern, he argued, explained why employment had grown at the top and bottom of the wage distribution and hollowed out in the middle.

Generative AI scrambles that story. Large language models are not programmed with rules; they learn from enormous quantities of text, absorbing much of what humanity has managed to write down. They are, in effect, machines for supplying codified knowledge at near-zero marginal cost. Ask one to explain the doctrine of equivalents in patent law or the assumptions behind a discounted cash flow model, and it will usually produce a competent answer in seconds.

The Levy Yeyati model formalises three consequences. First, substitution: machine and worker codified knowledge are treated as perfect substitutes, so when the machine version becomes abundant, the worker version, proxied by schooling, loses scarcity value. Second, complementarity: practice-based judgement becomes more valuable when the codified knowledge it works on gets cheaper, steepening the early-career slope. Third, obsolescence: experience tied to the old way of doing the work loses value when the technology changes, flattening the late-career slope.

The paper concedes its estimates do not separately identify these mechanisms. The pattern is consistent with all three acting together, but does not prove it. Nor does the paper distinguish fields of study or institutional quality. A year of organic chemistry and a year of media studies count the same.

A Labour Market Splitting in Two

If the Levy Yeyati paper measures what workers are paid, PwC's 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer measures what employers are asking for. Released on 15 June 2026, it analyses more than one billion job advertisements across 27 countries and territories on six continents.

Its central finding is a fork. In some occupations, which PwC calls professionalised, AI automates the routine parts of the job and pushes the remaining human work towards judgement and expertise. PwC's examples include radiologists and recruiters. In others, which it calls democratised, AI makes the work easier for non-experts to perform, lowering skill barriers and shifting roles towards less specialised activity. Its examples include IT service managers and medical secretaries.

According to PwC Belgium's release of the global results, “the 22% of jobs that are being professionalised are growing twice as fast as democratised jobs (52% of jobs)”, while “seeing 42% higher wage growth since 2021.”

Read alongside the earnings data, this is striking. The democratised track looks like the substitution story: AI takes over the codified core of a job, and the premium for having learned it shrinks. The professionalised track looks like complementarity: AI clears away routine work and leaves a residue of judgement that commands a premium. That the professionalised track is smaller but faster growing and better paid fits the idea that value is migrating towards tacit expertise.

PwC also reports that the average wage premium for AI skills in job postings rose to 62 per cent, from 57 per cent the previous year. Pete Brown, PwC's Global Workforce Leader, put the implication directly: “Organisations need to rethink how they develop talent if they want people to thrive in this new environment.”

Job advertisements capture what employers say they want, not what they pay individual workers, and PwC sells AI advisory services. Its findings are a large signal about demand, not a peer-reviewed causal estimate.

Junior Jobs That Ask for Senior Skills

The most pointed PwC finding concerns the bottom rung. Analysing 2.4 million entry-level job postings in the United States, the barometer finds that junior roles highly exposed to AI are seven times more likely to require “traditionally senior skills”, such as leadership and strategic thinking, than entry-level roles that are not exposed. Some accounts express this as 52 per cent of new skills against 7 per cent. That ratio fits the sevenfold headline, but the breakdown does not appear in PwC's public summaries, so the sevenfold figure is the safer one to quote.

Openings for these “seniorised” roles have grown 35 per cent since 2019, while other entry-level openings have fallen 10 per cent. The entry-level job is being redefined: employers want new hires who can do on day one what used to take years to learn.

Other data point the same way. Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen of Stanford's Digital Economy Lab have been tracking employment using payroll data from ADP, the largest payroll processor in the United States. Their paper “Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence”, first released in August 2025 and revised on 12 August 2026 with data through June 2026, finds no evidence of widespread, economy-wide job displacement. But employment of workers aged 22 to 25 in AI-exposed occupations is now 19 per cent below where it would be had it kept pace with less exposed peers. Experienced workers show no comparable gap. The adjustment works mainly through reduced hiring of young people rather than layoffs, and it is concentrated where AI substitutes for human tasks rather than complementing them.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York's tracker of the labour market for recent college graduates tells a similar story. In the third quarter of 2026, the unemployment rate for recent graduates eased to 5.2 per cent, but the underemployment rate, the share working in jobs that do not typically require a degree, rose to 42.5 per cent.

There is an apparent paradox here. If early-career experience is becoming more valuable, why are young people finding it harder to get hired? The Levy Yeyati paper measures returns among people who are employed. Once you are in the door, each year of practice is worth more than before. But the door is narrower, because the entry-level job, where codified knowledge was traditionally converted into judgement, is exactly what AI is eroding. The authors note that changes in who gets employed could partly explain their early-career estimates. The premium on early experience and the shortage of early jobs may be two faces of the same scarcity.

The Patent Attorneys Who Kept Their Gains

Which brings us to the most direct test of whether AI helps or hinders the acquisition of judgement. In September 2026 the NBER released working paper 35720, “Does AI Assistance Enhance or Erode Expertise? Evidence from a Three-Month Field Experiment in Patent Drafting”, by David Autor, Tanya Rodchenko, Josh Martin, Zanna Iscenko, Scott Strand, David Pearl and Melissa Ferere. A revision followed in October.

The design is unusually clean for a workplace study. In a pre-registered randomised controlled trial, 133 practising patent lawyers at eleven US intellectual property firms were split into groups, with roughly two-thirds given access to a custom AI patent drafting assistant. Blinded expert patent attorneys scored all the work. The researchers measured performance with the tool and then, after three months, tested everyone on a core professional task without it: redlining an existing patent application.

With the tool, everyone got better. AI access raised the quality of work on benchmark drafting tasks by 0.34 standard deviations at 10 days and 0.38 at 90 days, with larger gains among junior lawyers. Dennis Crouch, the University of Missouri law professor who writes the Patently-O blog, noted that much of the improvement came from “avoiding awful work” rather than producing the very best applications.

Without the tool, the picture split. Treated lawyers outperformed controls by 0.32 standard deviations on the unaided redlining task. But that advantage came entirely from senior lawyers, whose gain was 0.45 standard deviations. Junior lawyers showed no average improvement. Their scores spread out: mediocre results became much less common, while both poor and good results became more common. The authors describe AI as acting as a “springboard” for some juniors and a “cushion” for others. Their conclusion is a sentence worth pinning above every graduate trainee's desk: “Foundational expertise may be a prerequisite for extracting durable skill from AI-assisted practice.”

Autor summarised the result to Fortune in a phrase: AI is “a performance equalizer, but a skill-disequalizer.” He added a warning aimed squarely at people starting out: “Young professionals need to beware of the illusion of competence.” Junior lawyers given the tool reported a surge in task satisfaction, the largest effect in the study. They enjoyed skipping the blank page and moving straight to a reviewer's role. The danger is that the satisfaction of reviewing a competent draft is not the same as acquiring the ability to produce one.

The caveats are substantial, and Fortune's reporting set them out. The paper is not peer-reviewed. Only 91 of the 133 lawyers completed the AI-free test. The firms declined a baseline skills test, so skill gains are inferred from random assignment rather than measured before and after. Fifteen of the 91 markups were flagged as possibly AI-assisted despite the ban; excluding them shrinks the senior advantage to 0.39 standard deviations at a looser statistical threshold, and the overall effect no longer holds. Five of Autor's co-authors are full-time Google employees and the sixth is a paid Google contractor, Google conducted and paid for the study, and the tool was Google's own. Autor is head of MIT's economics department and a Google Technology and Society Visiting Fellow. Three months is short compared with the years it takes to make a patent lawyer.

Still, the result rhymes with others. Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li and Lindsey Raymond's study of more than 5,000 customer-support agents, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2025, found that AI assistance raised productivity by 15 per cent on average, with the biggest gains for less experienced and lower-skilled workers, while the most experienced saw small gains in speed and small declines in quality. And a field experiment by Hamsa Bastani and colleagues, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2025, found that Turkish high school students given unrestricted access to GPT-4 during maths practice scored 17 per cent lower once the tool was taken away, compared with students who never had it. A version with learning-protective guardrails largely mitigated the harm.

The pattern across all three is consistent. AI lifts novice performance in the moment. Whether it builds novice capability over time depends on what the novice already knows and how the tool is used.

Why Experience Expires

The other half of the rotation, the falling return at 25 years, connects to a literature on skill obsolescence that predates generative AI. In 2020 David Deming of Harvard and Kadeem Noray published “Earnings Dynamics, Changing Job Skills, and STEM Careers” in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Using job vacancy data from Burning Glass Technologies covering 2007 to 2019, they showed that the earnings premium for graduates in technology-intensive subjects such as computer science, engineering and business declines rapidly as they gain experience.

Their model treats a career as a race between on-the-job learning and skill obsolescence. In fast-changing fields, the specific skills a graduate brings are replaced within a few years, which lowers the return to experience and flattens the age-earnings profile. Higher-ability STEM graduates also tend to leave STEM careers more often and at younger ages.

Generative AI may be turning a phenomenon that was confined to technology-intensive careers into something more general. If a large share of codified knowledge in law, finance, marketing and software is now supplied by a machine, then the experience of having done those tasks the old way may depreciate across the board. The Levy Yeyati paper's late-career finding is consistent with that reading, though the authors place less weight on individual late-career coefficients because the pre-trend test for them is weaker.

Here is the double bind for someone starting out. Early experience matters more than ever, because judgement is what AI cannot yet supply. But that experience may itself be technology-specific, and if the technology keeps shifting, its value will erode too. The patent lawyer study suggests one way out: seniors who already had deep foundations were able to absorb the new tool and come out stronger. Experience did not simply expire. It compounded, for those who had enough of it to build on.

The Debt Was Priced for a Different Market

None of this would matter so much if degrees were cheap. They are not. In the United States, Federal Student Aid reported in September 2026 that 42.3 million recipients hold federal student loans totalling more than $1.7 trillion. More than 9.3 million are in default, owing $234 billion. In England, the Student Loans Company's 2025-26 statistics put the higher education loan balance at £294.6 billion, and the provisional average balance for borrowers entering repayment in 2026 is £47,730. The House of Commons Library projects the outstanding balance could reach around £500 billion, in 2025-26 prices, by the late 2040s.

Those debts were taken on at prices set for a labour market in which the return to schooling was stable. If the premium is now shrinking in the fields most exposed to AI, the implied return on that investment shrinks with it. A loan agreement does not reprice when the asset it financed does.

It is worth being precise about the scale. A decline of roughly 0.55 log points per year of schooling, or 3.2 log points at the paper's illustrative mid-career profile, is a meaningful cut but not an annihilation. Even after the shock, the return to schooling in exposed occupations, roughly 7 points per year, remains far higher than the 1.7 points in the least exposed occupations. A degree is still associated with substantially higher pay. What has changed is the direction of travel and the reason for the premium. The share of the premium attributable to knowing things is falling. The share attributable to being able to do things is rising.

England's income-contingent repayment partly cushions graduates, because repayments fall when earnings do; many American borrowers have less protection. Either way, the risk sits with the person least able to diversify it: a young worker with a single human-capital asset and a large liability attached.

What the Numbers Do Not Say

First, the Levy Yeyati paper is a working paper, not yet peer-reviewed, and its headline schooling estimate is sensitive to how top-coded wages are treated. Its central identifying assumption, that greater exposure means a larger expansion of machine-supplied codified knowledge, is assumed rather than tested. The authors list possible confounds candidly: changes in who is employed, signalling and employer learning, and post-2022 shifts in worker composition.

Second, years of schooling are a crude proxy for codified knowledge. A degree also signals persistence, conscientiousness and the ability to learn. It provides networks, and it often functions as a legal or professional gatekeeper. None of those functions is obviously diminished by a chatbot, and the paper cannot separate them.

Third, each of the other studies has its own blind spots, from the Autor experiment's single tool to the descriptive nature of the payroll data. Their convergence is more persuasive than any one result.

Fourth, all of this describes the first three and a half years of a technology that is still changing quickly. The Levy Yeyati authors call their results a short-run repricing of existing stocks of human capital. Over the longer run, schooling choices, curricula, mentoring, occupational sorting and the organisation of entry-level work will all adjust. They close by asking “whether workers can continue to acquire the practice-based knowledge” that AI increasingly substitutes for in learning itself.

Building Judgement Without the Apprenticeship

So how should someone at the outset of a career think about a credential? The evidence suggests five principles, none of them comfortable.

Treat the degree as a foundation, not a product. Senior patent lawyers extracted durable skill from AI because they had foundations to build on, and the authors' conclusion that foundational expertise “may be a prerequisite” is an argument for deep formal education, not against it. What loses value is the degree as a certificate of facts possessed. What retains value is the degree as scaffolding for judgement. The goal is not to memorise what a model can recite, but to understand a field well enough to know when the model is wrong.

Test yourself without the tool. Autor's advice to Fortune was that the only reliable check on skill development is performing tasks without AI and evaluating the results. The Bastani study points the same way: students who used unrestricted GPT-4 as a crutch did worse once it was gone. If your employer gives you an AI assistant, the most valuable thing you can do for your own career may be to periodically do the work without it and compare.

Hunt for the practice, not just the job. Returns to early-career experience are rising while early-career hiring is falling. The scarce resource is not the qualification but the chance to convert it into judgement through supervised real work. Roles offering genuine apprenticeship, with feedback from experienced people on tasks that matter, are worth more than their starting salaries suggest.

Lean towards the professionalised track. Ask whether AI in a given role raises the bar for human expertise or lowers it. Roles where the machine handles the routine and leaves you the hard calls are growing faster and paying better. The question applies to specific jobs and employers, not just titles.

Plan for your experience to expire. Technology-specific know-how depreciates, so the defence is to keep renewing it, layering new techniques onto durable understanding, as the senior patent lawyers did, rather than swapping one set of specific skills for another.

For employers, the implication is sharper. Cutting entry-level hiring because AI can do the junior work is a decision to stop producing senior people. The juniors whose outcomes spread out in both directions in the Autor experiment are next decade's senior lawyers, or not.

A Credential Worth Holding, Priced Differently

What does it mean when the wage premium for education shrinks in the fields most exposed to the technology? The honest answer is that the premium was always paying for two things at once, and the market has started to separate them.

One part paid for possessing codified knowledge, and that part is falling, because a machine can now produce it in seconds. The other part paid for the capacity to learn, judge and build on that knowledge, and that part is holding up, perhaps rising, for those who get the chance to exercise it. The degree you paid for is not worthless. Its price has been revised, and the reason it is valuable has shifted from what it certifies you know to what it enables you to become.

For the worker carrying the debt, that is cold comfort, because the debt did not reprice. For the person deciding whether to start, it is a clearer guide than the noise suggests. The credential still pays, most of all to those who treat it as the start of an apprenticeship rather than the end of an education. Half a percentage point is a warning, not a verdict. The 18-year hinge is a reminder that judgement, too, has a shelf life, and the only defence is to keep building it.

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References and Sources

1. Levy Yeyati, Eduardo; Judzik, Darío; Barbiero, Juan Ignacio. “Practice Makes Perfect: Tacit Knowledge, Generative AI, and Returns to Schooling and Experience.” arXiv:2610.36008 [econ.GN], submitted 26 October 2026. Also circulated as Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Escuela de Gobierno, Documento de Trabajo 2026/15. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36008 (HTML full text: https://arxiv.org/html/2610.36008)
2. Autor, David; Rodchenko, Tanya; Martin, Josh; Iscenko, Zanna; Strand, Scott; Pearl, David; Ferere, Melissa. “Does AI Assistance Enhance or Erode Expertise? Evidence from a Three-Month Field Experiment in Patent Drafting.” NBER Working Paper No. 35720, September 2026, revised October 2026. https://www.nber.org/papers/w35720 (also SSRN abstract 7426447: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7426447)
3. Crouch, Dennis. “Who Keeps the Skill: A Randomized Trial of AI Patent Drafting at Eleven Firms.” Patently-O, 9 September 2026. https://patentlyo.com/patent/2026/09/who-keeps-the-skill-a-randomized-trial-of-ai-patent-drafting-at-eleven-firms.html
4. Lichtenberg, Nick. “The economist behind the 'China shock' tackles Gen Z's AI paradox.” Fortune, 10 October 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/10/10/david-autor-china-shock-nber-google-paper-illusion-of-competence-gen-z/
5. PwC. “AI reshapes global labour market into two distinct paths, rewarding human skills: PwC 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer.” Press release, London, 15 June 2026. https://pwc.com/gx/en/news-room/press-releases/2026/pwc-2026-ai-jobs-barometer.html (syndicated copy: https://kyodonewsprwire.jp/release/202606150856)
6. PwC. “2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer: Global Findings.” June 2026. https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/artificial-intelligence/job-barometer/2026/2026-global-ai-jobs-barometer-global-findings.pdf
7. PwC Belgium. “AI reshapes labour market and urges for upskilling: PwC's AI Jobs Barometer 2026.” Press release, Diegem, 15 June 2026. https://press.pwc.be/ai-reshapes-labour-market-and-urges-for-upskilling-pwcs-ai-jobs-barometer-2026
8. Katanich, Doloresz. “Human skills increasingly in demand as AI reshapes labour market, PwC finds.” Euronews, 16 June 2026. https://euronews.com/business/2026/06/16/human-skills-increasingly-in-demand-as-ai-reshapes-labour-market-pwc-finds
9. Let's Data Science (LDS Team). “PwC Finds AI Creates Two-Track Global Labour Market.” 15 June 2026. https://letsdatascience.com/news/pwc-finds-ai-creates-two-track-global-labour-market-550ec8b1
10. Mincer, Jacob. Schooling, Experience, and Earnings. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research / Columbia University Press, 1974. Chapter 5, “The Human Capital Earnings Function”, pp. 83-96. https://ideas.repec.org/b/nbr/nberbk/minc74-1.html ; https://www.nber.org/chapters/c1767.pdf
11. Felten, Edward; Raj, Manav; Seamans, Robert. “Occupational, industry, and geographic exposure to artificial intelligence: A novel dataset and its potential uses.” Strategic Management Journal, 42(12), 2195-2217, 2021. DOI: 10.1002/smj.3286. https://econpapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:stratm:v:42:y:2021:i:12:p:2195-2217
12. Eloundou, Tyna; Manning, Sam; Mishkin, Pamela; Rock, Daniel. “GPTs are GPTs: Labor market impact potential of LLMs.” Science, 384(6702), 1306-1308, June 2024. DOI: 10.1126/science.adj0998. Preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.10130
13. Polanyi, Michael. The Tacit Dimension. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966 (reissued University of Chicago Press, 2009).
14. Autor, David H. “Polanyi's Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth.” NBER Working Paper No. 20485, September 2014. DOI: 10.3386/w20485. https://www.nber.org/papers/w20485
15. Brynjolfsson, Erik; Chandar, Bharat; Chen, Ruyu. “Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence.” Stanford Digital Economy Lab, first released August 2025, revised 12 August 2026. https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/publications/canaries-in-the-coal-mine/
16. Federal Reserve Bank of New York. “The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates.” Data for 2026:Q3. https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market
17. Brynjolfsson, Erik; Li, Danielle; Raymond, Lindsey. “Generative AI at Work.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 140(2), 889-942, 2025. Earlier version: NBER Working Paper No. 31161, 2023. https://www.nber.org/papers/w31161 ; https://econpapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:140:y:2025:i:2:p:889-942
18. Bastani, Hamsa; Bastani, Osbert; Sungu, Alp; Ge, Haosen; Kabakcı, Özge; Mariman, Rei. “Generative AI without guardrails can harm learning: Evidence from high school mathematics.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(26), e2422633122, 2025. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2422633122. https://econpapers.repec.org/RePEc:nas:journl:v:122:y:2025:p:e2422633122
19. Deming, David J.; Noray, Kadeem. “Earnings Dynamics, Changing Job Skills, and STEM Careers.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 135(4), 1965-2005, 2020. DOI: 10.1093/qje/qjaa021. https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/earnings-dynamics-changing-job-skills-and-stem-careers
20. US Department of Education, Federal Student Aid. “(GENERAL-26-57) Federal Student Aid Posts Updated Reports to FSA Data Center.” Electronic announcement, 22 September 2026. https://fsapartners.ed.gov/knowledge-center/library/electronic-announcements/2026-09-22/federal-student-aid-posts-updated-reports-fsa-data-center
21. Student Loans Company. “Student Loans in England: Financial Year 2025-26.” Official statistics, GOV.UK, updated 2 July 2026. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/student-loans-in-england-2025-to-2026/student-loans-in-england-financial-year-2025-26
22. House of Commons Library. “Student loan statistics.” Research briefing SN01079, 2026. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn01079

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

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I have been waiting a bit to write my take on the election. I know a lot of people have already, and I wanted to let people make their views known while I refine mine. I am not going to make this a long post. But here is my take, with a little history so that you know where I am coming from.

I am currently, and have been for almost the last 20 years, a non-partisan registered voter. I started out when I registered as a Democrat when I first was able to vote at 18, because that was what my Grandmother was, and she was always influential in my life, especially with my love of history and politics in school (that was before computers 😊). The Democrat party then was like the Republican party before Trump, I would say. Then after Reagan, I said I identified with Republicans and switched parties. But after George W., I said, what is going on here? These parties are for themselves and not the voting public, not the ordinary citizen. That is when I changed to non-partisan.

I always like to research and listen to candidates and see how well they align with my visions and priorities. I don't care what party they are associated with, or no party.

That is my number one issue with both parties: they look out for and take care of the Party first. People's lives are not a football, soccer or any other kind of game. These are people's lives. Most people tune out politics (like my parents used to, but once retired I see people get more involved and “aware of politics”). I saw this coming, and the reason was prices more than anything. The second thing was the Iranian war, which contributed to the first, and tariffs, which again lead back to number 1. It is almost always the Economy. I have never seen prices for food, gas or anything else this high in 57 years of life, and definitely not since I started buying stuff on my own as an adult.

I also think the result of this election is a warning for both parties: in modern times people want to see results. I think they want to see results and are less concerned with our politicians worrying about social issues.

My frustration as a voter is to vote for the party in power if they aren't delivering. In my opinion the Republican party was not delivering on:

1. The Economy.
2. The rampant corruption.
3. Remembering that the Legislative branch makes the rules and the President is to execute them, not vice versa, and not the Executive branch running everything.
4. Everyone needs to follow the laws of the land, including immigration, and that includes those that enforce the immigration laws and rules.

Now that the Democrats have power, they need to fulfill the mandate, and this was a mandate, with priorities like this:

1. The Economy.
2. Do your job, don't allow the President, no matter what party they are from, to run everything, keep things equal, and keep number 1 going smoothly.

I think endless investigations will not be well received. I am not saying do nothing. I think the people working for Trump need to be held accountable for following the President and not the Constitution. The Constitution should always be the overriding factor, and if you are fired, you are fired; at least you can hold your head up. Trump is not ever going to be President again no matter what, so just ignore him. If Republicans have any chance, they need to tell Trump no and reach across the aisle more than they have, to help get the Economy and common sense back in vogue, because that is what it takes to override Trump's veto. The Founders set this up on purpose. They didn't think Party over Country, and they deliberately made things slow to evolve. While we do need refinements, I think overall our Constitution, on the majority of things, makes this Country run like no other powerhouse known. Yes, I do think there needs to be fine-tuning of the Amendments, and some new ones based on abuses by the Executive and Judicial branches and even the Legislative branch (I am looking at you for term limits for Federal offices).

These should be the priorities of the new Congress, and if the Democrats want to remain in power, they need to prove themselves. If not, in 2 years we could well see another wave swing things back to the other side. No-party voters like me are the deciding factor in elections now, not each party's extreme wings, but moderates and no-party voters. And no-party voters don't like what has been going on in either party, or at least this no-party voter doesn't.

#currentevents #opinion #politics

I've been using OBTF lately to keep track of my life, and this is a quick writeup of the things I've found.

First, I mostly like the format, but rather than just have one header per day, I've been adding one header per time I open the file and start writing. This is automated by a shell script which also syncs the file from a fossil, then commits the file after I'm done editing. See the script below (I'll pull this in as text at some point, but a screen-shot is fast right now, and you can OCR it if you need).

I'm also still using todo.sh, and have started poking at that so that when I finish a task, it will get archived, and also copied into the obtf.txt file, but that integration is a little tricky, as I'd like this to work from any of the machines I use on a regular basis. I'm also going to have to set up a fossil for my fork of todo.sh.

But the obtf.txt file is serving as a prod to get me to get all my various machines talking to my VPS so that there is a single source of TRVTH out there somewhere and I don't have to think about merging documents and such. So I've been writing scripts and such to do the things I mostly use the file for.

Specifically, here are the things I do with it:

• A daily journal. Most of the things I do that seem worth remembering get put in there.
• A place to stash ideas that I can search for later. I do this by putting IDEA somewhere in the line.
• A place to archive things I've completed from my todo list. (grep for DONE to find them).
• A place to leave random notes for myself.

Most of these are pretty simple, but as I'm using long lines in the file, I wanted to print things with a blank line between them. For example, to dump all the IDEAs out, I use the following ideas script:

#!/usr/bin/awk -f /IDEA/ {print $0, "\n"}

There's more coming, but mostly I'm working on getting scripts written to deploy fossils on each new machine I set up, and make them link back to the master fossil on my VPS.

In Summary: * Moving into the night meds and night prayers phase of my evening, I'm resolved to do things a bit differently tonight than for the last two nights. Rather than stay up as late (for me) as I can following basketball or football games, I'm going to make a determined effort to retire early and calmly. Tomorrow will find a Monday morning with its early chores that are never a part of the weekend mornings. So I'll want to have a good, restful sleep behind me to make the morning work better.

And I'm wishing a good, restful sleep for you all, too.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 220.90 lbs. * bp= 159/72 (62)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, toe raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 06:15 – 1 banana, 4 little cookies * 08:20 – 1 ham & cheese sandwich * 12:00 – snacking on chocolate covered raisins * 13:45 – mashed potatoes & gravy, 4 hamburger rolls * 16:00 – 1 fresh apple

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 05:00 – wake * 06:00 – bank accounts activity monitored * 06:30 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, take daily meds, unpack, organize, and nap * 12:00 – watching FOXNFL broadcast of the Colts / Cowboys game – and the Cowboys win this one, 27 to 23 * 16:30 – listening to relaxing music * 17:00 – follow news reports from various sources

Chess: * 10:50 – moved in all pending CC games