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Its that time of year again. My mailbox is stuffed with catalogs. Targeted seasonal ads from Amazon, Walmart, and Target are following me around the internet. And every other email in my overflowing inbox offers me the go-to 2025 gift guide for everyone on my list! Anyone else out there starting to dread gift-giving? Sometime in the past 30 years, cheaply made stuff became easily available at the click of a button on our phones, and that took a lot of the shine off of gifts. Not only did online shopping make it much easier to buy things for ourselves (whether we needed them or not), but also it was much easier to buy things for other people. And that influx of stuff has also helped illuminate the very short life cycle of thing I covet to dust collector to trash. Why would I spend money on a gift thats just going to end up in a landfill? If you, too, are sick of the gift guides hawking next years refuse, heres the anti-gift-guide gift guide that will help you survive the 2025 holiday season without losing your mind or all your money. Define your gifting ethos This may sound ridiculously obvious, but my goal with gift-giving is to find something that the recipient will appreciate and use. I want the gift to show that I was thinking about them and that I pay attention to their likes and dislikes. (Groundbreaking, I know.) But if youve ever gotten a sweater that is wildly the wrong size in a color best described as baby diarrhea umber, you know not everyone adheres to such giving goals. In fact, many of us give gifts for reasons other than wanting to please the recipient. If you are giving presents to people because of obligation, because of habit, or because its a complex dance of meanness disguised as altruism, remember that you dont have to. Figure out who you want to give presents to, and go from there. That doesnt necessarily mean you can just bow out of giving gifts to everyone who expects it. You may still need to continue the long-standing revenge gifting with your sister-in-law until the heat death of the universe. But you can at least put more thought into the gifts you give to the people you actually care about and dial back the effort and money on those obligatory gifts. Think beyond objects Figuring out what your recipients want often starts with understanding what they dont want. In many cases, thats clutter. If you know your friends and family well enough to identify a charitable organization thats close to their hearts, making a donation in their name could be a great gift. But you may not be on So whos your favorite charity? terms with everyone on your list. To find the right present for those recipients, check out our anti-junk gift guide below. These are all gifts your loved ones and friends will appreciate that they generally dont have to find a spot for in their home. Heartfelt words Believe it or not, letting people know how much you appreciate them is often the best gift you can give. This is especially true for anyone who occupies what might be described as a thankless position. This former educator would especially encourage you to write a heartfelt note to your childs teacher, rather than give them a mug with an assortment of teas and hot chocolates. (You know who else is probably giving Juniors teacher a mug? Every other parent in the classroom.) It doesnt need to be long or poetic. Just relay a quick anecdote about something your kid said or did as a result of the teachers hard work and sign your name. If you attach a small piece of chocolate to the card, youll elevate it to the best teacher gift ever. But this isnt just a gift for teachers. Writing a letter to your significant other, to your in-laws, to your kids, to your parents, to your best friend, or to anyone you want to acknowledge will probably be one of the most memorable gifts you could ever give. Tell them how you feel and share a memory. Tell them something they may not know about your relationship. Tell them what you hope for the new year. They will cherish your words. Experiences Even though my sister is possibly the easiest person in my life to shop for (she has impeccable taste that is easy to identify), I find its more meaningful for both of us if I buy experiential gifts for her instead of another piece of art or jewelry. Thats why my Hanukkah gift for her this year is a pair of tickets to see Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter in Waiting for Godot on Broadway. Because watching Bill and Ted perform Samuel Beckett is the kind of experience that must be shared. Similarly, I like to purchase concert tickets for my husband, who loves live music. He returns the favor by buying me tickets to see some of my favorite comedians live. But there are plenty of other experience gifts that could be the best present under the tree: cooking, art, language, or music classes; museum or zoo memberships; camp registration; a vacation or weekend getaway. Photos It is a truth universally acknowledged that all our favorite photographs are never framed and put up on the wallespecially since the invention of Instagram. An easy and inexpensive gift that your friends and family will appreciate is taking the time to print out some of the best photos of you all together and getting them framed. For a bigger gift, you could create an entire photo book if youd like to commemorate your relationship over the years. These kinds of photo books are relatively easy to make and print using sites like Shutterfly. Consumables Giving consumable gifts is an easy way to ensure your presents dont have a subtext of Here, you throw this away. And the holiday season is a traditional time to exchange gifts of cookies, wine, and other treats. But remember, there are other types of consumable gifts. This gift guide is 100% affiliate-marketing free: Were not giving you specific items or linking to stuff to buy. Just consider consumable gifts like these for your loved ones: Candles or incense Essential oils Bath bombs, bath salts, or bubble bath Hand soap nd lotion Infused olive oil or vinegar Gourmet spices Coffee, tea, or cocoa Temporary tattoos (for kids) A more practical gift guide We all need things like socks, sunscreen, an ice scraper, a warm hat, a tool kit, and a first aid kit. And while most people probably already have most of these at home, they probably dont have high-quality versions of them. High-end practical essentials from brands that you personally love can be a great gift, especially if you know the recipient would never spend money on little luxuries for themselves. You can personalize these kinds of gifts. For example, my son and I recently tie-dyed some white bucket hats for an older relative who needed some additional sun protection. Making these sun hats one-of-a-kind made her even more delighted with the unexpected present. Books While some people may consider books to be clutter (blasphemers, all of them), many booklovers are happy to accept literary giftssince most methods of getting rid of a book are unlikely to contribute to environmental pollution. If you know your recipient is an avid reader, dont be afraid to give them a book. Of course, as any booklover who has been given books that did not in any way reflect their reading taste can attest, its not enough to simply pick up whatever book du jour is getting the most press and give it to your friend. And while no book aficionado will ever turn down a gift card to a local small bookseller, its a little impersonal. The best book gift is one youve read yourself that made you think of the recipient. I still treasure a book I received nearly 25 years ago, because the narrators sarcasm reminded the giver of my sense of humor. A guide to more joyful gift-giving When were all awash with too much stuff and anything we need is a one-click overnight delivery away, gift-giving loses a lot of its meaning. We can put the meaning back in if we embrace an anti-junk gift ethos for the holiday season. Instead of buying stuff just to have something to exchange, lets try to really give our loved ones things they will appreciate and remember, rather than something that will become the 2025 layer of municipal solid landfill waste.
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E-Commerce
What does it mean to be a courageous leader in 2025? Stanley McChrystal, retired four-star general in the U.S. Army, joins futurist and culture critic Baratunde Thurston to discuss McChrystals new book, On Character, the responsibility of leaders today, and the weight of being an active citizen in democracy. Considering President Trumps deployment of the National Guard, McChrystal explores the role of the military in civil society. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, recorded live at the 2025 Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. I was moved by your book. I was moved by your philosophical exploration, the concept of characternot just pushing a specific version of it, but breaking it down into component parts. Character is conviction plus discipline, and the thing that you argue for is to be curious about our convictions. Why is it important for you, for us, to not just have character or have good character, but to challenge the components of it in our lives? If you break character into the convictions, the strongly held beliefs you havetimes your discipline to live to them, because anything is zero if you don’t have the discipline to live to itthe convictions matter a lot, but they’re not the things that someone just told you. And if you think about it, most of us are the religion we were raised in, were the nationality we were born into. We are a product of the experience we’ve had. So much of what we believe is what was sort of handed to us as we went along, and that doesn’t make it right. I remember in the counterterrorist fight we would be against members of Al-Qaeda who were extraordinarily effective, and they were killing people and they were trying to kill us. At the same time, the best they had were loyal, they were brave, they were focused on a cause that they believed in. And the only difference between me and my people and them was the life’s journey. Had we switched life’s journey, every probability is we’d have been at the other place. And so once you get there, you step back and go, Well then, maybe they’re not entirely wrong. Doesn’t mean I agree with them, it doesn’t mean I support them, but it means that my convictions need me to pressure-test them to the greatest degree possible. Part of that comes with philosophy, and I didn’t do it through much of my life. I did a few things, but then as I get older [Im] realizing how important character always was. It was always the thing. At the moment, you didn’t always consider it that way. You were trying to be more proficient in this or more successful in this or more powerful. And then at the end . . . the common denominator of getting it right was always character. The decisions that I’m most proud of were good character and the ones that I regretand there are somethey were places where I didn’t live to the character that I knew was the right answer. And so I think we’ve got to be humble enough to decide what we think we believe and then challenge it. I want to follow up on the humility and on what we do, and I use we intentionally. I know I have not always lived up to the character I profess and deeply believe in. I’ve put my emotional needs before someone close to mean act of small but significant selfishness. And maybe you’ve had your own versions and people here have. What have you found works when we recognize that we haven’t lived up to our character, to recover from that and still maintain a good path forward? I think the first thing is we say, “Well, that’s not me.” But if any of you flew here and you made the mistake of checking your luggage, you had to go to the turnstile where the bags come out. And what do you typically see? You see people crowded right up next to it, like wildebeests at the last watering hole in the Serengeti. And there’s this idea that my bag’s going to come out faster if I’m closer. But the people down below putting the bags on the thing, they don’t care. If we all stepped back three or four feet, everybody could see it, we could calmly get in and reach our bag when it came out, and we could move on. Yet why are we that way? Not because we’re bad people, I don’t think. It’s because those people in that moment, we are anonymous to. We’re tired, we want to get home, we’re never going to see them again, so we can be that way. And how many times do you deal with somebody or some instance where you just think, I’m going to be this way because I’m angry or it serves my purposes? Things you would never do around people that you see routinely or your family. And then you realize we have lapses. So I think that the key thing for me isand I’m pretty self-criticalat the end of every day I literally say and think of the times in the day when I was not the person I should have been, when I responded incorrectly to somebody. I got mad, I was short . . . you name it, there’s just a litany. And the key is not to make that the new standard. The key is to say that was wrong, and tomorrow I’m going to try to do better, knowing you’re never going to get to perfect. . . . And I think the other thing that we desperately need in society are norms where we hold each other accountable, where we’re willing to do that. Your mom would do that, but if your mom’s not around, who will do it? Sometimes we need to look each other in the eye and just go, “That’s not the way we do things. That’s not the way we treat other people. That’s not what we would consider the standard that we all want to hold ourselves to.” Since you brought up how we treat other people, let’s talk about what is happening with the U.S. government right now, which has a duty of care to treat people a certain way and is making really radical decisions on how to deploy the services of the government. How do you respond to the deployment of armed forces in American cities, particularly those run by Democrats, but really any city, or the deployment of immigration officers dressed as special operators? How do you see this, and how do you feel [about] this use of our military right now? Well, I think it’s unfortunate and I think it’s a big mistake. But if we stepped back and sort of antiseptically said, someone looks at you and you didn’t like it, and they say, “Well, you don’t believe in illegal immigration, do you?” And I sort of don’t believe in anything that begins with illegal, but that’s really not the issue here. The issue is how we’re treating each other, how we’re treating people. And there are probably two levels to it. The first is people are human beings and there should be a standard that we all decide we’re going to treat people, particularly people who are less strong than we are, who need to be supported, who need to be respected, who need to be helped. Then the use of the miltary, and this is of course personal to me, there’s a tradition of not using the military in the streets of the United States, the Posse Comitatus rule, and it’s got a really good reason. It’s because you don’t want the American people to identify the military with people that come and police. . . . We dont want the American people to grow to fear or be resentful of our own military. Now, are there instances where the military can do things other organizations cant? Absolutely. There’s a common-sense point of this, but I think the apolitical nature of our military is one of the sacred norms that we have respected for most of our historynever perfectly, but pretty darn well. When I was a senior officer, actually at all ranks, I never knew the political persuasion of any of my peers. I didn’t know if they were liberal. I didn’t know if they were conservative. We didn’t talk about it. It was considered inappropriate to do that. And of course it was inappropriate to talk about it with your subordinates because that’s undue influence. You just didn’t because the military wasn’t part of that. The problem is if a military gets politicizedwe need only to look around the world for examples where that happensthen suddenly it has a different role in society, and we won’t like it. I guarantee it.
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E-Commerce
Every year, companies and space agencies launch hundreds of rockets into spaceand that number is set to grow dramatically with ambitious missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. But these dreams hinge on one critical challenge: propulsionthe methods used to push rockets and spacecraft forward. To make interplanetary travel faster, safer, and more efficient, scientists need breakthroughs in propulsion technology. Artificial intelligence is one type of technology that has begun to provide some of these necessary breakthroughs. Were a team of engineers and graduate students who are studying how AI in general, and a subset of AI called machine learning in particular, can transform spacecraft propulsion. From optimizing nuclear thermal engines to managing complex plasma confinement in fusion systems, AI is reshaping propulsion design and operations. It is quickly becoming an indispensable partner in humankinds journey to the stars. Machine learning and reinforcement learning Machine learning is a branch of AI that identifies patterns in data that it has not explicitly been trained on. It is a vast field with its own branches, with a lot of applications. Each branch emulates intelligence in different ways: by recognizing patterns, parsing and generating language, or learning from experience. This last subset in particular, commonly known as reinforcement learning, teaches machines to perform their tasks by rating their performance, enabling them to continuously improve through experience. As a simple example, imagine a chess player. The player does not calculate every move but rather recognizes patterns from playing a thousand matches. Reinforcement learning creates similar intuitive expertise in machines and systems, but at a computational speed and scale impossible for humans. It learns through experiences and iterations by observing its environment. These observations allow the machine to correctly interpret each outcome and deploy the best strategies for the system to reach its goal. Reinforcement learning can improve human understanding of deeply complex systemsthose that challenge the limits of human intuition. It can help determine the most efficient trajectory for a spacecraft heading anywhere in space, and it does so by optimizing the propulsion necessary to send the craft there. It can also potentially design better propulsion systems, from selecting the best materials to coming up with configurations that transfer heat between parts in the engine more efficiently. In reinforcement learning, you can train an AI model to complete tasks that are too complex for humans to complete themselves. Reinforcement learning for propulsion systems In regard to space propulsion, reinforcement learning generally falls into two categories: those that assist during the design phasewhen engineers define mission needs and system capabilitiesand those that support real-time operation once the spacecraft is in flight. Among the most exotic and promising propulsion concepts is nuclear propulsion, which harnesses the same forces that power atomic bombs and fuel the Sun: nuclear fission and nuclear fusion. Fission works by splitting heavy atoms such as uranium or plutonium to release energya principle used in most terrestrial nuclear reactors. Fusion, on the other hand, merges lighter atoms such as hydrogen to produce even more energy, though it requires far more extreme conditions to initiate. Fission is a more mature technology that has been tested in some space propulsion prototypes. It has even been used in space in the form of radioisotope thermoelectric generators, like those that powered the Voyager probes. But fusion remains a tantalizing frontier. Nuclear thermal propulsion could one day take spacecraft to Mars and beyond at a lower cost than that of simply burning fuel. It would get a craft there faster than electric propulsion, which uses a heated gas made of charged particles called plasma. Unlike these systems, nuclear propulsion relies on heat generated from atomic reactions. That heat is transferred to a propellant, typically hydrogen, which expands and exits through a nozzle to produce thrust and shoot the craft forward. So how can reinforcement learning help engineers develop and operate these powerful technologies? Lets begin with design. Reinforcement learnings role in design Early nuclear thermal propulsion designs from the 1960s, such as those in NASAs NERVA program, used solid uranium fuel molded into prism-shaped blocks. Since then, engineers have explored alternative configurationsfrom beds of ceramic pebbles to grooved rings with intricate channels. Why has there been so much experimentation? Because the more efficiently a reactor can transfer heat from the fuel to the hydrogen, the more thrust it generates. This area is where reinforcement learning has proved to be essential. Optimizing the geometry and heat flow between fuel and propellant is a complex problem, invlving countless variablesfrom the material properties to the amount of hydrogen that flows across the reactor at any given moment. Reinforcement learning can analyze these design variations and identify configurations that maximize heat transfer. Imagine it as a smart thermostat but for a rocket engineone you definitely dont want to stand too close to, given the extreme temperatures involved. Reinforcement learning and fusion technology Reinforcement learning also plays a key role in developing nuclear fusion technology. Large-scale experiments such as the JT-60SA tokamak in Japan are pushing the boundaries of fusion energy, but their massive size makes them impractical for spaceflight. Thats why researchers are exploring compact designs such as polywells. These exotic devices look like hollow cubes, about a few inches across, and they confine plasma in magnetic fields to create the conditions necessary for fusion. Controlling magnetic fields within a polywell is no small feat. The magnetic fields must be strong enough to keep hydrogen atoms bouncing around until they fusea process that demands immense energy to start but can become self-sustaining once underway. Overcoming this challenge is necessary for scaling this technology for nuclear thermal propulsion. Reinforcement learning and energy generation However, reinforcement learnings role doesnt end with design. It can help manage fuel consumptiona critical task for missions that must adapt on the fly. In todays space industry, theres growing interest in spacecraft that can serve different roles depending on the missions needs and how they adapt to priority changes through time. Military applications, for instance, must respond rapidly to shifting geopolitical scenarios. An example of a technology adapted to fast changes is Lockheed Martins LM400 satellite, which has varied capabilities such as missile warning or remote sensing. But this flexibility introduces uncertainty. How much fuel will a mission require? And when will it need it? Reinforcement learning can help with these calculations. From bicycles to rockets, learning through experiencewhether human or machineis shaping the future of space exploration. As scientists push the boundaries of propulsion and intelligence, AI is playing a growing role in space travel. It may help scientists explore within and beyond our solar system and open the gates for new discoveries. Marcos Fernandez Tous is an assistant professor of space studies at the University of North Dakota. Preeti Nair is a master’s student in aerospace sciences at the University of North Dakota. Sai Susmitha Guddanti is a Ph.D. student in aerospace sciences at the University of North Dakota. Sreejith Vidhyadharan Nair is a research assistant professor of aviation at the University of North Dakota. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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