writing for Quartz says there's a new study on despair and how it affects voter turnout. You'll be very surprised to hear that people who are suicidal and in despair are less likely to vote. Huh. Well, surprising. You know what they could have done to save some time and money? They could have just asked me. Scott, do people who are experiencing despair, are they motivated to do really anything? And I would say no. Despair really does not motivate you. It doesn't motivate you to vote. It doesn't motivate you to get a promotion. It doesn't motivate you to work harder. It doesn't motivate you to get married. Despair doesn't motivate you to do anything. Just ask me next time. I could save you a lot of time and money.

Well, there's a breakthrough battery circuit design for tiny little drones according to Interesting Engineering. Now the reason I like to mention all the battery stuff for drones is because it lets you predict the future. If you know what's happening with batteries in all kinds of ways, that will tell you absolutely what the next 20 or 30 years look like. And if you wondered will there ever be tiny little drones that are the size of a fingernail, and the answer is now they will. This specific breakthrough is for tiny drones, micro drones. Researchers at University of California San Diego and Caltech, whatever that is, they've got a novel circuit design that makes the power last a lot longer for a micro drone. A lot longer. So it's a big deal.

One of the examples they gave is if a building crumbles and they want to find survivors, there might not be enough room for a regular drone to be flying through, but the micro drones could just sort of fill all the spaces and look for survivors and sense things. Now that's the good news. The bad news is somebody can send a micro drone right into your house and that thing could be flying around in your house all you know for an hour and you wouldn't even probably hear it because it's a micro drone. So the privacy implications are pretty extreme. Pretty extreme.

Robbie Starbuck is writing that there's a program in the United States called the SNAP program. It's for providing money for food, groceries, for people who need a little extra help. And Robbie Starbuck is pointing out that the SNAP program spends $15 billion a year but about 10% of it goes to soda so people can buy what they want, I guess, within limits. It's got to be food or drink, but a lot of people are buying Coca-Cola and Pepsi. So Big Soda is getting nearly $1.5 billion a year just from the government's program on helping people buy food and beverages.

Now I think they're looking to scale that back so you can't buy food that's bad for you. But here's the problem. On paper this was always going to go that way because soda is addictive. So if you add the addictive nature of soda, and I know this