MY economy is doing great. I made over $2 billion in just two years as President. I don’t understand what YOUR problem is.
A few excerpts from: USA TODAY, “Trump says economy is great. We should definitely trust him” by Rex Huppke, USA TODAY Updated Sun, October 4, 2026
President Donald Trump, who never does anything wrong, shocked the nation this past week by admitting he has done something wrong.
With midterm elections fast approaching and polling on the economy not looking good for Republicans, Trump told reporters on Oct. 1: “There’s never been a job done like we’ve done, but we haven’t gotten the word out. So I say we’ve done a bad public relations job.”
A day earlier, the president said: “We have the best economy anywhere in the world. There’s no economy like this economy. And the only thing we don’t have is good public relations. We don’t seem to be able to get the word across.”
So the one thing President Trump has done wrong, in his opinion, is this: He has failed to effectively tell us how great everything is. The high mortgage rates you are reckoning with, and the wages that aren’t keeping up with inflation, are all the result of bad PR.
Well, I certainly hope the president doesn’t put all this on himself. I think the real problem is WE have failed to notice how great everything is, probably because we can’t afford gas to drive around and see all the greatness, or maybe because we passed out at the grocery store when we saw a box of Frosted Mini-Wheats cost $9.19.
Shame on us for not better observing this ongoing Golden Age.
“We have inflation totally in control and we’ve done a great job,” Trump said Oct. 1.
[Inflation is higher and still rising] than when Trump took office in January 2025, which means it’s down as long as we patriotically stand on our heads.
The president continued: “We have the most successful period of time for a president in terms of building our country in the history of our country. There’s never been a time like this. We were a dead country just two years ago and now we’re the hottest country in the world.”
TRUMPFLATION
“We have inflation totally in control and we’ve done a great job,” Trump said Oct. 1.
So really folks, what’s y0ur problem — except for inflation, war, American soldiers injured and dying, American children sickening and dying from measles, Trump’s Gestapo running wild, the stealing by the most corrupt President in American history, and his lies, lies, lies?
This is the Golden Age (for Trump and his family). Hey, let’s name another street after him and build his expensive arch. Maybe Trump’s no-bid “pool pal” can build it. Who cares that Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are broke?
Excerpts from an article in the Sun 4 Oct 2026 Guardian:
Pennsylvania health officials brace themselves as measles outbreak expected to spread
Most counties don’t have their own health agencies, and some specific population groups have low vaccination rates
I’m Robert F. Kennedy. I have no formal medical training and am not a physician. I have no M.D. or D.O., and my official biography lists no medical or public-health degree. My formal education is principally law. My professional career was primarily as an environmental lawyer before Trump made me Secretary of Health and Human Services.
His specialty is environmental law, so naturally, Trump put him in charge of health — just another incompetent that Trump has made head of a department for which they have zero qualifications.
Do you remember when measles was eliminated in America because of vaccinations? That was two years ago, before Trump appointed “Witch Doctor Kennedy.”
Now, children are sickening and dying of this preventable disease.
Pennsylvania is bracing for a wave of measles cases, with some public health officials concerned that it’s “only a matter of time” until the disease spreads beyond the outbreak’s epicenter.
Last week, the state reported its fifth measles-associated death amid 943 confirmed cases across 39 counties. The outbreak comes amid concerns that public health in the US has been hit by increasing vaccine skepticism, especially due to the power and influence of controversial health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Lancaster county, which doesn’t have its own health department, has seen the highest amount of cases, at 381, believed to be mostly among the Amish or similar religious groups who have historically low rates of measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine uptake.
Jeanne Franklin, director of Chester County’s health department, said her county, which has the third-highest number of cases at 83, is preparing for an influx of cases from neighboring Lancaster.
“We have a very long border with Lancaster County, and these types of disease don’t care about borders,” Franklin said. “It’s going to keep going and find a person who isn’t vaccinated.
She added that although many Amish people have not been vaccinated, it’s not because they are anti-vaxxers, but rather because “they were either unaware of it or they don’t seek out healthcare as frequently as other residents”.
She added: “But they’re willing to have the conversation and make a decision on what’s happening today. They’re not making decisions based on the myths out there, but because their neighbors are impacted.”
Amid active surveillance of measles cases, contact tracing and setting up community vaccination centers, the county is also working to dispel misinformation some residents have about vaccine safety.
A Return to the Dark Ages of Myth, Rumor and Magic
We have people in key positions saying “it isn’t an outbreak, it isn’t a problem.”
That would be Trump’s witch doctor. But wait. Trump and his family have been vaccinated, but he hired an anti-vaxxer for the rest of us.
But it “isn’t a problem” that children are dying, is it?
We have people who approach our nurses and say that they were told the vaccine will make them sterile, or that there’s a microchip within it,” Franklin said.
That is what Republicans believe, because a Republican phony told them so.
Dr. Richard Lorraine, the medical director of Montgomery County’s Office of Public Health, said it is a “matter of time” before the third most populous county in Pennsylvania begins to see measles cases.
“We recognize that essentially it’s all around us, and so a big focus for the county is immunization,” Lorraine said. “It’s the best preventative measure and where the county is focusing its efforts on.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s witch doctor is in a state of denial.
Creating a single all-purpose household robot may be aiming at the wrong target. The ordinary home contains hundreds, perhaps thousands, of different tasks, many requiring very different physical abilities. A robot that can cook dinner, clean a bathtub, wash windows, mow the lawn, fold laundry, repair a faucet, carry groceries, change a light bulb, and make a bed would require an extraordinary collection of sensors, manipulators, tools, skills, and programming.
Humans accomplish these things with hands, legs, brains and a general understanding of today’s culture, that nature has spent millions of years developing. Reproducing all of those capabilities in one machine may be extraordinarily difficult and, more important, unnecessary.
A simpler approach is to divide the household into specialized functions. Instead of teaching an all-purpose robot to push a vacuum cleaner, build a vacuum cleaner that moves by itself.
Instead of teaching the robot to wash windows, build a specialized window-cleaning machine or incorporate cleaning mechanisms into the windows.
The same principle can apply to lawn care, laundry, food preparation, dishwashing, security, climate control, inventory, deliveries, and dozens of other household functions. Each specialized machine needs to solve only its own relatively narrow problem. This is the principle I described earlier: automate the household rather than the housekeeper.
The general-purpose robot then becomes something quite different. Think of it as the butler robot. It might have wheels, arms, cameras, and manipulators for miscellaneous jobs, but physical labor would not be its primary function.
Its most important job would be to understand what the resident wants and translate those wishes into instructions for the household’s specialized machines.
A car is made by many manufacturers, each creating specialized components that work together as one system.
Tell the butler robot, “Get the house ready for six guests at seven o’clock,” and it might instruct the floor-cleaning robot to vacuum, the food system to prepare dinner, the climate system to adjust the temperature, the lighting system to prepare the dining room, and the lawn machine to finish its work before the guests arrive.
The butler robot would coordinate the jobs, monitor their progress, handle conflicts, and ask the human for a decision when necessary.
We already have a miniature example of this concept: the modern automobile. In that system, the human serves as the butler.
Walk toward the car with the key in your pocket and one specialized system recognizes the key, tells another system to unlock the doors, and may tell still another to turn on the lights.
Press the Start button and a sequence of specialized machines and computers prepares the car to operate. Select reverse and the transmission engages reverse while the backup camera comes on and proximity sensors begin watching for obstacles.
Shift into drive and the camera turns off, the transmission changes its function, and other systems begin monitoring speed, approaching traffic, lane position, engine conditions, tire pressure, and dozens of other variables.
As conditions change, headlights may turn on, windshield wipers may activate, warning signals may sound, and braking or steering systems may intervene.
No single mechanism does all these things. Specialized components perform specialized jobs and exchange information so quickly and routinely that the driver experiences them as one machine: the car.
The automated house would extend essentially the same principle to a much larger and more varied collection of machines, with the robot butler assuming many of the coordinating functions now performed by the automobile’s human driver.
This approach creates another problem, however. The butler and all those specialized machines have to be able to talk to one another. A homeowner should not have to buy every appliance, robot, window, thermostat, security device, and lawn machine from the same corporation. Nor should the manufacturer of the butler robot have to write entirely new software for every product ever introduced by every other manufacturer.
What is needed is a common language—a set of standards allowing machines made by different companies to identify themselves, describe their capabilities, accept instructions, report their status, and communicate problems.
There already is a precedent for exactly this kind of industrial cooperation. The Connectivity Standards Alliance developed Matter, an open smart-home communications standard supported by hundreds of companies. Amazon, Apple, Google, Samsung SmartThings, Signify, and many others participated in its development.
Matter is intended to allow smart-home products from different manufacturers and ecosystems to communicate using a common protocol. Today’s Matter already provides such functions as device discovery, provisioning, secure communications, and control.
The household-robot system I envision would take that principle much further. The objective would not merely be to let the butler turn on a light made by Company A or change the thermostat made by Company B. The standard would allow a machine to tell the entire household system what it is, what it can do, what it needs, what commands it understands, and what information it can return.
Imagine bringing home a new window-cleaning robot made by a company from which you never before have purchased anything. The butler should not require special WindowBot software. The new machine should be able to announce, in effect: “I am a window-cleaning device. I can wash, rinse, dry, and inspect windows. I require electrical power, water, cleaning fluid, and access to the window. I accept commands to start, stop, pause, resume, inspect, clean a specified area, and return to my storage location. I can report my location, progress, supply levels, equipment condition, problems, and completion.”
If both machines conform to the standard, the butler robot already knows how to employ its new worker.
Creating such standards would require cooperation among companies that normally compete with one another. A House-Robot Committee could begin with companies that already possess pieces of the necessary technology. Amazon, Apple, Google, Samsung, and perhaps OpenAI could contribute artificial intelligence, speech, vision, operating systems, and home-control expertise.
Indeed, Amazon Echo, Google Nest Hub, Apple HomePod, and Samsung SmartThings already can function as hubs for Matter devices.
Companies specializing in household robotics could provide another part of the expertise. iRobot and Roborock, for example, have experience with autonomous navigation, mapping, docking, obstacle avoidance, and specialized cleaning machines.
Appliance manufacturers such as Whirlpool, LG, Bosch, and Samsung could represent refrigerators, ovens, dishwashers, washers, dryers, and other stationary machines—which really are specialized robots whether or not we call them robots.
Building-system companies also would be essential. Schneider Electric could contribute expertise in electrical and energy-management systems; Honeywell in environmental controls and sensors; Signify in lighting; and companies specializing in locks, doors, windows, plumbing, security, and building materials could represent the increasingly automated structure itself.
Husqvarna and similar companies could represent robotic lawn and outdoor equipment. NVIDIA and semiconductor manufacturers could contribute the processors, sensors, communications hardware, and artificial-intelligence infrastructure on which the entire network would depend.
Many companies in these categories already participate in the Connectivity Standards Alliance, demonstrating that cooperation among otherwise competing manufacturers is quite practical.
The committee should not try to standardize the robots themselves. That could inhibit innovation. A company should remain free to invent a better window cleaner, another a radically different food-preparation system, and another a lawn machine nobody previously imagined.
What should be standardized are the interfaces among them: how machines describe their capabilities, how tasks are requested, how permissions are granted, how priorities are established, how status is reported, how errors are communicated, and how one machine discovers what another machine can do.
This also changes the economics of household robotics. No corporation has to solve the entire almost impossibly difficult problem of building an artificial human. Hundreds of companies can solve smaller problems at which they already have expertise.
A refrigerator company improves refrigerators. A window company improves windows. A robotics company improves mobile machines. An AI company improves the butler’s ability to understand people and coordinate machines. Improvements can be introduced one component at a time without replacing the entire system.
The result ultimately may make the distinction between the robot and the house increasingly meaningless. The mobile butler is merely the human’s principal representative within a network of specialized machines, sensors, appliances, computers, and structural systems.
Intelligence and physical capability are distributed throughout the house. One machine does not have to know how to do everything because the system knows which machine can do each thing. Further, the failure of one machine would not require replacing the entire system, nor would it disrupt the entire system. The faulty part simply could be identified and replaced.
In that sense, the most important household robot of the future may not be a robot at all. It may be the house itself—a modular robot consisting of hundreds of specialized components, coordinated by an intelligent butler that understands what its human residents want. When the car radio goes down, the car doesn’t stop. You just replace the radio.
The first step toward building it may therefore have surprisingly little to do with building robots. The first step may be getting the companies that eventually will build all those pieces into the same room and agreeing on how their machines will talk to one another.
The previous post, Build the Ecosystem, Not Just the Robot, discussed the incredible difficulty of creating a household robot capable of handling typical chores—cooking, cleaning, buying, etc.—that humans may find trivial. Still, their variety makes them devilishly difficult to build and program.
Brains, fingers, feet, eyes, noses, ears, skin, and taste—all attributes humans possess courtesy of nature—are hard to replicate. Even driving a car, a task humans perform with minimal thought, has proven challenging for robots.
Here are examples of solutions.
Automate the Household, Not the Housekeeper
Why train a robot to do what a Roomba already can do?
The effort to develop household robots may be aimed at the wrong objective. Rather than trying to create an artificial human capable of performing thousands of unrelated physical tasks, in various environments, it may be far easier to automate the details of the household itself.
The general-purpose robot would become less a maid, cook, gardener and handyman than a butler: a mobile coordinator connecting the human with a collection of specialized automated systems.
A modern automated factory does not ordinarily employ one fantastically capable humanoid robot that walks around welding, painting, machining, inspecting, packing and driving a forklift.
It distributes those functions among machines optimized for particular jobs and coordinates their activities. A highly automated home could operate according to the same principle.
The “Roomba” offers a simple example. One approach to automated floor cleaning would be to teach a humanoid robot to find a vacuum cleaner, grasp its handle, operate its controls, maneuver it around furniture, determine what it has already cleaned, and return the vacuum when finished.
The simpler solution is a vacuum cleaner that moves by itself. The specialized machine needs to understand only its specific job and the part of the environment relevant to that job.
The principle can be extended throughout the house. Don’t give the general-purpose robot a scrub brush and teach it to clean a bathtub; develop a bathtub-cleaning system.
Don’t give it a squeegee and teach it to wash windows; incorporate cleaning mechanisms into the windows or provide a specialized window-cleaning machine.
Don’t teach the robot to mow the lawn; give the lawn its own machine. Don’t teach it to load a dishwasher; automate the entire food-service and cleaning process.
The general-purpose robot—think of it as a butler robot—then doesn’t need thousands of highly refined motor skills. It needs to understand human intentions, communicate those intentions to specialized systems, coordinate their activities, supervise results and deal with exceptions.
Physical manipulation remains useful, but it becomes one capability among many rather than the foundation of household automation.
Consider food shopping. Even sending a robot to a store may preserve an unnecessary human-era activity. If every food item has an electronic identity and the refrigerator and pantry maintain continuous inventories, the house already knows what it contains, how much remains and the household’s historical consumption. It can predict that milk will run out Tuesday afternoon or that only two eggs remain.
Routine shopping therefore can disappear. The household system can compare suppliers, prices, quantities and delivery times and automatically replenish ordinary items within limits established by the resident. The system can refer unusual purchases or significant price changes to the resident for a decision.
The store, which can resemble an “Amazon-style” warehouse, can deliver standardized containers directly to the house’s receiving dock, where refrigerated items are routed to refrigerated storage, frozen foods to frozen storage and dry goods to their appropriate locations.
Inventory would be updated automatically.
No robot needs to drive anywhere. No car needs to park. Nobody needs to walk through aisles. The shopping trip was merely another traditional human task whose underlying purpose—maintaining an appropriate inventory of food—can be accomplished without the task itself.
Meal preparation can be treated similarly. A resident might say, “I want steak, mashed potatoes and peas at six o’clock, with approximately 300 calories and 12 grams of protein.” The butler robotdoes not peel potatoes or stand over a broiler. It converts the human request into objectives, preferences, constraints, and a deadline, then communicates them to the household food system.
The food system selects appropriate ingredients from inventory, determines quantities, prepares and cooks the components at appropriate times and temperatures, and produces the finished meal.
If the requirements conflict—for example, if the requested steak portion by itself would exceed the calorie limit—the system reports the problem to the butler robot, which asks the resident whether to reduce the portion or increase the calorie limit.
This is where general-purpose artificial intelligence is particularly valuable: between human intention and specialized machinery. The human specifies the desired result. The AI interprets that result, resolves ambiguities, coordinates the necessary systems and reports problems requiring human judgment.
After the meal, there is no reason to assume that the traditional sequence of clearing dishes, loading a dishwasher, unloading it and putting dishes into cabinets must survive. Reusable dishes might move automatically into an integrated cleaning-and-storage system.
Alternatively, dishes and utensils might be fabricated when required from recyclable materials and returned afterward to the material supply. The table itself might be built and programmed to perform some of these functions.
The important point is not which particular solution ultimately prevails. Tasks should not become the one butler robot’s automated task.
The correct first question is not, “How can we build and program this robot to fold laundry?” It is, “What is the objective of folding laundry?” If the objective is to store clean clothing conveniently, perhaps a different storage system eliminates folding altogether. Or at worst, the storage system would be programmed and built specifically to fold laundry, an easier build than trying to do it with an all-purpose robot.
The objective of shoveling snow is not shoveling snow; it is keeping necessary outdoor surfaces usable. The objective of replacing a roof shingle is not manipulating shingles; it is keeping the building weatherproof. The objective of washing a plate is not washing a plate; it is providing a clean surface to eat from.
This suggests a fundamental rule for household automation. Don’t automate the task. Identify the task’s purpose and automate that specific purpose.
The resulting house becomes a network of specialized systems. Cleaning machines, food-storage systems, cooking equipment, laundry systems, waste processors, environmental controls, security equipment, delivery systems, garden equipment, structural monitors and repair systems continually exchange information.
The mobile butler (the primary robot) is one participant in that network, serving mostly as the resident’s general-purpose representative and coordinator.
Information can travel in both directions. The refrigerator can tell the food system that a steak should be used soon. The food system can tell the butler that steak therefore would be a sensible dinner choice. The butler can ask the resident, “How about steak tonight?” A four-word answer can initiate dozens or hundreds of coordinated operations.
The architecture also offers an important reliability advantage. If a single extraordinarily sophisticated humanoid robot performs every household function, that robot’s failure may disable virtually the entire automated household.
In a distributed system, a window-cleaning machine failure means the windows remain dirty until that component is repaired. Food preparation, laundry, floor cleaning, security and package delivery continue functioning.
Specialization also permits incremental technological improvement. A homeowner need not replace a fantastically expensive general-purpose robot because someone has invented a superior floor-cleaning technology. The floor-cleaning component can be replaced independently. The same principle has made industrial automation practical and continuously improvable.
Eventually the distinction between robot and house may become increasingly artificial. The building itself contains sensors, communications, storage, machinery and specialized automated systems. Mobile robots provide those capabilities requiring mobility. Fixed machines provide capabilities that do not require mobility. The intelligence coordinating them may be distributed throughout the system.
The house, in effect, becomes a modular robot, with each replacable module trained for a specific task..
This approach also could make household automation achievable sooner. An artificial human capable of successfully manipulating virtually every object and tool found in an ordinary house presents an extraordinary robotics problem. A coordinated collection of machines, each optimized for a relatively narrow function, presents many smaller and more manageable engineering problems.
The central research objective therefore should not be “Build the perfect household robot.” It should be “Automate the household.”
For every existing household activity, ask three questions.
What is the actual objective?
Does the traditional task need to exist at all?
If it does, should a general-purpose robot, a specialized machine, or the house itself perform it?
The result may be a paradox: a far more automated home that requires a far less capable humanoid robot.
Instead of making a robot sophisticated enough to handle the extraordinary complexity of a house designed entirely for humans, divide the system into tasks and make the whole system sophisticated so the robot doesn’t have to be.
To begin the evolution, relevant industries should coordinate their efforts so they can determine some initial standards. Companies that make stoves, washing machines, windows, roofs, lighting, floor cleaners, building materials, tools, and robots, etc., should begin working together to create the “smart house.”
That is where the future lies, not with an all-purpose robot, but with a society assisted by automation.
