Oh, they absolutely might still try. And if they do, they’ll probably irreversibly destroy some or all of the existing monument, which seems fitting for this administration.
But at least it doesn’t seem possible that we’ll ever end up with Trump’s head up there, no matter how much he might want it, and it does make me a little happy to know that he can’t get everything he wants.
This has already been looked into, because he said he wanted to be on Mount Rushmore during his first term, and a bill was introduced last year to add him.
No matter how much he may want it, it’s not possible; there’s not enough rock left on the mountain, and what’s there is too fragile to support it.
The New York Times actually had a good article last year with 3D visualizations showing exactly why it can’t happen: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/27/us/mount-rushmore-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.vFA.N4J6.i9vauCc4EdSZ
So at least there’s that.
My degree was in economics (though I didn’t stay in the field and moved into information security instead). Econ 101 is basically a bunch of thought experiments that are designed to get people thinking about very broad economic concepts, but it’s all very, very abstract and largely doesn’t apply to anything connected to reality.
In higher levels, it starts to resemble reality, though my professors constantly reinforced the lesson that there are multiple ways to interpret data and that no matter how complicated you make the model you’re using, it’s still a massive oversimplification of the real world.
Unfortunately, people take intro micro/macro and think that’s what economists actually think when in reality they’re essentially learning about the very, very general oversimplifications. The amount of math it takes to start going through the actual models gets overwhelming, and it’s unlikely a first or second year undergrad would be able to handle it unless they’d already taken calc 1 and 2, and ideally some additional statistics classes.
There’s also been a massive shift in the last decade from theoretical models to much harder quantitative experimentation, so the field as a whole is trying to be less theory-driven and more data-driven. I sometimes wish I’d found the math more enjoyable, because it’s been very exciting to see some of the results coming from experimentation.
Lobachevsky also passed away in 1856, so I doubt he would be referred to as the colleague of anyone from the last hundred or so years before publication.
I did appreciate the reference to “Lobachevsky” by Tom Lehrer, though. (And who deserves the credit / And who deserves the blame? / Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name!)
I work for a different large ISP who provides modems and routers to our customers, but not this specific feature (being a bit vague because I know at one point mentioning the company’s name on social media would result in the post being reviewed by the social media team/referred to security for anything discussing internal processes, and while Lemmy probably isn’t on their radar I’d rather not risk it).
The amount of data we can see if you’re using our routers is pretty crazy, and most people have no idea. We can see exactly what you have on your network and what it’s doing. If you’re just using the modem and not the router, we have much more limited visibility. We don’t have the capacity to monitor everything everyone is doing all the time, so if you’re using your own equipment (and you’re not using our DNS service), it’s unlikely we have much data on your activity. Storage in the scale needed to store what everyone is doing gets expensive.
I’ve always used my own equipment, and I make sure everyone in my family has their own equipment as well. I would absolutely advise against using your ISP’s equipment if your goal is privacy.