On October 1, 1908, Ford produced the first Model T at a plant in Detroit. The auto could travel 40 miles per hour and ran on gasoline or hemp-based fuel. (As oil prices fell, Ford phased out the hemp option.) The Model T was the first car designed for a mass market, rather than as a luxury item. By 1927, Ford had built 15 million Model T cars — the longest production run of any car model until the Volkswagen Beetle surpassed it in 1972.
Nepal’s government had banned social media, fearing the extremity of sentiment that might be expressed against the regime, but what followed that ban brought down the government. The general mood of protest escalated into nationwide demonstrations, clashes with security forces, and the storming of government buildings, resulting in at least 74 deaths and over 2000 injuries.
But this was not an organized coup. It developed so swiftly from youth protest to the fall of Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli’s government* that it sure seemed to be spontaneous, taking just a few weeks’ time (or days’, depending where you set the starting point.)
Interestingly, the government the protesters ousted was communist, as in Marxist-Leninist — but both the ruling CPN-UML and the Maoist Centre are less ideologically rigid than traditional Marxist parties, focusing on nationalism, development, and power-sharing rather than the totalitarian push for utopia.
That is, the commies went straight to the corruption part of the long arc of socialism.
And that’s what young people objected to, focusing special ire on “nepo baby” status examples, the scions of wealthy rulers living life extra-large.
But the low employment rates also mattered, as did the censorship of the Internet, upon which so many Nepalese economically depended.
In fact, the momentum of Nepal’s uprising appears to have been largely driven by domestic digital activism on TikTok and Discord.
It’s not called the “Gen Z Revolution” for nothing.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Protesters battled security forces on September 8; by the next day the parliament building and other government offices were in flames and the prime minister had resigned. The social media ban was lifted. The army imposed a nationwide curfew on the 10th; Sushila Karki, 73-year-old former Supreme Court Chief Justice became Nepal’s first female prime minister on September 12, 2025.
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The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power.
Francis Bacon, Essex’s Device (1595).
Thomas Edison’s first commercial hydroelectric power plant began operation on September 30, 1882. Dubbed the Vulcan Street Plant, it was established on the Fox River in Appleton, Wisconsin, and was housed in the Appleton Paper and Pulp Company building, which burned to the ground in 1891.
The candidate wants to increase taxes and government spending, reduce freedom and individual responsibility. The standard Democratic agenda, but foisted bigger and faster.
One announced plan is to scrap mass transit fees.
Taxpayers would then suffer new costs. But so would riders who travel “free.” Greater crowding is one. Another is the kind of people who would be more often riding, no longer discouraged by having to pay fares or having to risk arrest for jumping a turnstile. Riders would be plagued by more bums and more criminals.
Beggars already being a common sight on NYC subways, it’s easy to project that ending financial and physical barriers to entry would only encourage more. Criminals would also be encouraged.
We might consider what happened elsewhere when this has been tried. Kansas City, Boston, Philadelphia — a “scientific socialist” would insist on a thorough study of all those cases, but Mamdani’s merely mentioned Bogotá’s, and is not pushing a study, maybe because he’s seen the mess Albuquerque’s in, after eliminating its one-dollar bus fare in 2023. Buses were soon being used as “rolling homeless shelters.” Local media also reported that they were “being used as getaway vehicles for shoplifters. . . . The addition of security guards on buses has undoubtedly caused criminals to think twice, but it has not solved the problem.”
The author of these words, Paul Gessing, is hoping that recounting Albuquerque’s experience will convince Mamdani to scrap his free-transit proposal. Should Mamdani become mayor, he may eventually be forced do so, but probably only after first making everybody suffer.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Krea and Firefly
The art of reasoning is nothing more than a language well arranged.
Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, as quoted in Antoine Lavoisier, Elements of Chemistry (trans. Robert Kerr, 1790), Preface, p. xiv.
On September 29, 1789, the first Congress of the United States under the new Constitution adjourned.
On the same date in 1881, economist Ludwig von Mises was born in Lemberg, Galicia, of the Austria-Hungary Empire (now Lviv, Ukraine).
From October 1 to November 9, 2025, Comet 3I/ATLAS (also known as C/2025 N1) will become unobservable from Earth due to solar conjunction — making it too close to the Sun’s glare for ground-based telescopes. Thus it will be unobservable when it reaches its perihelion (point on its trajectory closes to the Sun) on October 29, 2025. It should reappear for observations in early November 2025, though visibility will be limited to equatorial regions initially.
As previously mentioned in these updates, the comet may not even be a comet since it is so weird. And it is so weird that Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb has had a field day on newscasts and podcasts speculating on the possibility that the object may be artificial in origin. YouTube is filled with both rational discussion and outrageous hype about this extremely odd interstellar mass, with talk of alien machinery, etc. And is it worth noting that the object will be invisible to us on Halloween day? (See illustration, above, for a chuckle.)
While 3I/ATLAS is in a sense a UFO — we do not yet understand why it is so odd, why it is so different from the previous two interstellar interlopers to our solar system as well as from all other comets, a category it has sort of been shotgunned into by most respectable observers — it is one whose outré status may be falsified in the next few months. If it does not slow down or speed up after its “dark” (eclipsed) period behind the Sun, we can probably determine it’s not “too” outré.
But something interesting is happening right before disappearing: it’s been hit with a coronal mass ejection (CME):
What are the odds? Already the odds of an interstellar object of this size should “do” a flyby of three planets (Mars, Venus & Jupiter) in the plane of the ecliptic boggles the mind. Add all the rest, and now this CME, and what do we get? A riddle orbiting a mystery recolving around an enigma!
This is all not just entertaining science stuff. Understanding objects flying within the orbits of the terrestrial planets has to be regarded as a safety issue for all people on our planet.
It is not true that on an exchange of commodities we give value for value. On the contrary, each of the two contracting parties in every case, gives a less for a greater value. . . . If we really exchanged equal values, neither party could make a profit. And yet, they both gain, or ought to gain. Why? The value of a thing consists solely in its relation to our wants. What is more to the one is less to the other, and vice versa.
Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Le Commerce et le Gouvernement (1776), as quoted in Karl Marx’s Capital, Vol. I, Ch. 5.
On September 28, 2008, SpaceX launched the Falcon 1, the first private spacecraft to go into orbit around planet Earth.
SpaceX has achieved many records since.