Faced with starvation and separation from families, lakhs of workers started walking or cycling hundreds of kilometres back home. Hundreds perished on the way – of exhaustion, run over by vehicles or after they were assaulted by the police. Many who made it home states faced police action and were stigmatised by local authorities and communities. The restrictions on movement were justified on the grounds that this was necessary to limit the spread of the epidemic. We examine this assumption and, using a case study of Rajasthan and a Primary Health Centre area within it, argue that the reverse holds true: holding migrants back in cities was actually responsible for the spread of the coronavirus in rural areas.
Because the corona crisis has allowed us to experience a very different time, it will be interesting to see whether parts of this new normality, such as home offices and reduced mobility, will remain. But even if it is just an involuntary pause from capitalist times, we should reconsider neoliberalism’s temporal regimes of growth, decline and acceleration that have shaped life on Earth. Our experiences of corona time has given us a training in temporal thought and flexibility. Humanity will weather this crisis, but there are others ahead. Perhaps then, it will be comforting to know that we can, and must, trick time and plan for the future – even when we feel stuck in the present.
Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.
A new quarterly glossy magazine Die Kehre (The Turning), published this month, which describes itself as a “magazine for natural protection”. It draws its title from the writings of anti-modernist philosopher Martin Heidegger and tries to reclaim environmental concern as a reactionary cause. In its editorial, the magazine describes ecology as the “crown jewels” of the right “robbed” by the leftwing green movement in the 1970s, and argues for redefining the subject away from Klimaschutz (climate protection) towards Heimatschutz (homeland protection). Several articles warn of the danger to Germany’s “native” bird species and “fairytale forests” posed by windfarms. Another column cites a manifesto by far-right thinktank Recherche Dresden, “Seven theses for a conservative-ecological turn”, written in the wake of the German Green party’s triumph at the 2019 European elections
Belgium on Sunday broke its own standing record for the longest political crisis and longest period without an elected government. It has been 592 days since the previous government, led by former Prime Minister Charles Michel, collapsed over inter-party tensions on migration in December 2018. Strained negotiations after last year’s elections in May have routinely collapsed as party leaders and several top government officials resign from their mission to steer the coalition negotiations. The previous record for Belgium’s longest post-election period without a government stands at 541 days and ended with the swearing-in of Former Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo after a similarly convoluted negotiation period followed the June 2010 elections.
A common perspective is that types are restrictions. Static types restrict the set of values a variable may contain, capturing some subset of the space of “all possible values.” Under this worldview, a typechecker is sort of like an oracle, predicting which values will end up where when the program runs and making sure they satisfy the constraints the programmer wrote down in the type annotations. Of course, the typechecker can’t really predict the future, so when the typechecker gets it wrong—it can’t “figure out” what a value will be—static types can feel like self-inflicted shackles. But that is not the only perspective.
The year was 1981, and the man in question was international drug czar, Pablo Escobar. The location was his private zoo in Antioquia, Colombia. Located on eight square miles of land, the estate’s zoo included antelope, giraffes, elephants, and ponies. Now, he wanted hippos. So, in 1981, he acquired four of the animals from America. It was said he enjoyed his zoo immensely for years. But by 1993, Escobar had been shot and killed, and his drug business was over. The national government was running his property, but the zoo became too much to manage. The animals were sent off to refuges and sanctuaries. Hippos, however, are difficult to handle. They are herbivores, or plant-eaters, that happen to weigh an average of 3,000 pounds. And they’re some of the most unpredictable, temperamental creatures on the planet.
De 20 ˢᵗᵉ gemeente wordt ondersteund door organisaties die werken rond tijdelijk gebruik. Ze hebben een maatschappelijk doel: ze engageren zich om de lege gebouwen in Brussel open te stellen voor de Brusselse gemeenschap. Ze willen dat burgers de stad maken. Wij waarschuwen voor het creëren van een parallelle sub-huurmarkt waar de rechten van bezetters worden uitgehold. Wij verzetten ons tegen actoren die enkel financiële winst als doel hebben. Wij vragen de overheid om Leegbeek, de 20ˢᵗᵉ gemeente, te beschermen tegen de uberisering. Wij vragen dat de oppervlakte van Leegbeek wordt gewijd aan het zoeken naar oplossingen voor de dringende behoeften van onze samenleving.
This is brilliant… A German university is offering “idleness grants” to applicants who are seriously committed to doing nothing, as part of a design research project: “What can I refrain from so that my life has fewer negative consequences on others?”
Wow. Huge if true. “According to a machine learning analysis of dozens of languages […], the meaning of words does not necessarily refer to an intrinsic, essential constant. Instead, it is significantly shaped by culture, history and geography.”
“Though Russia is only one foreign actor capable of targeting US political audiences through the QAnon community, its history of operations appear to be the most ideologically aligned with the overarching QAnon theory,” the report said. “Russia also appears to have made the most effort to gain credibility within the community thus far.” QAnon was named by the FBI as a potential instigator of domestic terrorism, and followers have been charged with making a terror threat, murder and other crimes.
The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) has published RFC8890, The Internet is for End Users, arguing that the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) should ground its decisions in what’s good for people who use the Internet, and that it should take positive steps to achieve that. Why does this need to be said? Is it going too far? Who else could they favour, and why should you care? As author of the RFC and a member of the IAB that passed it, here are my thoughts.
Up to 30% of Belgians are anywhere from sceptical to strongly opposed to receiving a potential coronavirus vaccine, a new international survey showed. Among the 27 countries, only Turkey and Peru had equal rates of negative attitudes to a potential vaccine, contrasting sharply with Brazilians and Australians (12%), as well as with respondents in China, where opposition to a vaccine plunged to a mere 3%. The survey also showed that 22% of Belgians polled said they would not get a vaccine because “they are against vaccines in general,” landing Belgium among the six countries with the highest number of respondents to hold this view. Overall, Russia and Italy had the highest degree of anti-vaccine responses (30%), followed by France (24%), South Africa (23%) and the United States (20%).
Eight people in Gresik regency, East Java, were ordered by local authorities to dig graves for those who have died of COVID-19 as punishment for not wearing face masks in public. Cerme district head, Suyono, said that he punished residents who did not wear face masks by making them dig graves at a public cemetery in Ngabetan village.
The office as the default way of working is dead. But the office itself isn’t dead. With working from home, what we gain in work-life balance we might lose in innovation and creativity. There are people who could directly challenge that sentence but I suspect they will come from highly mature companies who have fully mastered the remote working learning curve. Many of us are still at the stage of doing what we did in the office , just remotely. The timorous amongst us may use the lack of productivity net gains as a reason to regress rather than push through the ‘pain barrier’ as Matt Mullenweg describes it. We can do so much better, for ourselves, our customers and society if we stop being so frightened or so certain of the future.
An international team of astronomers, led by Professor Jane Greaves of Cardiff University, today announced the discovery of a rare molecule – phosphine – in the clouds of Venus. On Earth, this gas is only made industrially, or by microbes that thrive in oxygen-free environments. Astronomers have speculated for decades that high clouds on Venus could offer a home for microbes – floating free of the scorching surface, but still needing to tolerate very high acidity. The detection of phosphine molecules, which consist of hydrogen and phosphorus, could point to this extra-terrestrial ‘aerial’ life. The new discovery is described in a paper in Nature Astronomy.
In mice and one person, scientists were able to reproduce the altered state often associated with ketamine by inducing certain brain cells to fire together in a slow-rhythmic fashion. “There was a rhythm that appeared and it was an oscillation that appeared only when the patient was dissociating,” says Dr. Karl Deisseroth, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Stanford University. https://sci-hub.tw/10.1038/s41586-020-2731-9
Hydrogels have an astonishing ability to swell and take on water. In daily life, they are used in dressings, nappies, and more to lock moisture away. A team of researchers has now found another use: quickly extracting large amounts of freshwater from air using a specially developed hydrogel containing a hygroscopic salt. The study, published in the journal
Angewandte Chemie, shows that the salt enhances the moisture uptake of the gel, making it suitable for water harvesting in dry regions.
Hydrogels can absorb and store many times their weight in water. In so doing, the underlying polymer swells considerably by incorporating water. However, to date, use of this property to produce freshwater from atmospheric water has not been feasible, since collecting moisture from the air is still too slow and inefficient.
On the other hand, moisture absorption could be enhanced by adding hygroscopic salts that can rapidly remove large amounts of moisture from the air. However, hygroscopic salts and hydrogels are usually not compatible, as a large amount of salt influences the swelling capability of the hydrogel and thus degrades its properties. In addition, the salt ions are not tightly coordinated within the gel and are easily washed away.
The materials scientist Guihua Yu and his team at the University of Texas at Austin, USA, have now overcome these issues by developing a particularly “salt-friendly” hydrogel.
As their study shows, this gel gains the ability to absorb and retain water when combined with a hygroscopic salt. Using their hydrogel, the team were able to extract almost six liters of pure water per kilo of material in 24 hours, from air with 30% relative humidity.
I enjoy forecasting, pretty much in the same way other people enjoy video games, or stamp collecting. It’s also an activity broadly in line with my values. I think the world would be a much better place if people approached predicting the future with the same level of rigor they have when explaining the past. Yet incalculably more books have been written about the past than about the future, and the fact that studying the past is more tractable than studying the future only partly explains this asymmetry. I think most people approach forecasting in what some authors call “far mode”: as an exercise whose primary purpose is not to describe reality accurately, but to signal our aspirations, or something along those lines. However, as Robin Hanson likes to say, the future is just another point in time.
Birdfont is a free font editor which lets you create vector graphics and export TTF, OTF and SVG fonts. The editor has good support for both monochrome and color font formats.
“Everyone has observed the sonic phenomena of a political crowd of dozens or hundreds of thousands of people. The human river shouts a slogan in a uniform rhythm. Then another slogan springs from the head of the demonstration; it spreads towards the tail replacing the first. A wave of transition thus passes from the head to the tail. The clamour fills the city, and the inhibiting force of voice and rhythm reaches a climax. It is an event of great power and beauty in its ferocity. Then the impact between the demonstrators and the enemy occurs. The perfect rhythm of the last slogan breaks up in a huge cluster of chaotic shouts, which also spreads to the tail. Imagine, in addition the reports of dozens of machine guns and the whistle of bullets adding their punctuations to this total disorder. The crowd is then rapidly dispersed, and after sonic and visual hell follows a detonating calm, full of despair, dust and death. The statistical laws of these events, separated from their political or moral context… are the laws of the passage from complete order to total disorder in a continuous or explosive manner. They are stochastic laws.”
“Karl Marx is most famous as a critic of capitalism, but at the heart of his critique can be found a desperate plea for the transformation of work. People, he argues, express themselves and create the world through creative and collective activity. This natural tendency is twisted into something unrecognisable in work under capitalism. He didn’t just think work around him was bad because it took place in noisy and dangerous conditions, or for low wages and long hours. The problem of work was a fundamental one: under capitalism, work takes something human and turns it into something monstrous. The forces of capital become ravenous, eating up all that is human, sucking on the very lifeblood of society.”
— Amelia Horgan,
Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism
Almost any physical system is associated with
some degree of integrated information, even a single molecule. The presence of integrated information does not in itself indicate the presence of consciousness, according to IIT. The theory tells us that, in any physical system, consciousness is present at the level at which there is the most integrated information. For example, a molecule contained within the brain will not be conscious, as the level of integrated information in a brain is much higher than the level of integrated information in a single molecule. However, IIT predicts that a molecule in a puddle of water will be conscious, as there is more integrated information in the molecule than in the puddle as a whole. This is a theory of consciousness with considerable empirical support, and yet it entails that consciousness is much more widespread than we ordinarily assume.
Goff, Philip.
Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness. New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2019.
“Innovation” is in very bad odor these days. “Disruption” is even more disreputable. But as tech and the global south researcher Rida Qadri writes in Wired, “innovation” isn’t limited to inventing unregulated banks and calling them “fintech” and “disruption” is more than just misclassifying employees as contractors.
Qadri studies workers who are seizing the means of computation, reverse-engineering and repurposing the apps that are meant to keep them in bondage and figuring out how to set themselves free. Her research on gig drivers in Jakarta is essential reading:
Indonesian drivers have banded together to build clubhouses that serve as break-rooms, union halls, tech workshops and scooter maintenance depots. These centers are the birthplace of “tuyul” apps, which allow workers to resist algorithmic “optimization” and adapt their working conditions to improve their pay and safety.
In her Wired piece, Qadri gives examples of other “tech workers” — that is, low-waged, casualized workers who are dispatched and managed by apps — who use technology to take back control, from “farmers who strike against a smart city plan” to riders who band together to get back their stolen scooters.
This is mutual aid, with code. It is every bit as innovative and disruptive as Uber or Amazon, but because it is done by workers, rather than to workers, it is not recognized as such. Indeed, when workers modify the apps that script their movements, they’re called “criminals,” not “innovators.”
Take Doordash’s smear campaign against Para, an app that let delivery drivers find out how much a job paid before they took it (Doordash hides compensation from drivers in hopes of tricking them into taking unprofitable runs):
Doordash called Para a criminal app, baselessly accused it of identity theft, and insisted that drivers had no right to know how much they were going to get paid before they committed to a job.
But as Para shows, seizing the means of computation is an important strategy for workers seeking a better life. The tactics of Adversarial Interoperability (AKA Competitive Compatibility or Comcom) can transfer power from Goliaths to Davids:
But the soi-disant disruptors of the business world will not tolerate being disrupted themselves. Uber is content to skirt labor, safety and transportation policy, but would scream bloody murder if drivers and riders hacked the app to make it obsolete:
Many seem to be perceiving this film strictly as a metaphor for climate change or the straightforward risk of a literal asteroid.
But to me, this piece of cinema captures the epitome of modernity’s issue and serves as a much greater warning and metaphor for much more than just climate issues.
It’s a reflection on how humanity by and large treats epistemic and intellectual matters, largely disregarding finer details; our unwillingness to communicate and to relinquish ignorance; and our inability to perceive epistemic and existential risk—all of which deliver us into suffering.
From our complex love affair with capitalism, to social narcissism, and the tendency to refuse to confront or even acknowledge new information—avoiding even the slightest consideration that our model of reality can be wrong—and the grave consequences of this.
Don’t Look Up is reminiscent of the plight of the philosopher. A tale as old as time itself. Except instead of Spinoza being exiled for saying true things, we have a cast of characters trying to convey an existential risk to a population that, by and large, is so caught up in itself and its cultural prescriptions, it simply does not care.
Instead, the cast is greeted by a populace which embarrassingly and arrogantly disregards epistemic care for detail—a society trapped in a sort of neurosis of avoidance—to avoid looking at the thing that makes them uncomfortable
—a deliberate avoidance of reality—to stay inside of a feel-good narrative, even if the narrative completely rails against reason, in order to remain in a wireheaded state of ignorant bliss.
Even if new information suggests we should be concerned, attentive, and careful. Even if the price of not doing this is the ultimate suffering.
Despite the films humor, Don’t Look Up is a serious reflection on modernity and its predicament. And a reminder that care itself should be epistemic and intellectual in nature. Because tradeoffs are real.
One fear I have is that this film, although a comedy, is much closer to what might actually happen if an asteroid were definitively heading for Earth.
But if planet Earth were actually a rational place, we would all have a Spinozan refinement and care for all of the universe’s details. We would all be philosophers, scientists, and creators—beings of meaning—sharing the utmost epistemic and intellectual care—rather than indulging in the kind of anti-epistemology culture which largely dominates Earth now.
But I think that’s the even greater irony—perhaps the most disheartening realization—is that there are already many metaphorical asteroids we are already ignoring.
To paraphrase Slavoj Zizek: Hollywood’s love of apocalyptic films is a reflection of a much greater and darker truth—that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine change.
“Mildred Harnack was beheaded on Hitler’s direct order. Born in Milwaukee, she was 26 when she moved to Germany to pursue a PhD. As an American grad student in Berlin, she saw Germany swiftly progress from democracy to fascist dictatorship. She and her husband Arvid began holding secret meetings in their apartment. She recruited working-class Germans into the resistance, helped Jews escape, plotted acts of sabotage, and collaborated in writing leaflets that denounced Hitler and called for revolution.
“Mildred Harnack nicknamed their resistance group “the Circle.” The group was diverse: its members were Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, atheist. They were factory workers and office workers, students and professors, journalists and artists. Over 40% were women.
…
"The Gestapo arrested Mildred Harnack on Sept 7, 1942 and gave her group a name: the Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra). Postwar testimonies and notes smuggled out of a Berlin women’s prison describe the daily interrogations and torture that Mildred and others in the group endured.
"Mildred Harnack and 75 of her German coconspirators were forced to undergo a mass trial at the highest military court in Nazi Germany. A panel of 5 judges sentenced her to 6 years at a prison camp but Hitler overruled the decision and ordered her execution
"Before her execution Mildred spent the last hours of her life in a prison cell translating poems by Goethe. The title of my book ALL THE FREQUENT TROUBLES OF OUR DAYS is a line from one of them. A prison chaplain smuggled out the book of poems under the folds of his robe
"On February 16, 1943 at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin, Mildred Harnack was strapped to a guillotine and beheaded. According to all available records, she was the only American in the leadership of the German resistance to Hitler.”
“… for most of Tumblr’s history, the Dashboard was (and still largely remains) organized by reverse chronology, rather than algorithmic hierarchy. 11 This has a democratizing function: posts with ten thousand notes (even “promoted” posts) appear equally weighted to posts that only have five notes. Tumblr’s feed structure, in combination with its pseudonymity, means that individual users’ voices are not automatically marginalized or dismissed for being less popular or more radical. 12 Others cannot see the identity or number of a user’s followers nor who they follow. As a result, although “star” posters do develop on Tumblr (since the number of “notes” is visible on a post), they rarely reflect cultural hierarchies or power brokers in real life.Tumblr’s structure thus emphasizes ever-shifting collective authorship and diverse creative communities over individual originality and idea ownership. Tumblr’s reblogging convention decenters singular authorship of any one piece of content; a creative work, once posted, can circulate through multiple clusters of users and communities via reblogging, conveying a sense of expansive yet elusive community. This sense of an ever-present imagined collectivity also manifests in Tumblr users’ performative authorship through hashtags. Tags were particularly vital as early collective tools because, before 2015, there was no private direct messaging function between users. Rather than using tags as more traditional indexing tools, users add tags to posts as a form of performative signaling on many collective Tumblr networks. 13 Over time, hashtags also became ways to block content and curate community engagement, as widely employed user modifications allowed users to block content by tag.Taken together, this mix of design features affords an experience and environment that both maximizes user creative agency…”
In practice, this emergent ruling class of our time insists on the confinement of particular acts of creation within the property form and access to collective creative activity, from which to harvest information in the aggregate. This is the vectoralist class. If the capitalist class owns the means of production, the vectoralist class owns the vectors of information. They own the
extensivevectors of communication, which traverse space. They own the
intensive vectors of computation, which accelerate time. They own the copyrights, the patents, and the trademarks that capture attention or assign ownership to novel techniques. They own the logistic systems that manage and monitor the disposition and movement of any resource. They own the financial instruments that stand in for the value of every resource and that can be put out on markets to crowdsource the possible value of every possible future combination of those resources. They own the algorithms that rank and sort and assign particular information in particular circumstances.
Wark, McKenzie.Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? London: Verso, 2019.
I hated Facebook from the start and couldn’t wait for it to die. That was a pretty reasonable thing to expect. After all, I’d watched social networks from Sixdegrees on crash and burn as the network effects that drove their growth also drove their precipitous collapse.
A system enjoys “network effects” if it increases in value as it adds users. Social networks are all about these effects: you join Facebook because your friends are there, and once you join, others sign up because you are there.
But there’s a hard corollary: systems driven by network effects lose value when users leave. Your blender doesn’t get better when someone else gets a blender of their own, but it also doesn’t get worse when someone else throws theirs away.
Social networks are prone to sudden collapses, in part because of the double-edged sword of network effects — but also because of the intrinsic dynamics of social networking. Social networks insist that we articulate our relations to one another, pinning down the way we feel about the people in our lives.
The problem here is that the most important part of our relationships are hard to pin down. The opposite of “love” isn’t “hate” — it’s indifference. It’s surprisingly common to feel a mixture of emotions towards the people who matter the most in your life. Pinning down an emotion that fluctuates from moment to moment is difficult.
Actually, it’s worse than difficult. It’s anti-social. Your partner or your bestie knows when you’re pissed off at them, but that doesn’t mean you should create a world-readable sign that says “I hate this person (right now).” That’s a recipe for staying mad.
And those are the easy cases. Because at least the people who love and who love you care about your happiness. There’s a whole universe of people — like your boss, or a creepy co-worker — who seem to sincerely think they’re your pal, even though you loathe them. When those people friend you, you have to friend them back.
This dynamic is so common that I wrote an article about in 2007, entitled, “How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook.”
It describes how, over time, the coziness and connection of a friend-list populated by people you genuinely like becomes an exhausting morass of people you don’t really like, but can’t kick off the list, and how you are almost certainly oblivious to the fact that you’re someone else’s exhausting not-really-a-friend.
Back in 2007, I thought we’d soon be free of the scourge of Facebook. I was wrong. Facebook used a mix of tactics to extend its shelf-life and increase its influence, and its network effect advantage let it grow, and grow, and grow.
Facebook owes its longevity in part to its anticompetitive conduct. By 2012, young users were fleeing Facebook, which was being colonized by their parents and teachers. They flocked to Instagram, so Facebook just bought Instagram, ensuring that its disgruntled users could not escape its grasp.
Having captured Instagram, Facebook ruthlessly strangled potential competitors. It tricked millions of users into installing a fake battery monitor called Onavo, which spied on their mobile usage, giving Facebook the strategic intelligence it needed to keep rivals like Snap at bay:
But capturing or killing rivals was only half the story. The other half was Facebook’s ruthless campaign directed against its own users, whom Facebook sought to impose “switching costs” on. A “switching cost” is the value of everything you give up when you switch out a product or service for a rival. Facebook did everything it could to increase the switching costs of leaving for a competitor, including plotting to hold your family photos hostage:
That’s important, because low switching costs are kryptonite for network effects. If you could leave Facebook and still talk to your Facebook friends (the way you can leave your cellular carrier without leaving behind the people you talk to on your phone), then the first time Facebook really pissed you off, you could just quit.
In other words, network effects are how companies like Facebook get big, but high switching costs are how they stay big.
Facebook used both technology (breaking interoperability) and law (suing companies that interoperated anyway) to fend off switching costs. It build a walled garden with really high walls.
But not even sky-high switching costs could keep Facebook users locked in forever. At a certain point, the number of truly awful people in your Facebook feed made leaving worth the price. Growth slowed. Halted. Reversed. Last quarter, Facebook lost US daily users for the first time. Investors pounded the company, wiping more than $230m off its market cap, the largest single drop in value ever experienced by any company, ever.
Those investors understood that when the toxic creeps push the most delicate normies off of Facebook, that leaves the rest of the nontoxic users mired in forums where the creep:normie ratio is worse. More normies leave. The ratio declines some more. Soon, it’s just a cesspool. We’ve all experienced online communities where this happened.
Today in his Garbage Day newsletter, Ryan Broderick revisits the last days of Myspace and the way this dynamic created a precipitous slide from the world’s largest-ever online service to a husk in the blink of an eye:
Myspace started out as a fun place to hang out with friends and meet new ones. But it filled up with scammers and harassers. Creepy grownups arrived and creeped on teenagers, who were creeped out. Users left (for Facebook!) in droves. Myspace lost 10 million users in a single month:
What’s interesting is what Myspace did next. They tried to pivot to “safety,” stepped up their moderation, tried to target teens. When that didn’t work, they embarked on “a bizarre redesign, a dumb logo change, and a shifting of their corporate strategy.”
Dumb logo change? Bizarre redesign? Radical shift of corporate strategy?
Huh.
Oh, by the way, Facebook is now called Meta. It has a new logo that is just…wow. Also, it’s not a social network anymore. It’s a VR company, except it’s not called VR anymore, it’s called “metaverse.” No one likes their metaverse. Possibly because it doesn’t work.
They’ve got a a doozy of a new slogan: “Meta, metamates, me.” (No, really).
The misbegotten “pivots” are everywhere. As Broderick writes, “Reels, the video feed on Meta’s once-cool photo app, is filling up with silent auto-playing one-second video memes everyone hates.”
Facebook’s demographic is aging. It has become synonymous with toxic debate, conspiratorialism, harassment, and creeps.
Switching costs or no, people are leaving. And the nature of network effects is that every person who leaves makes Facebook less valuable to the people who stay behind. What’s more, as the bad drive out the good, the people who make Facebook most worth staying for are the ones leaving.
The company lost $230b in market-cap last month. Seen through this lens, the investors who hung in are looking like optimists.
I recognize optimism when I see it. I’ve been waiting for Facebook to die for 15 years now. The market can stay irrational for longer than I can stay solvent, which is why I’m glad I didn’t short the stock. But I never lost hope. Today, I’m more hopeful than ever.
Before we get into the super fun memes on Monday to celebrate the anniversary of Captain Cook’s death, I wanted to give some backstory because the events surrounding his demise are greatly misinterpreted and misunderstood, especially in the Western world.
Captain Cook arrived in Hawai’i durning Makahiki. This celebration lasts around four months, and rings in the New Year. This celebration focuses on rest and rejuvenation, and labor and warfare were forbidden. Days were set aside for large feasts, parties, sports, dance and for rest, with many ceremonies and prayers being held/given all the time.
The bay where Cook harbored belonged to Lono, the Hawaiian god who was honored durning Makahiki. Due to this, Kānaka Maoli assumed Cook was a gift from Lono, he was a friend to help increase the celebrations and joy. However, tensions quickly rose when Cook and his men didn’t participate any other traditions besides partying. In short, they were terrible guests. Cook destroyed a sacred burial site to steal wood and was just a massive dick. Cook had incorrectly assumed the Hawaiians mistook him for a god, and treated acts of friendship like worship and used that as an excuse to act however he wanted.
Cook and his men left Hawai’i on but had to return a week later due to damage on their boat. But this time, Makahiki was over, and everyone had fallen back into routines of daily life and labor. The season of Kū had started, the Hawaiian god of warfare. By returning after Makahiki and durning the season of war and politics, Cook unknowingly revealed that he was NOT a gift from Lono, which upset the Kānaka Maoli since they had been tricked.
Cook demanded the Hawaiians fix his boat, but they refused. Cook refused to leave until his boat was fixed, and tensions continued to grow. Hawaiians then stole a longboat from Cook along with other items.
In an attempt to barter for the longboat back, Captain Cook tried to kidnap Kalaniʻōpuʻu, the aliʻi nui (supreme chief) of Hawai’i at the time. When Cook and his men went to retrieve Kalaniʻōpuʻu, the chief and lower chiefs wrongly assumed Cook was taking them back to his ship to barter a treaty. However, by the time they reached the bay, it became obvious that Cook was trying to kidnap, not negotiate. A struggle began. Many Hawaiians soon came to the beach, trying to revive the ali’i nui including serval lower chiefs. It quickly became a tense mob. Cook struck a chief and the crew raised their guns and in return, the chief pushed Cook to the ground. While on the ground, Cook and his men were mobbed, and in the crowd, Cook was stabbed with a metal dagger, which was allegedly given to the Hawaiians on Cooks first visit.
While the crew was busy, several Hawaiians dragged Cook’s corpse off the beach to an unknown location. There his body was burned, leaving his bones to be gathered to steal his mana, or power. Mana is a life force with gives influence, power, and authority. Mana can be gained or lost, and it is stored in the bones. After someone’s death, small bones would be turned into jewelry for their loved ones, so their mana could be held by their family even after their death. A few of Cook’s bones were given back to his crew as they had the right to inherit his power. This began the rumor of c*nnibalism, as the crew didn’t understand why they would need his bones.
The crew remained for another week without incident, until they could repair their boat fully.
In summary, James “haole bitch“ Cook got exactly what he deserved and my ancestors did everyone a favor ❤️
The Yanqing National Alpine Ski Centre, located just outside of Beijing, China, is the venue for all alpine skiing events at the 2022 Winter Olympics. It relies on artificial snow (evident from the white streaks amid dark mountains), which China has gone to great lengths to produce, diverting water from a key Beijing reservoir. As the climate warms, many believe fake snow will be the new norm for the Winter Olympics, raising concerns about water usage and scarcity.
“Diagnostic manuals such as the DSM were created to provide a common diagnostic language for mental health professionals and attempt to provide a definitive list of mental health problems, including their symptoms.
The main findings of the research were:
• Psychiatric diagnoses all use different decision-making rules
• There is a huge amount of overlap in symptoms between diagnoses
• Almost all diagnoses mask the role of trauma and adverse events
• Diagnoses tell us little about the individual patient and what treatment they need
The authors conclude that diagnostic labelling represents ‘a disingenuous categorical system’.
Lead researcher Dr Kate Allsopp, University of Liverpool, said: “Although diagnostic labels create the illusion of an explanation they are scientifically meaningless and can create stigma and prejudice. I hope these findings will encourage mental health professionals to think beyond diagnoses and consider other explanations of mental distress, such as trauma and other adverse life experiences.”
Professor Peter Kinderman, University of Liverpool, said: “This study provides yet more evidence that the biomedical diagnostic approach in psychiatry is not fit for purpose. Diagnoses frequently and uncritically reported as ‘real illnesses’ are in fact made on the basis of internally inconsistent, confused and contradictory patterns of largely arbitrary criteria. The diagnostic system wrongly assumes that all distress results from disorder, and relies heavily on subjective judgments about what is normal.””
I was a practicing psychiatrist for 45 years. This article tells the truth as I experienced it.
A historical accident made Massachusetts a lab for studying how tech can serve monopolies, and the moves, countermoves and counter-countermoves show how businesses, tinkerers, governments and the public can liberate themselves from seemingly all-powerful monopolists.
It all starts with Right to Repair. Companies love to monopolize the repair of their products. If the only place to get your broken stuff fixed is at its manufacturer’s authorized depots, the manufacturer can move all kinds of value from your side of the deal to their own. Like, they can force you to buy their original parts, rather than cheaper replacements. They can charge you uncompetitive rates for repairs, based not on the cost of labor and parts, but on how much they think you’ll pay before you just buy something else. Best of all, a repair monopoly lets manufacturers decide when your stuff is “beyond repair,” whereupon they can offer you a generous “trade-in rebate” if you buy a new gadget.
(No coincidence that Apple leads the anti-repair movement; CEO Tim Cook warned his shareholders that the biggest threat to the business was people fixing their phones rather than replacing them.)
But monopolizing repair is hard. Even if a manufacturer refuses to supply repair manuals, companies like iFixit will step in, do teardowns of your products, and make their own documentation. If you gouge on replacement parts, companies will reverse-engineer the parts and make their own alternatives. These factors keep businesses honest: if they abuse their customers, they create a market for rivals who’ll treat their customers better.
But American innovation is alive and well in the anti-repair sector. Canny corporate lawyers have devised clever ways to abuse copyright and trademark to fight independent repair. Like, if you etch a minute company logo into all the parts in your gadgets, you can use trademark to fight refurbishment and re-importation of parts harvested from scrapped items.
Even more powerful is DRM. Thanks to Section 1201 of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, making tools to bypass a “copyright access control” is a felony. Software is copyrighted, so if your product has a chip in it, you can wrap it in a thin layer of “access controls” (DRM). Anyone makes a tool to bypass that DRM — say, to extract diagnostic information or activate a new part — commits a felony.
A company that puts cheap microcontrollers into its gadgets can make it a literal crime to reconfigure your own property so that it serves you, rather than the company’s shareholders. The falling price of chips (notwithstanding our current supply-chain blip) encouraged manufacturers to deploy this strategy to monopolize all repair.
The automotive sector was an early adopter of these dirty tricks. Car companies hate independent mechanics and third-party parts companies and have waged war on them for decades. By adding DRM to our cars, the auto makers found a way to block third-party parts, and to prevent independent mechanics from interpreting diagnostic messages.
By 2012, the people of Massachusetts had had enough. They put a question on the state ballot that year and 75% of Bay Staters voted for a Right to Repair rule that required Big Car to supply independent mechanics with the information needed to interpret the diagnostics that traveled over their cars’ wired network (the “CAN bus”).
But the car makers weren’t going to give up on the dream of making indie mechanics extinct. They shifted their diagnostic messages from the CAN bus to the cars’ wireless networks, which were not covered by the Right to Repair law.
Eight years later, in 2020, Bay Staters once again put a Right to Repair question on the ballot. The car makers pulled out all the stops to fight it, including a surreal scare-ad campaign that claimed that allowing independent repair would lead to women being stalked and murdered:
The car makers went to court to fight this (naturally), but that was just the start of their fuckery. Manufacturers like Subaru and Kia found a truly disgusting way to punish the people of Massachusetts for having the audacity to demand the right to choose their own mechanics: they are disabling advanced features on cars sold in MA:
If you buy your Subaru or Kia in Boston, you lose the ability to remote-start your engine on cold mornings. Your car won’t send you oil-change reminders or tire-pressure warnings. You lose access to emergency assistance services (I was a happy Kia owner — until I read this).
This is just more of the fuckery that started in 2012, when car makers shifted their diagnostics to the wireless network. It’s a winning strategy. If car makers can maintain a legal barrier to repair, they can force independent mechanics out of business and scare investors away from parts manufacturers. Do it long enough and the car makers won’t need to fight right to repair, because there won’t be any indie fix-it shops left — all the mechanics will have changed careers or taken jobs with the big auto-makers.
All of this is an object lesson in the limits of interoperability in fighting monopoly. Interop — the power to plug a new product or service into an existing one — is a powerful anti-monopoly tool.
To understand why, you have to first grasp the fatal flaw in the arguments in favor of tech monopolies. Antitrust law (theoretically) bans companies from trying to secure monopolies, but if a company just happens to get a monopoly by being the best at what it does, antitrust says we should leave it alone.
So Big Tech’s apologists like to claim that tech is a “natural monopoly” — a “winner-take-all” market that inevitably results in a single company dominating each tech subindustry. They attribute this natural monopoly to “network effects” — that’s when a product gets better as it adds customers. You probably joined Facebook because your friends were there, and once you joined up, you became a reason for more people to join. That’s “network effects.”
Tech companies definitely enjoy network effects, but that’s not the whole story. You see, digital technology is configurable in a way that other technologies are not. At a fundamental level, every computer we know how to build can run every program we know how to write. The inescapable universality of technology means that we can’t just think about network effects; we also have to think about “switching costs.”
Switching costs are another idea from economics: switching costs are (unsurprisingly) the costs you have to bear when you switch from one product to another. Switch from Facebook, lose the ability to talk to the customers and communities and friends you leave behind. Switch from iOS, lose your apps and media. Switch from HP, throw away all the ink you’ve bought on your subscription plan (and maybe pay a fee to cancel the subscription).
All of these switching costs may seem technological, but they’re actually legal. The universality of computers means that you could absolutely switch from iOS to Android and keep running your apps in a virtual machine. There’s no technical reason you can’t install modified HP printer software that lets you use third-party ink. There’s no technical reason you can’t leave Facebook but continue to participate in the messaging and groups you left behind:
The reason you can’t do these things is that it’s illegal. The reverse-engineering, scraping and other guerrilla tactics you need to accomplish these things without the manufacturers’ cooperation put you at risk of prosecution under cybersecurity, copyright, trademark and other laws.
The antitrust reform movement has cottoned onto this and there is a groundswell of support to force the tech companies to open up their platforms to competitors. In the USA, there’s the ACCESS Act:
And in Massachusetts, there are Right to Repair laws.
Like I said, Massachusetts is the lab where these ideas are playing out. They’ve been at it for a decade. We should study the monopolists’ countermoves in Massachusetts because they are a playbook that will be used by other monopolists if we pass, say, the ACCESS Act.
Back in 2012, Big Car was forced to open up its wired network, so it moved all the useful network traffic to its wireless net. If the ACCESS Act forces Facebook to expose an API so third parties can interoperate with it, we should expect Facebook to pull a similar stunt.
They could claim that they are “refactoring their data-structures” to provide security, or innovative features, and feign remorse and surprise that this move means that the API is no longer useful for interoperators who supply ex-Facebook users with access to their friends and communities.
And yeah, we could go to court to fight them, or we could pass another law to try to prevent this kind of fuckery, but in the meantime, the fate that befell Massachusetts mechanics awaits interoperators. Neither small co-ops, nor tinkerers’ hobby-projects, nor startups will be able retain users, programmers or funding for their federate refuge from Facebook if it can’t hook up to Facebook. As Facebook ties up enforcement action in court or Congress, these projects and businesses will fail. When (if?) we force Facebook to stop cheating, the pool of interoperators will be much smaller. And like the car-makers, Facebook can create a fuckery stockpile, and roll out a new tactic every time an old one is banned.
But remember computers are intrinsically universal. Even if manufacturers don’t cooperate with interop, we can still make new services and products that plug into their existing ones. We can do it with reverse-engineering, scraping, bots — a suite of tactics we call Adversarial Interoperability or Competitive Compatibility (AKA “comcom”):
These tactics have a long and honorable history, and have been a part of every tech giant’s own growth. That’s given Big Tech companies a deep and urgent appreciation of how effective these tactics are at overthrowing dominant firms. First, you make a name for yourself by selling cheap ink that works with a monopolist’s printers, then you leverage that name-brand recognition to go into the printer business! Unsurprisingly Big Tech now hates comcom, claiming that when they used guerrilla tactics, it was part of the legitimate progress of the industry, but when others do it to them, that’s piracy, hacking — digital terrorism!
Imagine if comcom had been in the mix back in 2012, when the automakers broke Massachusetts right to repair by shifting service messages to their cars’ wireless networks. If breaking DRM was legally permissible, Bay Staters wouldn’t have had to wait eight years for a new ballot initiative. Instead, a couple of smart MIT kids could have hacked those wireless service messages, designed a decoder for them, manufactured a gadget with a $3 bill of materials, and sold it for $50 to every independent mechanic in Massachusetts (and the US, and the world!). They could have raised capital to do this, promising a subscription revenue stream that would cover updates that kept the gadget current with new models of cars and new scrambling schemes.
The auto-makers could fight back, but they’d be at a serious disadvantage. If they pushed updates to their cars (or revised the systems on new cars coming off the line), they would have to ensure that their authorized service centers were current. The added complexity would piss off the mechanics paying for the companies’ stamp of legitimacy, and their customers. The harder the auto-makers fought, the more mechanics would give up on being authorized and buy the indie diagnostic gadget instead — and the more drivers would switch to indie mechanics.
Meanwhile, our MIT kids could expand into ancillary services — like a price-comparison tool to help indie mechanics source cheap third-party or refurbished parts, or third-party warranties for drivers, or… Well, you get the picture.
If auto-makers knew that committing a fuckery would immediately spark this kind of comcom guerrilla warfare, there’s a good chance they wouldn’t commit the fuckery. Large companies hate competition, but they hate uncertainty even more. Providing a standard interface for interoperators may not be their preferred outcome, but at least it’s orderly and predictable. Comcom represents an unquantifiable risk to large businesses whose shareholders get really angry when unexpected things happen.
So in theory, just the threat of comcom might dampen manufacturers’ fuckery inclinations. But who knows? Some of these companies might decide to roll the dice, driven by spite or hubris. When that happens, it’s MIT kids to the rescue, and a market for cheap guerrilla comcom gadgets that keep the independent sector going while lawmakers and regulators go through the slow, plodding business of fixing the law.
This isn’t just a theory, it’s one with an evidentiary basis. This is how previous compatibility wars actually played out. Back in the early 2000s, Microsoft was kicking Apple’s ass by undermaintaining Office for the Mac. Windows Office docs and Mac office docs were only barely compatible, and many was the time when opening a Windows Excel or Word file on a Mac would permanently corrupt it.
I was a CIO back then, overseeing heterogeneous Mac/Windows networks, and we actually started giving our Mac-using designers a second Windows computer so that they could reliably share Office docs with their Windows-using peers. In some cases, we just bought Window versions of Quark and Photoshop and got rid of the designers’ Macs.
Apple didn’t solve this problem by convincing Microsoft to fix its Mac products. Instead, Apple reverse-engineered the Windows Office file-formats and created iWork (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) a Mac productivity suite that could seamlessly read and write those files.
That was the moment when Microsoft finally stopped fighting standardization of its Office formats, and started cooperating with the project of moving them to a universal, XML-based successor (docx, xlsx, pptx). Why not? All the obfuscation they had thrown into Office represented a major engineering headache. Maybe the cruft was worth it if it helped Windows kill off the Mac, but once Apple committed the resources to untangle Office’s spaghetti code, all the benefits to Microsoft disappeared.
Today, the comcom tactics that saved Apple are largely off the table, thanks to all the legal restrictions that have been bought and erected by tech giants, including Apple. Like, if you try to make a runtime for iOS apps, Apple will 100% sue you:
Corellium, the company that built that iOS runtime, squeaked out a very narrow victory. A broader version of their product — aimed at a mass market, not just security researchers — would have a much harder struggle in court.
Comcom and mandatory standards are complementary. Mandatory standards provide new interoperators with a reliable, low-cost way to build new products and services. Comcom keeps tech giants’ cheating impulses in check, and also offers interoperators a fallback position when an exec decides to cheat anyway.
We can get mandatory standards through a law: pass the ACCESS Act or DMA. But comcom is harder to revive. Ideally, we could reform all the laws that block comcom — patent, copyright, cybersecurity, contract, etc — to protect interoperability. But that’s a lot of slow lawmaking, and there’s no guarantee that the high-priced corporate lawyers who figured out how to twist those laws to block comcom won’t come up with more gambits.
Another possibility is to pass an “interoperators’ defense” — something like an Anti-SLAPP law, where an interoperator accused of an offense under any statute could use a streamlined court process to show that they’re engaged in legitimate interop — improving competition, security, privacy, accessibility, usability, etc.
We could use the ongoing antitrust cases against the tech giants to appoint “special masters” — independent overseers who’d have to bless any legal action taken by the company against a competitor, only after verifying that it wasn’t a pretext for blocking interop.
We could use government procurement rules: if you want to sell a car to the government, you have to promise not to sue rivals that make it possible for independent mechanics to fix that car, even if they bypass your DRM. A similar rule could require, say, Google to promise not to attack rivals who made interoperable ed-tech that plugged into Google Classroom.
All of these would leave the companies with the legal right to fight actual bad actors — companies that stole user data or enabled fraud. Even more important, though, is the long-overdue creation of a federal privacy law in the US. That way, we could have a single standard that applied to both Big Tech platforms and the scrappy interoperators that offer liberation from their walled gardens:
After all, even companies that claim to stick up for their users’ privacy — like Microsoft and Apple — are highly selective about when that privacy is worth defending. So long as the switching costs are high enough, those companies can be relied upon to put their shareholders’ interests ahead of their users’ privacy:
The antitrust world has really started to think hard about the power of interop to smash monopolies in rapid and durable ways. An excellent new Yale Law Journal paper from Herbert Hovenkamp, the dean of American antitrust legal scholarship, delves into the legal basis for an interop remedy:
I’m really hoping that as the idea of interop spreads through antitrust circles, that these game-theoretical analsyses of the ways that different kinds of interop interact with each other to create durable anti-monopoly measures enters the discourse.
“Most of us were not taught moral philosophy outside the constructs of our institutional religions or educational systems. I would like to propose a simple, time-tested applied ethic to steer our conversation. In the troubled times we find ourselves in, our disposition should be to side with those that have less power. In the context of capitalist modernity, to borrow Abdullah Öcalan’s language, this means siding with the oppressed, the exploited, the immiserate, the marginalized, the poor. You can examine any situation, in all its complexity, and assess the following: who has more power over the other? Who is benefitting from the other’s misery? Who is exerting domination? Where does this power come from? What are the rights of those involved? From this vantage point of critical thinking, one can then engage their moral will in support of balancing power. This can be applied to both the human and more-than-human realms of other species and animate ecosystems.”
“Listen,” says the mayor, opening the windows of his office. From the street below rises the sound of human voices. “Before I became mayor 14,000 cars passed along this street every day. More cars passed through the city in a day than there are people living here.”
Miguel Anxo Fernández Lores has been mayor of the Galician city since 1999. His philosophy is simple:
owning a car doesn’t give you the right to occupy the public space.
“How can it be that the elderly or children aren’t able to use the street because of cars?” asks César Mosquera, the city’s head of infrastructures. “How can it be that private property – the car – occupies the public space?”
a metro-style map of pontevedra shows typical walking times.
“They stopped cars crossing the city and got rid of street parking, as people looking for a place to park is what causes the most congestion. They closed all surface car parks in the city centre and opened underground ones and others on the periphery, with 1,686 free places. They got rid of traffic lights in favour of roundabouts, extended the car-free zone from the old city to the 18th-century area, and used traffic calming in the outer zones to bring the speed limit down to 30km/h.
The benefits are numerous. On the same streets where 30 people died in traffic accidents from 1996 to 2006, only three died in the subsequent 10 years, and none since 2009. CO2 emissions are down 70%, nearly three-quarters of what were car journeys are now made on foot or by bicycle, and, while other towns in the region are shrinking, central Pontevedra has gained 12,000 new inhabitants. Also, withholding planning permission for big shopping centres has meant that small businesses – which elsewhere have been unable to withstand Spain’s prolonged economic crisis – have managed to stay afloat.
“The city is the perfect size for pedestrianisation,” says local architect Rogelio Carballo Soler. “You can cross the entire city in 25 minutes. There are things you could criticise, but there’s nothing that would make you reject this model.”
A lot of people are rightfully asking in the comments/reblogs if this part of the city is still accessible to people with mobility limitations, since walking/biking isn’t something everyone can do. Like, I LOVE the idea of no cars. I do not love the idea of no public transportation at all.
“ Since 1999 Pontevedra has seen intense urban renewal and cultural revival, positively influencing the local economy. In the 21st century the city of Pontevedra has undergone both a cultural renaissance and an urban transformation, taking in the pedestrianisation of the city centre, extension of cycle lanes, recovery of the historical and natural heritage, rehabilitation of buildings and public spaces, and an increase in green areas and pedestrian walkways. Unlike the other six large cities of Galicia, which have lost inhabitants to neighboring municipalities, Pontevedra’s population is currently increasing. It has become one of the most accessible cities for disabled people, receiving a national prize for this in 2006, along with the European “Intermodes” award in 2013, the UN Habitat Award in 2014 and the Award of the Center of Active Design in New York in 2015. Pontevedra’s model for responsible mobility is currently seen as an international reference.[9][10][11][12]
…
“Pontevedra is well connected by road and rail. It sits on the A Coruña-Tui railway and motorway corridor. Pontevedra is located between the Galician capital Santiago de Compostela (58 km to the north) and the largest Galician municipality, Vigo (30 km to the south). Pontevedra city itself does not have an airport in its municipality but the city is relatively close to the airports of
Lavacolla to the north (in the municipality of Santiago de Compostela) and
Peinador to the south (in the municipalities of Redondela, Mos and Vigo). A good network of roads and motorways efficiently connects Pontevedra with the other Galician cities, and also with Portugal (55 km to the south), and inland (100 km to the eastern city of Ourense). Regular bus lines link Pontevedra with other Galician cities and towns, as well as with Madrid, Porto and Lisbon (among others).
The AVEhigh-speed train (in SpanishTren de alta velocidad, or TAV) reaches Pontevedra and the city is a stop in the “Atlantic Line”, running from the northern Galician city of A Coruña to Lisbon (Portugal).[22][23][24] Likewise, Pontevedra will benefit from the high-speed train connecting Galicia and central Spain. That Galician connection will be fully operational in 2018.[25]Despite the fact that Pontevedra was once the main Galician port, at present the tiny Pontevedra harbour is only used for recreational purposes, not for cargo or passenger transportation. Neighbouring Marín is a major military and commercial harbour 7 km away.”
Here’s what their official government page says, via google translate from Galician into English:
“Accessibility
The integrating city.
That was one of the main goals of urban reform, which is practically achieved throughout the public space of Pontevedra. Starting from a global approach, accessibility to facilitate an independent life for everyone was a fundamental axis of the whole transformation.If the barrier-free work is for those who find it more difficult to walk (wheelchair users, older people, moms and dads with baby strollers, etc.), it also works for everyone else, who runs between ramps and stairs. they often use ramps.
Testing the works
In the first phase of urban reform, when the technicians were still not very familiar with the features of these works, it was the members of the Friendship association who tested the result before receiving it as fit. Thus, unique ramps and platforms, which make life easier for so many people, have a very resolute resolution.
Illuminated
In addition to the configuration of the street or square, public lighting is of primary importance, especially when thinking of the elderly or those with some type of visual difficulty. The lighting has been enhanced throughout the city, both in strictly pedestrian and mixed-use spaces. At some points, light intensities on pedestrian crossings have been enhanced.
Accessible trails
The city is the epicenter of several trails accessible to anyone who has or wants to use a few wheels to get around. All departing from the capital, except for the Gafos River, are wheeled. Both the Mirador and the Alameda parks as well as the Senda do Lérez and those that make up the Xunqueira de Alba water complex can be covered from start to finish in good accessibility conditions. Likewise, all the coastal walk between the city and the river (axis Buenos Aires - Uruguay - Corbaceiras - Av. De Marín) can be crossed without any impediment.”
Back to the Guardian article:
“ The benefits are numerous. On the same streets where 30 people died in traffic accidents from 1996 to 2006, only three died in the subsequent 10 years, and none since 2009. CO2 emissions are down 70%, nearly three-quarters of what were car journeys are now made on foot or by bicycle, and, while other towns in the region are shrinking, central Pontevedra has gained 12,000 new inhabitants. Also, withholding planning permission for big shopping centres has meant that small businesses – which elsewhere have been unable to withstand Spain’s prolonged economic crisis – have managed to stay afloat. “
It’s a little known fact that before Mandelbrot first pioneered his work on fractal geometry in the 1970s, Douglas Hofstadter first stumbled over the phenomena while working on problems in Number Theory.
During the 1960s, Hofstadter discovered a family of graphs that exhibited a specific kind of discontinuity. Hofstadter dubbed the main graph INT. The graph of INT(X) contains infinite many distorted copies of itself.
INT(X) is discontinuous at all rational values of X, but continuous at all irrational values of X.
Actually, stopping the pandemic is the
real pandemic.
China’s healthcare system is simply not equipped to deal with a pandemic - ignore the fact that it already did and still is doing so.
All this
seems like an enormous success, since they have absurdly lower death rates and infection rates than the US….
but,,, it’s so Extreme and Authoritarian!!!
Actually, Covid will become endemic, and all disabled, immunocompromised, and elderly people will die, and tens if not hundreds of millions will become permanently disabled from long-covid. This is just inevitable, because the US has given up and says so. Ignore the fact that if the US also just had literally two weeks of full, paid lockdown, the virus would be eradicated - there’s nothing we can do. Sorry! Get back to work.
We’re back! Yesterday, an underwater volcano known as Hunga Tonga erupted near the remote Pacific nation of Tonga, sending plumes of gas and ash thousands of feet into the atmosphere. The explosion was so powerful it was captured by numerous weather satellites and sent a four-foot tsunami wave into the capital city of Nuku’alofa. Tsunami warnings were also issued in Japan and for the Western coast of the United States. The shots here include two images from Planet Labs, one in the days leading up to the eruption (Jan. 12) and after with the center on the volcanic island blown away (Jan. 15), as well as a video captured by Tonga’s meteorological agency.
As the planet warms, the Arctic treeline is accelerating towards the pole, turning the white landscape to green. The trees used to creep forward a few centimetres every year; now they are leaping north at a rate of 40 to 50 metres a year. In the European Arctic, the birch is the leader of the pack.
Downy birch is one of few broadleaved deciduous trees in the Arctic and it is hardier even than most conifers. Its “down” is a soft coating of hairs that acts like a fur coat in the punishing cold. Often found cooperating with pines and spruce at lower latitudes and altitudes, above a certain point the birch leaves the others behind and goes on alone for hundreds of miles.
It might be unprepossessing, even ugly, with its stumpy branches and pockmarked bark, but this tough little tree is a survivor and a pioneer, essential to nearly all life in the Arctic. Used by humans for tools, houses, fuel, food and medicine, it is home to microbes, fungi and insects central to the food chain, and it is critical for sheltering other plants needed to make a forest. The downy birch dictates the terms of what can grow, survive and move in the areas in which it takes hold. And, as the Arctic heats up, that range is expanding fast.
Once upon a time, the first snows of winter would fall some time in October, initially on the tundra, the plateau above the treeline, and then on the pine and birch forests of the river valleys and the coasts. Shortly after, the mercury in the thermometer would descend below freezing and stay there until April or May, when the snow would begin to melt and the rivers would rush with the clear turquoise of superoxygenated ice. Until 2005, the average winter temperature in the region was -15C and it would reliably sink below -40C at least once during the winter, eliminating even the hardiest of all insect larvae, a process that kept the Arctic pest-free in the summer.
This world of winter was dark and cold and dry. At those temperatures there was no moisture at all. The snowpack was the consistency of sand, made up of several layers of large snow crystals. At -40C or-50C in the middle of winter, the quality and nature of snow crystals is critical to the survival of humans and animals alike.
When the temperature climbs back up towards zero or, even worse, above it, this delicate winter ecosystem collapses. Even a little warming of the snow can create havoc. Moisture starts to appear in the snowpack at -5C or -6C, at which point it loses its sand-like quality, and the snow starts to compact under the reindeer’s hooves, ruining the grazing beneath. If the thermometer goes all the way into the positive, as it has done increasingly in recent years, it is a catastrophe. Melting snow or rain will freeze when the temperature goes negative again, forming a crust of ice over the ground, locking the vegetation away from the browsing reindeer. This happened in 2013 and again in 2017. Tens of thousands of reindeer died; some herders lost more than a third of their animals.
Polar bear Station Russian-based wildlife photographer Dmitry Kokh ventured to an abandoned meteorological station on Kolyuchin Island, where polar bears have taken over the station.
“I remembered once, in Japan, having been to see the Gold Pavilion Temple in Kyoto and being mildly surprised at quite how well it had weathered the passage of time since it was first built in the fourteenth century. I was told it hadn’t weathered well at all, and had in fact been burnt to the ground twice in this century. “So it isn’t the original building?” I had asked my Japanese guide. “But yes, of course it is,” he insisted, rather surprised at my question. “But it’s been burnt down?” “Yes.” “Twice?” “Many times.” “And rebuilt.” “Of course. It is an important and historic building.” “With completely new materials.” “But of course. It was burnt down.” “So how can it be the same building?” “It is always the same building.” I had to admit to myself that this was in fact a perfectly rational point of view, it merely started from an unexpected premise. The idea of the building, the intention of it, its design, are all immutable and are the essence of the building. The intention of the original builders is what survived. The wood of which the design is constructed decays and is replaced when necessary. To be overly concerned with the original materials, which are merely sentimental souvenirs of the past, is to fail to see the living building itself.”
“If the mRNA technology that Pfizer and BioNTech and Moderna have developed and deployed…were to be shared with any number of these 120 companies, we could vaccinate the world in close to six months,” Prabhala explained. “It’s not theoretical. It’s based, in fact, on a model of existing partnerships that companies like Moderna have with very similar manufacturers, except they’re located in Spain instead of Bangladesh or Senegal or Tunisia.”
According to the latest data from the World Health Organization, more than two-thirds of people in high income countries have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose; in low income countries, less than a tenth of the population has received one. There are still countries, mainly in Africa, where the vaccination rate is at or below one percent.
Lifting patent restrictions “loosens Moderna, Pfizer and BioNTech’s stranglehold on these vaccines,” Prabhala said. “It undercuts the massive tens of billions of dollars of profit and revenue that they can earn off selling to poor countries in the next couple of years, once they’re done with rich countries.” He offered a solution: “President Biden can bring Moderna to the White House, sit them across the table, say that we have laws that can force you to do what we are asking you to do, but we’d rather you just do it instead, work out that agreement, and then let it go and take credit for vaccinating the world.”
Biosecurity strategies in wealthy nations emphasized stockpiling vaccines for their populations, especially for providing booster shots to the general populace rather than for specifically the most vulnerable. By failing to compel vaccine manufacturers to release their technology or distribute more vaccines outside its own borders, the imperial core essentially threw the rest of of the world under the bus but
stillfailed even to secure its own health. What this strategy
did secure was massive profits for Pharma. Scientists were well aware this strategy would fail to keep us safe, and would lead inevitably to new variants that would jeopardize everyone, but as ever the voice of money spoke louder to government than the voice of science.
The increasing amount of plastic being added to our environments has created intense selection pressure for microbes that can break down plastic for energy.
Looking at environmental DNA samples, researchers have found 30,000 different enzymes capable of digesting different types of plastic. Almost 60% did not fit into any known enzyme types.
While previous plastic-eating microbes had primarily been found in garbage dumps or recycling plants (locations with very high levels of plastic), the enzymes in this study were collected from soil and ocean water throughout the world, meaning this phenomenon is even more widespread than we thought.
This story from NPR could be Edward Abbey’s “I told ya so” moment. He opposed the creation of Lake Powell and the dam that clogged up the Colorado River for many reasons, including the beautiful landscape that was going to be submerged underwater.
Following photo: the “bathtub ring” way above Eric Balken, executive director of the Glen Canyon Institute, in part of Glen Canyon, shows us the extent of the drop in the level of Lake Powell over the past few years.
I visited Lake Powell and some of the surrounding areas a few years ago. I saw the bathtub rings, but they were not as dramatically over my head as they would be today. I could sense the beauty of the canyon, but I was seeing just the top of the canyons, not the canyon walls that were submerged. We’re starting to see them now.
Excerpt from this story from NPR:
At Lake Powell, the nation’s second-largest reservoir, record-low water levels are transforming the landscape, renewing a long-standing dispute over the land the reservoir drowned — a canyon labyrinth that novelist Edward Abbey once described as “a portion of earth’s original paradise.” For half a century, environmental groups and Colorado River enthusiasts have implored water managers to restore Glen Canyon by draining the reservoir.
The goal has always been viewed as a bit far-fetched. Lake Powell is one of the busiest tourist destinations in the country. A half-billion-dollar tourism industry has blossomed on its stored waters along the Utah-Arizona border.
But with water levels at record lows and dropping, hindering tourism and revealing long-hidden rock formations like the one behind Dombrowski’s boat, advocates for Glen Canyon see a unique opportunity to catalog what was lost and to correct, perhaps, what environmentalist David Brower called “America’s most regrettable environmental mistake.”
Human actions built the reservoir. Now human actions are causing it to shrink.
“All of the best data that we have suggests it’s going to be mostly empty for now on,” says Eric Balken, executive director of the Glen Canyon Institute, a nonprofit that wants to see the canyon restored. “So I think it’s really important for policymakers to consider what phasing out this reservoir looks like, because if we don’t, then we might just be stuck in a harder situation down the road where it’s happening by default.”
It would be hard to overstate the anger sparked by the creation of Lake Powell and the flooding of Glen Canyon. The plot of Abbey’s most famous fiction, The Monkey Wrench Gang, centered on a band of environmental extremists hellbent on destroying the concrete behemoth that pinched off the Colorado River near the Utah-Arizona border in 1963.
The Glen Canyon Dam, named for the canyon it drowned, was celebrated as one of the “engineering wonders of the world” by the Bureau of Reclamation. To Abbey, it was “an insult to God’s creation.”
Rock spires, arches, amphitheaters and ecosystems were gradually submerged. Stalled water crawled up slot canyons. Petroglyphs and pull-tab beer cans were covered over.
“They ruined it all when they put the water in there,” says Ken Sleight, a river-runner friend of Abbey’s and an environmental preservationist.
The purpose of the dam was to generate electricity for a growing Southwest and to manage flows on the famously up-again, down-again Colorado River. Ranchers, farmers and a fast-growing Western U.S. needed a stable water supply. Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell, together with their downstream neighbors, Hoover Dam and Lake Mead, would provide that stability.
Gregory Natural Bridge in 1963 and in 2021. Environmental preservationist Ken Sleight, seen under the bridge, led tours in the area. John Stockert/J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah; Claire Harbage/NPR
Eric Balken, executive director of the Glen Canyon Institute, walks through a canyon that was filled by Lake Powell until recent years. Claire Harbage/NPR
“There is an always-significant difference between knowing and believing. We may know that the earth turns, but we believe, as we say, that the sun rises. We know by evidence, or by trust in people who have examined the evidence in a way that we trust is trustworthy. We may sometimes be persuaded to believe by reason, but within the welter of our experience reason is limited and weak. We believe always by coming, in some sense, to see. We believe in what is apparent, in what we can imagine or “picture” in our minds, in what we feel to be true, in what our hearts tell us, in experience, in stories — above all, perhaps, in stories.”
What’s
really cool about this is that cephalopod (octopus, squid, etc.) intelligence evolved completely separately from intelligence in tetrapods (which includes primates, dolphins, crows… basically any other intelligent animals you can think of). Cephalopods are very, very far away from us on the tree of life. For context, you and a starfish are more closely related than you and an octopus. The last common ancestor of humans and cephalopods was the so-called Urbilaterian, the hypothetical first animal with a left-right symmetric body. This animal almost certainly had, at most, an extremely simple nervous system, without anything resembling a brain.
All this is to say that the fact that this octopus appears to be
dreaming means one of two things. Either
a) dreaming is a very, very old thing indeed, going directly back to the Urbilaterian. This would mean that almost every animal, from insects to starfish to sea slugs to newts, is likely to have the ability to dream in some capacity or another (unless they have specifically lost it by evolutionary simplification).
or
b) dreaming evolved entirely independently in cephalopods when they developed greater intelligence. This would suggest, at least, that there’s something very fundamental about dreaming related to intelligence itself, which causes it to emerge independently when sufficient intelligence arises.
Needless to say, either of these outcomes would be
really very cool.
“You have the Gaia hypothesis, and everybody congratulates themselves on what a leap forward that is—and it is, but it’s quite another step to realize that it is not that the Earth is alive, it’s that the Earth is intelligent. The Earth is some kind of mind. And before we throw up our hands and say, “Well, how could that be? How could a planet have a mind?” Is it any less peculiar that a monkey could have a mind? You know? How do monkeys have minds? That’s the miracle. A planet is a very large system, probably able to pull many tricks out of the bag. It’s our portion of mind that is so puzzling.”
*Unlike a lot of stuff I post on the Tumblr here, I’m inclined to believe a lot of this.
Resiliency and electrification will drive smart energy
By Stacey Higginbotham
After years of lackluster starts in what I think of as the internet of electricity, we might be at an inflection point thanks to the very real perils of climate change. For at least a decade, companies and energy experts have envisioned a future where the electrical grid responds to market and demand signals to ultimately use less energy. That vision has evolved from using less energy to using more renewable energy and better matching the use of energy when it was created by renewable means (often during daylight hours, when solar and wind generation are strong).
But the last two years have led to a shift in how we view our reliance on the grid and how our portfolio of energy generation has exacerbated the problem of climate change. We need more resiliency in the grid. We also need to transition from coal, gas, and natural gas as quickly as possible. In the meantime, we’re beginning to realize that as we shift to a more information-rich grid that will become increasingly more dependent on renewable energy, there’s no way we’re going to actually use less energy. And this has huge implications for the smart home.
— Electrification and a need for resiliency will drive the internet of electricity.
These two trends — electrification and resiliency — will drive investment into energy management technologies going forward. Let’s tackle electrification first.
New York City this week became the largest city in the country to ban natural gas hookups in new buildings. This means that gas dryers, ranges, and more are now forbidden in new construction. Other cities have taken similar steps.
But adding dryers and ranges to the electric grid is a big lift, simply because both appliances require larger 240-volt circuits and a lot of electricity. New buildings can price these needs into their electrical boxes and the amperage demands from the utility, but electrification is also a trend in remodels as consumers try to replace gas appliances with electrical counterparts (or gas vehicles with electric ones). And it means that people will need to upgrade their electrical boxes, which can cost between $5,000 and $20,000 depending on where they live and how much of an upgrade they need.
Instead, I expect we’ll see more consumers choose smarter electrical boxes that can help manage a limited supply of electricity coming into the home. With an eye toward reducing consumption, I tried smarter panel boxes and devices that attached to those boxes to help me understand the electricity consumption in my home, but quickly hit a wall. At some point, modern life requires electricity. I dumped the meters.
But software that can manage limited amperage coming in and allocate it based on residents’ needs and preferences makes sense as we plug more high-powered devices into our homes. It’s why resiliency will drive the adoption of new energy management devices, whether they are smart breaker boxes from a company like Span or Schenider Electric, or software from a tech provider that attempts something similar using a digital assistant.
The second big trend driving investment and change in the energy world is resiliency. In the last two years, it seems, wildfires, extreme weather, and a spike in the number of employees working from home have made people willing to spend on batteries and other forms of energy storage and off-the-grid generation.
Last month, we saw Generac, a generator company, buy Ecobee for $770 million; ADT, meanwhile, spent $825 million on SunPro, a solar panel maker. Both of these deals combine smart home software with energy generation and storage. Basically, we’re seeing a way to ensure the supply of energy while managing it even when homes are off the grid.
I break the energy market down into five elements: generation, transmission, storage, management at the edge, and consumption. I focus mainly on management and consumption because that’s where the smart home companies are stepping up. Broadly speaking, we need to increase the capacity and resiliency of the grid while also bringing in more electricity-consuming devices through the electrification of cars and buildings. But let’s start with generation.
1. Generation: Generation encompasses both the big utilities using fossil fuels or renewable power from wind, solar, or water. It also includes localized generation through solar. The big challenges here are moving toward a more sustainable generation strategy as well as managing the variability of some renewable energy sources.
2. Transmission: Transmission involves moving electrons from the utility to a home or office or feeding power back into the grid. It features the combined challenges of an aging infrastructure with those related to regulations and business models. But it is clear that in an era of extreme weather caused by climate change and more and more of our economy relying on reliable electricity, transmission investment and innovations need to happen. We’re already seeing some utilities try to add real-time usage and pricing signals to aid both transmission and generation; we have also seen what happens when transmission falters. In California, for example, PG&E’s power lines are causing wildfires, so the utility shuts down power during periods of high winds and drought. In Texas last February, one reason the state had such a catastrophic power failure during the freeze was that its grid was isolated and lacked resiliency.
3. Storage: Here’s where things start to get interesting for the smart home. Storage is essential because it provides resiliency when the grid is unavailable and helps make energy available when renewables aren’t providing electricity. There’s old-school energy storage, like generators that run off gasoline, and newer storage, in the form of batteries. Based on a few pre-CES briefings I’ve been given, we’re going to see some interesting products associated with energy storage in January. There’s also plenty of research on modernizing energy storage techniques that are practically ancient. But storage is basically a buffer between generation and consumption.
That’s why I found the Generac deal for Ecobee so interesting. With the acquisition, Generac, which is basically an energy storage company, is gaining control of the largest energy-consuming device found in most homes. It’s also gaining control of a team that has done a lot of work building software designed to help consumers save energy. For the near term, it feels like a chance to introduce Generac to a newer tech-savvy audience, but over time it’s a chance to intelligently link the supply of energy to demand.
4. Management at the edge: On the management side, we’re seeing companies in the traditional electric panel market such as Leviton, Schneider Electric, and Honeywell add smarts and internet capability to their products. Newer entrants like Span are building networked electrical boxes that will manage the flow of electricity and let users set their own preferences, while Amazon and others are building data models into their smart home software to track how much energy is being consumed by certain devices so they can offer ways to manage it using their AI.
5. Consumption: When it comes to managing energy consumption, HVAC systems are the primary focus simply because they are the top user of a home’s electricity. But utilities are also starting programs to help manage the consumption of electricity by water heaters while appliance companies are trying to think about features that might help consumers save energy by changing settings on their dryers or fridges. With more input from the grid on the price of electricity or the availability of renewables, we could see intelligent delays built into a dishwasher or dryer so they only do their jobs when electricity is plentiful and cheap. An electric vehicle that doesn’t need to charge right away might wait until other big electricity-consuming loads are done before charging, for example. And when the grid is unavailable, appliances and management software will collude to conserve electricity while trying to keep users comfortable and preserve food in the fridge or the charge on a laptop.
Many of the pieces are here already, but the tech and energy world has been waiting for incentives that will force the adoption of a smarter grid and better energy management in the home. These are, after all, big infrastructure upgrades, and until resiliency and regulations forcing electrification became an issue, conservation wasn’t pushing people to make much of an investment.
In the coming years, that’s going to change. And it will change rapidly as the climate gets more unpredictable and our devices get smarter.
[When we write or when we read, it is easy to forget that the beginning is not the word, but the scream. Faced with the mutilation of human lives by capitalism, a scream of sadness, a scream of horror, a scream of anger, a scream of refusal: NO. The starting point of theoretical reflection is opposition, negativity, struggle. It is from rage that thought is born, not from the pose of reason, not from the reasoned-sitting-back-and-reflecting-on-the-mysteries-of-existence that is the conventional image of the thinker’.]
John Holloway, “The Scream,” in Change the World Without Taking Power
