Most of the carbon that’s been emitted into the atmosphere has happened within the past few generations. Parametric Press took this rather salient fact and made it real with a visualization that shows how these emissions relate to your time on earth.
I honestly never understood the reflexive QR code hate, especially among U.S. techies. The earliest days had the standard adoption issues, but once scanning got baked into the default camera app on iOS and Android, those pretty much went away. When I’ve traveled outside of the U.S. and payed for train tickets or meals via QR code, the experience has always been simple and straightforward.
Nothing like a pandemic to make us rethink our priors.
I genuinely love Japanese vending machines — not just the boxes and the variety of wares themselves, but the fact you can be cheerily zigzagging through the streets of Tokyo late at night after several drinks and suddenly find yourself drinking a can of actually quite tasty hot corn chowder and all seems right with the world. I’ve literally never consumed that vending machine corn chowder while sober so I have no idea if it’s actually good but I know for certain it is amazing.
Turns out, that’s the sort of impulse buy that helps fuel a $44 billion industry. Forty-four billion dollars!
I was also surprised to learn the machines themselves are fairly low-tech and only a small percentage even keep track of inventory. “Companies usually have no idea what’s in stock or out of stock until someone opens the machine, adding to logistical costs.”
But unlike traditional broadcasters, the social media platforms are not held accountable for their decisions. The choices that they make to amplify certain voices over others, or whether and how to police content, have had grave consequences, ranging from the radicalization of young men to the proliferation of hate speech on Facebook that fanned the flames of genocide in Myanmar.
And most important, no one can even see what choices their algorithms are making across a community because no two people see exactly the same content. Users only see what gets amplified in their individual algorithmically curated news feed.
More fantastic work from The Markup (see also: their Blacklight tool) to account for how the blackboxes of social media actually work. It’s interesting that they are starting with a representative sample of 1200 people rather than just releasing an open source browser plug-in. Frankly, I appreciate and trust a methodological approach more.
The long and short of this post: early in-person voting in North Carolina begins on October 15. There’s a unique opportunity to flip what has been the solid red district that encompasses Western North Carolina, formerly held by Donald Trump’s current Chief of Staff, to blue. If you can, please consider supporting Moe Davis. There are also plenty of other down-ballot races that could use your support as well — I like The Great Slate and Flippable.
In 2010, the North Carolina legislature became overwhelmingly Republican, riding an astroturfed, reactionary wave of right-wing grievance fueled by an onslaught of dark money that presaged our current political calamity. The state GOP promptly set to work carving up new congressional districts to maximize their advantage, using an undemocratic playbook that has become all too familiar to even casual political observers. One of the casualties was NC-11, in the western part of the state, where the obvious gerrymander split the reliably Democratic Bumcombe County in half to ensure the district became an uncontestable ruby red.
Last year, this skewed map was declared invalid and fairer maps were drawn for the 2020 election; NC-11 has a competitive election for first time in years. What’s more, right-wing radical Mark Meadows abandoned his post mid-term to humiliate himself as part of Donald Trump’s ever-rotating staff, leaving NC-11 wide open.
The Democratic primary was settled pretty quickly, however the Republicans tied themselves into a knot that’s been characteristically full of Trumpian drama. The favorite, a businesswoman endorsed by both Meadows and Trump, didn’t win a large enough plurality in a crowded field and was forced into a runoff with a 24-year-old unknown, which she lost.
Voters in NC-11 could not face a more stark choice. The Democrat is Moe Davis, a JAG-trained lawyer and retired Air Force Colonel who served as the chief prosecutor in Guantanamo Bay, a position he resigned in protest of the government’s insistence on using confessions gained via torture. Regardless of how you feel about America’s disastrous foreign policy during the Bush administration, it’s impossible to deny that Moe Davis is a man of deep integrity.
His opponent, Madison Cawthorn, could not be more diametric, in terms of politics, values, or temperament. Cawthorn is a deeply incurious and cynical individual who has no concept of what public service means beyond his own self-fulfillment, making him a perfect avatar of the twisted corruption of the Republican Party under Trump. Cawthorn has attempted to parlay a personally compelling narrative into a story of triumph in the face of adversity, where the reality is little more than transparent lies built on a foundation of deception. Esther Wang has done the citizens of NC-11 a great service by cataloging the myriad ways Cawthorn is unfit to serve them in Congress. Now Cawthorn’s campaign is using hundreds of thousands of dollars in dark money in an effort to swift-boat Colonel Davis and his actual service.
I got involved with Moe’s campaign earlier this summer, when it looked like a long shot, primarily because I believed in his integrity and ability to bring leadership to my home district. I grew up in Asheville and know the people of Western North Carolina are decent folks who often feel like they are forced to choose between an increasingly unhinged Republican Party and a Democratic Party that appears to only represent urban centers1. The more I learned about Moe’s opponent, the criminally unqualified Cawthorn, the more I knew I had to do anything I could to keep him from being elected to Congress.
The 11th district wasn’t on anyone’s list of flippable districts and seemed to be set up for another disappointing embarrassment. The year has been nothing if not relentless in its ability to surprise, however, and not always in the worst possible way. In NC-11, Moe Davis has managed to secure a small lead in the polls. As people get to know Moe, and understand how different he is from his opponent, they like what they hear. Like most of the U.S., North Carolina has increasingly sorted itself on partisan lines over the past few decades, but there are still plenty of folks who will split their tickets this election. Moe can win this, and he will serve Western North Carolina honorably.
Mail-in voting has already begun in North Carolina, and early voting is about to get underway. These last few weeks are critical — if you’re looking for a down-ballot candidate to support, please consider Moe Davis.
As a proud progressive who’s spent his entire life in big cities, I reflexively disagree with this dichotomy, but I also understand why the perception exists and is flamed by right-wing media. ↩︎
This piece by Christopher Leonard outlines one of the biggest dangers of the Barrett nomination (other than the brash illiberalism of the process) and a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court: that the U.S. regulatory framework, tenuous and imperfect as it is, will be replaced by an even more lassiez-faire system. Naturally, Charles Koch appears to have been a major player in orchestrating this.
I haven’t been following the Barrett nomination all that closely — it’s a depressing farce and there’s nothing to be learned from such a horrifying display of abuse of power from a Republican party hellbent on solidifying their minority rule for a generation. From the headlines, it appears the usual battle lines are being drawn, over abortion and healthcare primarily.
I don’t believe the Republican party actually cares all that much about making abortion illegal — Mike Pence, a creepy weirdo, probably personally cares, as do his fellow evangelical cultists. But so much of of the project of the Republican party for the past fifty years has been to dismantle and delegitimize the post-New Deal consensus about the role of government in favor a Hobbesian free market that favors the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.
Which really gets at the heart of so much of the cynicism of the Republican party. Charles Koch is almost certainly not motivated by abortion or even voting rights — his professed commitment to libertarianism, in fact, should make him a champion of safe and legal abortion access. He does care deeply about destroying regulation and undoing even the most basic collective commitments of government, so deeply to have spent five decades and a vast inherited fortune making it happen. This cynicism is inseparable from the Republican party today, whether it’s McConnell’s abuse of the legislature to tilt the judiciary or the entire party rallying around a criminally stupid horrorshow like Donald Trump to sign off on all of it before he blithely kicks off to watch four straight hours of Fox News.
I don’t know how simply getting rid of Trump, a vital first step, is going to counter this very long game. The existential problems we face, from climate change to racial justice, require collective action and we are now in a world where that no longer appears possible.
I’m trying to stick with this ongoing reporting, even as the collective world only burns faster and hotter and brighter since the first story dropped just a few weeks ago. What struck me about this latest piece — and it’s something we all know intuitively — is how much of the corruption is just out there in the open. The fact that the Times has to rely on an inside source for tax records to even expose Trump’s malfeasance is, in and of itself, a massive scandal. Then there’s the chart that shows so clearly how often he visits his own private clubs and meets with favor currying donors at the same clubs, all paid for by the government. It’s just a stunning amount of self-dealing and cheap grifting and it’s right out there in the open!
Like the Mueller report before it, the details of the President’s total abdication of duty will have no effect on how people think about the job he’s done. That’s a stunning indictment of our times. We can hope, though, the outcome could be different, even if this reporting has been lost in flood of shit that is the 2020 election. If we manage to excise the cancer and the malignancy that created it, the law comes next.
Machines in space need to operate both quickly (real-time, so they can reorient if they’re about to, say, get fried by too much solar radiation) but also deterministically, so they know how long a process takes to execute, every single time.
(Probably telling that NASA licenses a proprietary, commercial OS where the European Space Agency uses the open source RTEMS)
Following the success of their Illinois unit, ProPublica is adding distributed hubs that will cover North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee in the South, and New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Utah and possibly Colorado in the Southwest. They’re also expanding the Illinois coverage to the rest of the Midwest.
ProPublica does fantastic work and this is decidedly great news, even as it’s also indicative of the broader media landscape shift. Not that long ago, there were excellent local and regional news outlets that most folks living outside of those areas had never heard of, doing the grinding work of journalism. Most of these were not only self-sustaining businesses but wildly successful thanks to owning a natural monopoly on local coverage.
The massive realignment wrought by the internet over the past twenty years has meant consolidation at best, and often shuttering of these institutions. Google and Facebook captured most of the revenue that used to go to local news without providing any of the services that people, businesses, and a functioning democracy relied on. ProPublica’s success is in some ways a strong counter to this, albeit at a scale that doesn’t fully replace what’s came before; it’s also funded — very generously — by philanthropy.
One of the interesting things to watch about this move is how ProPublica will (and won’t) be able to fill in those gaps in their regional expansion. It’s somewhat similar to how the New York Times and the Washington Post have grown in stature, and succeeded after some lean years, while so much of the rest of industry struggled or died. All are doing incredible work, but there are inevitable gaps that scale won’t ever be able to fill. There are, of course, innumerable blogs and newsletters filling in at micro-scale of varying degrees of quality. I don’t mean to sound defeatist or grim — there are lots of opportunities here! — but also opportunists who use this institution gap to dark purposes.
I’ve recommended Park MacDougald’s excellent and horrifically prescient 5-year-old piece on the “neo-reactionary” alt-right before. With the news that Silicon Valley types are hanging out with Mencius Moldbug, a Republican congressman says democracy is overrated, and militant right-wing terrorists plotted on Facebook to kidnap the governor of Michigan, now is perhaps time for a revisit.