Lahaina Burns

Lahaina Emerges From ‘Devastating’ Fire As Relief Begins To Arrive (Honolulu Civil Beat)
Image: Matthew Thayer/The Maui News, via Associated Press/NYT; Maui Fire Department/US Civil Air Patrol

[ed. Heartbroken. Former capital of the Kingdom of Hawaii and legendary whaling port wiped out. More photos here; here and here: [Update]: have many relatives in Lahaina who seem to be safe at the moment, but not everyone is accounted for, and my uncle and his wife (80s) lost their home. Completely burned to the ground.]

Farley Katz
via:

How to Hire a Pop Star for Your Private Party

At ten o’clock on a recent Saturday night, the rapper Flo Rida was in his dressing room with a towel over his head, in a mode of quiet preparation. Along one wall, a handsome buffet—lobster, sushi, Dom Pérignon—sat untouched. Flo Rida, whose stage name honors his home state but is pronounced like “flow rider,” is fastidious about his physique. He is six feet three, two hundred and twenty pounds, and often travels with a trainer, though on this occasion the trip was brief enough that he would do without. That afternoon, a private jet had carried him, along with eight of his backup performers and assistants, from South Florida to Chicago. By the following night, he would be back at his mansion in Miami.

Flo Rida, who is forty-three, attained celebrity in 2008 with his song “Low,” an admiring ode to a Rubenesque beauty on the dance floor. “Low” went platinum ten times over and was No. 1 on the Billboard charts for ten weeks—a longer run than any other song that year, including Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies.” In 2009, Flo landed another No. 1 hit, “Right Round,” which broke a world record, jointly held by Eminem, 50 Cent, and Dr. Dre, for the most downloads in an opening week. Flo never matched the stardom of those peers, but he has recorded another nine Top Ten hits, sold at least a hundred million records, and secured for himself a lucrative glide from ubiquity. His endorsement deals are of sufficient scale that, in a recent breach-of-contract dispute with one of his brand partners, Celsius energy drinks, a jury awarded him eighty-three million dollars.

A man with this kind of nest egg might never need to leave home again. But, on this evening, Flo had journeyed north on business: he was playing a bar mitzvah, for a thirteen-year-old boy and three dozen of his friends, in the well-to-do Chicago suburb of Lincolnshire. The bar-mitzvah boy, in keeping with the customs of his forebears, had chanted his way into adulthood; then, following a more recent tradition, the celebrants had relocated to a warehouse-size event venue that is highly regarded on Chicago’s mitzvah circuit. A production company had installed the décor, including roller coasters stencilled across the dance floor and a banquet table made to resemble a red Ferrari. The whole affair was invisible to the outside world, except for the word “Andrew” projected by brilliant red floodlights onto an exterior wall.

The entertainment had been arranged by Andrew’s father, an executive at a financial-services company. At first, he had doubted that Flo Rida, his son’s favorite artist, would agree to come, but an agent informed him that most big-name musicians are available these days, under the right conditions. Flo Rida’s fee for private gigs in the United States runs between a hundred and fifty thousand and three hundred thousand dollars, depending on location, scale, and other particulars. Reginald Mathis, his lawyer, told me, “Internationally, it could run you up to a million.” For the Lincolnshire bar mitzvah, the contract stipulated private-jet travel, suitable accommodations, and a fee “in the six figures,” Mathis said; Flo Rida would perform for thirty minutes. When I saw Andrew’s father at the event, he was thrilled with the outcome but declined to have his name in this story. “I work on Wall Street,” he told me. “I don’t want to end up on Page Six.”

As showtime approached, Flo changed from his travel T-shirt and jeans into performance attire: a much nicer T-shirt (vintage Kiss concert merch), a sleeveless black biker jacket, and cat-eye shades speckled with rhinestones. While the opening act finished up, I stepped out of the dressing room to assess the crowd. From a balcony overlooking the dance floor, surrounded by a hefty array of professional-grade lights and speakers, I watched a desultory turn of the hora, backed by a recorded Hava Nagila. The children seemed preoccupied. Then a platoon of production staff started handing out flashing L.E.D. sticks, and the kids rushed toward the stage in anticipation.

I was joined on the balcony by one of Flo’s bandmates, a younger rapper known as Int’l Nephew, who wore a red sweatband and a black puffy vest over a tank top. We peered across the railing toward the back of the room, where a few dozen parents were sipping cocktails. In the realm of private gigs, those secondary guests are a high-priority demographic—future clients who don’t yet know it. Int’l Nephew saw the makings of a worthwhile trip. “They’re all big-money people,” he said. “And they’re, like, ‘Oh, we want you, Flo.’ ”

By the time Flo Rida bounded onstage, his hands to the heavens, the kids were bouncing to the opening strains of “Good Feeling,” one of his club hits, featuring the sampled voice of Etta James. The edge of the stage was lined by teen-age boys in untucked shirts and jeans, alongside girls in spaghetti-strap dresses and chunky sneakers. Flo was flanked by dancers in black leather bikini tops and mesh leggings. Out of the audience’s view, he kept a set list inscribed with the names of his hosts, as an aide-mémoire. “We love you, Andrew!” he shouted, and barrelled into “Right Round,” a rowdy track about visiting a strip club and showering a pole dancer with hundred-dollar bills. When he pulled Andrew onstage, the bar-mitzvah boy didn’t miss a beat, dancing along to Flo’s verse: “From the top of the pole I watch her go down / She got me throwing my money around.” (...)

In January, Beyoncé did her first show in more than four years—not in a stadium of screaming fans but at a new hotel in Dubai, earning a reported twenty-four million dollars for an hour-long set. More than a few Beyoncé fans winced; after dedicating a recent album to pioneers of queer culture, she was plumping for a hotel owned by the government of Dubai, which criminalizes homosexuality. (As a popular tweet put it, “I get it, everyone wants their coin, but when you’re THAT rich, is it THAT worth it?”) Artists, by and large, did not join the critics. Charles Ruggiero, a drummer in Los Angeles who is active in jazz and rock, told me, “The way musicians look at it, generally speaking, is: It’s a fucking gig. And a gig is a gig is a gig.”

If you have a few million dollars to spare, you can hire Drake for your bar mitzvah or the Rolling Stones for your birthday party. Robert Norman, who heads the private-events department at the talent agency C.A.A., recalls that when he joined the firm, a quarter century ago, “we were booking one or two hundred private dates a year, for middle-of-the-road artists that you’d typically suspect would play these kinds of events—conventions and things like that.” Since then, privates have ballooned in frequency, price, and genre. “Last year, we booked almost six hundred dates, and we’ve got a team of people here who are dedicated just to private events,” Norman said. An agent at another big firm told me, “A lot of people will say, ‘Hey, can you send me your private/corporate roster?’ And I’m, like, ‘Just look at our whole roster, because everybody’s pretty much willing to consider an offer.’ ” (...)

A random selection of other acts who do privates (Sting, Andrea Bocelli, Jon Bon Jovi, John Mayer, Diana Ross, Maroon 5, Black Eyed Peas, OneRepublic, Katy Perry, Eric Clapton) far exceeds the list of those who are known for saying no (Bruce Springsteen, Taylor Swift, and, for reasons that nobody can quite clarify, AC/DC).

Occasionally, the music press notes a new extreme of the private market, like hits on the charts. Billboard reported that the Eagles received six million dollars from an unnamed client in New York for a single performance of “Hotel California,” and Rolling Stone reported that Springsteen declined a quarter of a million to ride motorcycles with a fan. But privates typically are enveloped in secrecy, with both artists and clients demanding nondisclosure agreements and prohibitions on photos and social-media posts. 

by Evan Osnos, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Victor Llorente for The New Yorker

Ry Cooder

[ed. Can't imagine a Kia prompting this kind of devotion. See also: Live at the Record Plant, Sausilito, CA; and more recently, The Prodigal Son (Live in Studio).]

via: here and here

Cocaine Prices Are Plummeting

Partly because of massive overproduction.

The world’s demand for cocaine appears insatiable. According to the latest data from the un Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), although the number of consumers of the illegal drug in the United States has remained broadly stable for the past two decades, the number of users in Australia, Europe and Asia has kept increasing (see chart 1). Last month in Sydney, the biggest city in Australia, five people were shot in the space of five days because of gang-related turf wars sparked by a booming market for blow in that city. Yet in some parts of Colombia—the country that produces about 60% of the world’s supply of cocaine—white chunks of coca paste are piling up and prices are plummeting.

Villages across Catatumbo, a coca-abundant region in the north near the border with Venezuela, used to be awash with money off the back of the illicit market. Music used to blare through the streets and billiards clubs were full on the weekends. But for the past year shops have been closed and locals have started to go hungry. “People who sell now, sell at a loss,” says Holmer Pérez Balmaceda, whose family, like most in that region, used to cultivate coca leaves. Similarly in Cauca, in the south-west of the country, prices have plunged from 70,000 Colombian pesos ($17.25) for a unit of coca leaves (12.5kg) a year ago to 38,000 pesos today.

Why has the boom turned to bust in parts of the country? For a start, there has been overproduction, which pushes down prices. The UNODC data suggest that in the past few years cocaine production has accelerated more than demand: a whopping 204,000 hectares were covered by coca crops in Colombia in 2021, an increase of 43% on the previous year. That is a bigger area dedicated to coca crops than ever before. Farmers have also worked out how to grow the coca plant more efficiently, while the labs to produce cocaine hydrochloride (the refined product) have become bigger. This is making the whole process more productive. According to the un, potential cocaine hydrochloride production yield in Colombia went up from 6.5 kg per hectare on average in 2016 to 7.9 kg per hectare in 2020.

And Colombia is not the only supplier flooding global markets with coke (see chart 2). Peru has increased its production by 62%, from 49,800 hectares in 2017 to 80,700 hectares in 2021. Bolivian production has increased by 24%, from 24,500 hectares to 30,500 hectares in the same period. Production in Venezuela, Honduras and Guatemala is taking off, too.

A bump in the road

“Overproduction is certainly happening. But it cannot explain everything,” says Ana Maria Rueda at Fundación Ideas para la Paz, a Colombian think-tank. Another factor she points to is the shifting fortunes of criminal groups. Colombia’s cocaine market used to be dominated by individuals such as Pablo Escobar, who ran the Medellin gang. Their rivals were the Cali gang. In the early 1990s these groups were broken up when their leaders were killed or captured. Their activities were mostly overtaken by two guerrilla organisations: the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN). These guerrilla outfits also “regulated” the market for coke, controlling the whole supply chain as the Medellin and Cali cartels had done: looking after everything from harvesting and processing coca to transporting it out of the country.

However, in 2016 the Colombian government struck a peace deal with the FARC. That ended an internal armed conflict almost half a century long. It also had the unintended consequence of splitting the drug market. Now there are more than 500 criminal groups across the country. Gangs who buy cocaine wholesale can pick and choose which regions they purchase it from and drive prices down locally, says Ms Rueda. (...)

These developments have halted coca processing in some regions. It has also helped disrupt the established norms over price and quality. According to Mr McDermott, the fragmentation of Colombia’s criminal networks means that gangs who are buying the finished product wholesale—mostly Mexican, but also increasingly European gangsters, too—now travel all the way there to put together big shipments themselves. Previously, Colombians would have done this for them. International gangs tend to prefer to go to areas where they already have established connections. An example of this is the Nariño region, which borders Ecuador and where there is a permanent presence of Mexican gangs, says Mr McDermott. It has not seen the same fall in prices as in other parts of the country. This hints at a potential changing dynamic in the drugs market. The power used to lie with the gangs who had the drugs; now those who have good access to distribution networks call the shots.

Another factor affecting the price of cocaine was the election, last year, of Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first avowedly left-wing president. During the previous right-wing governments of Juan Manuel Santos and Iván Duque, crop-substitution programmes doled out subsidies to coca-producing families to abandon their illicit crops. This had the perverse effect of making coca farmers grow more, and of prompting others to start growing it too, in order to gain access to these benefits, says Ms Rueda. These subsidies were combined with mass coca-eradication policies.

Mr Petro has long argued against his predecessors’ approach, particularly targeting farmers and destroying coca fields, rather than going after criminal intermediaries. In his inauguration speech he declared that “the war on drugs has failed”. (Mr Petro also blames the fentanyl crisis in the United States for the falling price of cocaine, though many experts doubt this has had much of an effect.) (...)

As a result, all Mr Petro has done so far is to slow the government’s coca-eradication efforts, with a goal of eradicating coca on 20,000 hectares of land annually, which is 30,000 hectares fewer than Mr Duque achieved. Alongside this, President Joe Biden’s administration has rolled back American satellite monitoring of coca in Colombia. Both policies have contributed to the coke pile-up.

Falling prices mean not just a collapse of the rural economy in parts of Colombia, but also an acute social crisis. More than 230,000 Colombian families rely on coca as their primary source of income, according to a federation which represents peasants who grow illicit crops. In July the government began to give out cash to families in some of Colombia’s 181 coca-producing municipalities. “This is a contingency plan,” says Felipe Tascón, director of the government’s illicit-crop substitution programme. He thinks that a change in the substitution policy is needed, in order to get farmers to move away from coca to other, legal crops. “What we’ve been doing till now hasn’t worked,” he admits.

by The Economist |  Read more:

Image: The Economist

[ed. Always supply side, never demand. Like cigarettes, cocaine (and other drugs) won't recede until people begin to internalize risks vs. benefits and allow others who are willing to take those risks create teacheable examples (and make drug-taking in general passe).]

via:

[ed. While you're at it could you make The Law great again, too? See here and here.]

Anne Collier, Woman Crying (Comic): #8

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What My Musical Instruments Have Taught Me

I keep a small oud in the kitchen, and sometimes, between e-mails, I improvise with it. Ouds resemble lutes, which in turn resemble guitars. But where a guitar has a flat back, an oud has a domelike form that presses backward against the belly or chest. This makes playing one a tender experience. You must find just the right way to hold it, constraining your shoulders, moving mainly the smaller muscles below the elbows. Holding an oud is a little like holding a baby. While cradling an infant, I feel pretensions drop away: here is the only future we truly have—a sacred moment. Playing the oud, I am exposed. The instrument is confessional to me. (...)

Nahat ouds can be especially big. My arms have to travel more in order to move up and down the longer neck; the muscles around my shoulders become engaged, as they do when I’m playing the guitar. Moving this way, I become aware of the world beyond the small instrument I’m swaddling; I start to play more for others than for myself. The cello also makes me feel this way. You have to use your shoulders—your whole back—to play a cello. But cellos summon a different set of feelings. Playing one, you’re still bound up in a slightly awkward way, bent around a vibrating entity—not a baby, not a lover, but maybe a large dog.

The khaen, from Laos and northeastern Thailand, is the instrument I play the most in public. It’s a mouth organ—something like a giant harmonica, but with an earthy, ancient tone. Tall bamboo tubes jut both upward and downward from a teak vessel, angling into a spire which seems to emerge, unicorn-like, from the forehead of the performer. I first encountered one as a teen-ager, in the nineteen-seventies, during a time when I was exploring Chinese music clubs in San Francisco. These were frequented mainly by older people, and often situated in the basements of faded apartment buildings. The khaen isn’t Chinese, but I noticed one resting against a wall in a club and asked if I could try it. As soon as I picked up the khaen I became a rhythmic musician, driving a hard beat with double- and triple-tonguing patterns. The old men applauded when I finished. “Take it,” a woman holding an erhu said.

Later, I learned that my instant style was completely unrelated to what goes on in Laos. It emerged, I think, from how the khaen works with one’s breathing. On a harmonica, as on many instruments, the note changes when you switch between inhaling and exhaling—but on a khaen, one can breathe both in and out without changing pitch. Breathing is motion, and so the khaen and its cousins from Asia, such as the Chinese sheng, are liberating to play. I’ve been lucky enough to play khaen with many great musicians—with Jon Batiste and the Stay Human band on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” for instance, and with Ornette Coleman. When I played the khaen with George Clinton and P-Funk, Clinton stood facing me, leaning in until we were just inches apart; he widened his eyes to make the channel between our beings as high-bandwidth as possible, breathing ferociously to transmit the groove he was improvising. It was the most physically demanding performance of my life.

If playing the khaen turns me into an extroverted athlete, then the xiao—which is held vertically, like a clarinet or an oboe—invites me to explore internal dramas. This isn’t just a mind-set but a physical sensation: while playing xiao I feel a rolling movement in the air just behind my upper front teeth, and a second area of resonance in my chest, and I seem to move these reservoirs of air around as I use the instrument. I’m not the only one to have this kind of sensation: singers often say that they experience air in this way, and flute teachers I’ve known have talked about “blue” or “yellow” air flows. I’ve had long conversations with wind players about how we seem to be painting the flow of air inside our bodies. I have to suspend my skepticism when this sort of talk starts—I don’t think we’re really doing what we describe, but I do think we’re describing something real. It’s possible to shape tone by adjusting the mouth, tongue, lips, jaw, throat, and chest. When I find my tone, I even feel the presence of a structure in the air between my lips and the flute—a tumbling, ineffable caterpillar, rolling rapidly on its long axis. The caterpillar collaborates with me, sometimes helping, sometimes pushing back, and by interacting with it I can explore a world of tone.

Did the xiao players of the past perceive invisible caterpillars like mine? Maybe they did. Xiaos have come in many shapes and sizes over the centuries, but, judging by the illustrations that have been preserved, they’ve all been recognizably xiao. On the other hand, there are many ways to play a flute. Perhaps xiao notes used to end in elegant calligraphic rises; maybe the breath was emphasized so that the sound of the flute seemed continuous with nature; or possibly ancient xiao tones were lustrous and technical, with perfect stability. Perhaps the sound that xiao players sought was deceptively transparent but filled with little features, or maybe they were show-offs, playing high, fast, and loud. These descriptions fit contemporary flute-playing styles, and it seems possible that historical styles resembled them—or not. (...)

As a technologist, my work has often focussed on the creation of interactive devices, such as head-mounted displays and haptic gloves. It’s sobering for me to compare the instruments I’ve played with the devices that Silicon Valley has made. I’ve never had an experience with any digital device that comes at all close to those I’ve had with even mediocre acoustic musical instruments. What’s the use of ushering in a new era dominated by digital technology if the objects that that era creates are inferior to pre-digital ones?

For decades, researchers have been attempting to model acoustic instruments with software. Simulated saxophones and violins can sound impressive but only within an artificially constrained frame. Listen to one note at a time and the synthetic instruments sound good. Connect the notes together and the illusion fails. This may be because the experience of interacting creatively with such models is sterile, vacant, and ridiculous. One is usually clicking on little dots on a screen, or pushing buttons, or—in the very best case—adjusting variables with physical knobs and sliders. From a commercial point of view, this doesn’t make simulated instruments useless; embedded in the mix, splashed with reverb and other effects, they sound just fine. But physical instruments channel the unrepeatable process of interaction, a quality lost with modern production technology.

Human senses have evolved to the point that we can occasionally react to the universe down to the quantum limit; our retinas can register single photons, and our ability to sense something teased between fingertips is profound. But that is not what makes instruments different from digital-music models. It isn’t a contest about numbers. The deeper difference is that computer models are made of abstractions—letters, pixels, files—while acoustic instruments are made of material. The wood in an oud or a violin reflects an old forest, the bodies who played it, and many other things, but in an intrinsic, organic way, transcending abstractions. Physicality got a bad rap in the past. It used to be that the physical was contrasted with the spiritual. But now that we have information technologies, we can see that materiality is mystical. A digital object can be described, while an acoustic one always remains a step beyond us.

Today, tech companies promise to create algorithms that can analyze old music to create new music. But music is ambiguous: is it mostly a product to be produced and enjoyed, or is the creation of it the most important thing? If it’s the former, then being able to automate the production of music is at least a coherent idea, whether or not it is a good one. But, if it’s the latter, then pulling music creation away from people undermines the whole point. I often work with students who want to build algorithms that make music. I ask them, Do you mean you want to design algorithms that are like instruments, and which people can use to make new music, or do you just want an A.I. to make music for you? For those students who want to have optimal music made for them, I have to ask, Would you want robots to have sex for you so you don’t have to? I mean, what is life for?

by Jaron Lanier, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Michael Turek

[ed. See Jaron playing the khaen here.]

A Barbie Aged By AI Tells A Too-Bleak Story Of Getting Old

Recently, not one but two Barbies have appeared. The one that everyone knows about by now is Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster film. Movie Barbie.

The other, which I doubt you ever heard of, is an AI-generated photo of an 83-year-old Barbie, reproduced by a company that makes personal alarms for the elderly and distributes a blog about aging issues.

Pensioner Barbie. That’s what they call her.

This article published by the personal alarm company and others tries to use Pensioner Barbie to, as they say, “normalize” conversations about aging.

In fact, their discussion does the opposite.

Barbie the movie, on the other hand, is an excellent way to learn about aging. It makes you think. The AI-created Pensioner Barbie simply makes you cringe.

When it comes to learning about what it means to grow old, beware of the experts.

The article circulating on the internet sees aging only in terms of sickness and loneliness — deficit-speak. It succumbs to Specialist Temptation, focusing on their self-proclaimed expertise and ignoring everything else. You’re a malady specialist? Look for maladies.

And boy do they ever.

“We all get older, and it’s nothing to fear,” the article says.

And then it goes on to describe Pensioner Barbie’s life only in terms of exactly what we fear.

Here is the article’s description — better yet its diagnosis.

“After a lifetime of wearing high heels, Pensioner Barbie now suffers from chronic foot pain and poor posture as well. At her age, Barbie has a one in two chance of having at least one fall each year.”

She has “deteriorating eyesight and development of cataracts has also impaired her vision, meaning she can no longer drive her iconic hot pink car.”

And the worst of all: “With an empty chair in the background, it’s also assumed that lifelong heart-throb Ken has also passed away, and Barbie is likely struggling with loneliness.”

Adding to that doom scenario is Pensioner Barbie’s gaunt appearance, as if she’s tried to keep the “cute figure” she had in high school except that after a lifelong effort she’s lost her curves.

Good lord. This is not Pensioner Barbie’s life. That’s her medical record. She has no life here outside her tchotchke-filled room. (...)

That’s not normalizing aging. It’s oversimplifying aging, stigmatizing it and scaring the stuffing out of someone who wants to understand the life of her uncle in Florida. Or for that matter, a middle-aged woman who has learned to live with cellulite but now discovers she can’t really wear high heels anymore.

Pensioner Barbie is a conversation stopper. On the other hand, in terms of aging, Barbie the movie is a conversation starter.

Considering what you probably know about the awesome Barbie phenomenon that’s often referred to as “The Barbie Industrial Complex”, this probably surprises you. You know, Barbie and Ken, umpteen kinds of Barbie dolls, Mattel’s multi-billion-dollar Barbie sales, first-order feminism, second-order feminism.

Who knew?

Well, Greta Gerwig, the film’s co-writer and director, sure knew. Aging sets the movie’s tone.

by Neal Milner, Honolulu Civil Beat |  Read more:

Image: Midjourney via:

[ed. Caution: Barbie movie spoilers. Ageism is a real problem, and the least of many "isms" to get any real attention or revision (feminism, racism, sexism, capitalism, socialism, etc.). Many cultures honor and celebrate elders - their wisdom, life experiences, traditions and contributions to family cohesion. Western culture does not, America in particular.] 

De-Aging Technology Still Has a Ways to Go

 

[ed. Fell down the Rabbit Hole this morning reading about de-aging technology (specifically, the new Indiana Jones movie). General consensus seems to be: it works pretty well sometimes but not others (eg. IJ) and has a ways to go before becoming something really seamless and unnoticeable (see also: here). I love these scenes from Martin Scorsese's "The Irishman". First because it's a great movie, second because the acting is wonderful (in Al Pacino's case as union boss Jimmy Hoffa some have said overacting, but I disagree strongly - see for yourself), and third because the anti-aging technology used here is about as good as it gets. Btw, for an example of early anti-aging efforts, see: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button where Brad Pitt's face is simply pasted over those of some babies and children as he grew older/younger. Weird but still a great movie!]

Autoenshittification

Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car's digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare – but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist utopia, it's a dream they can't give up on.

Your car is stuffed full of microchips, a fact the world came to appreciate after the pandemic struck and auto production ground to a halt due to chip shortages. Of course, that wasn't the whole story: when the pandemic started, the automakers panicked and canceled their chip orders, only to immediately regret that decision and place new orders.

But it was too late: semiconductor production had taken a serious body-blow, and when Big Car placed its new chip orders, it went to the back of a long, slow-moving line. It was a catastrophic bungle: microchips are so integral to car production that a car is basically a computer network on wheels that you stick your fragile human body into and pray.

The car manufacturers got so desperate for chips that they started buying up washing machines for the microchips in them, extracting the chips and discarding the washing machines like some absurdo-dystopian cyberpunk walnut-shelling machine:

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/desperate-times-companies-buy-washing-machines-just-to-rip-out-the-chips-187033.html

These digital systems are a huge problem for the car companies. They are the underlying cause of a precipitous decline in car quality. From touch-based digital door-locks to networked sensors and cameras, every digital system in your car is a source of endless repair nightmares, costly recalls and cybersecurity vulnerabilities:

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/quality-new-vehicles-us-declining-more-tech-use-study-shows-2023-06-22/

What's more, drivers hate all the digital bullshit, from the janky touchscreens to the shitty, wildly insecure apps. Digital systems are drivers' most significant point of dissatisfaction with the automakers' products:

https://www.theverge.com/23801545/car-infotainment-customer-satisifaction-survey-jd-power (...)

But even amid all the complaining about cars getting stuck in the Internet of Shit, there's still not much discussion of why the car-makers are making their products less attractive, less reliable, less safe, and less resilient by stuffing them full of microchips. Are car execs just the latest generation of rubes who've been suckered by Silicon Valley bullshit and convinced that apps are a magic path to profitability?

Nope. Car execs are sophisticated businesspeople, and they're surfing capitalism's latest – and last – hot trend: dismantling capitalism itself.

Now, leftists have been predicting the death of capitalism since The Communist Manifesto, but even Marx and Engels warned us not to get too frisky: capitalism, they wrote, is endlessly creative, constantly reinventing itself, re-emerging from each crisis in a new form that is perfectly adapted to the post-crisis reality:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/books/review/a-spectre-haunting-china-mieville.html

But capitalism has finally run out of gas. In his forthcoming book, Techno Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis proposes that capitalism has died – but it wasn't replaced by socialism. Rather, capitalism has given way to feudalism:

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/451795/technofeudalism-by-varoufakis-yanis/9781847927279

Under capitalism, capital is the prime mover. The people who own and mobilize capital – the capitalists – organize the economy and take the lion's share of its returns. But it wasn't always this way: for hundreds of years, European civilization was dominated by rents, not markets.

A "rent" is income that you get from owning something that other people need to produce value. Think of renting out a house you own: not only do you get paid when someone pays you to live there, you also get the benefit of rising property values, which are the result of the work that all the other homeowners, business owners, and residents do to make the neighborhood more valuable.

The first capitalists hated rent. They wanted to replace the "passive income" that landowners got from taxing their serfs' harvest with active income from enclosing those lands and grazing sheep in order to get wool to feed to the new textile mills. They wanted active income – and lots of it.

Capitalist philosophers railed against rent. The "free market" of Adam Smith wasn't a market that was free from regulation – it was a market free from rents. The reason Smith railed against monopolists is because he (correctly) understood that once a monopoly emerged, it would become a chokepoint through which a rentier could cream off the profits he considered the capitalist's due:

https://locusmag.com/2021/03/cory-doctorow-free-markets/

Today, we live in a rentier's paradise. People don't aspire to create value – they aspire to capture it. In Survival of the Richest, Doug Rushkoff calls this "going meta": don't provide a service, just figure out a way to interpose yourself between the provider and the customer:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

Don't drive a cab, create Uber and extract value from every driver and rider. Better still: don't found Uber, invest in Uber options and extract value from the people who invest in Uber. Even better, invest in derivatives of Uber options and extract value from people extracting value from people investing in Uber, who extract value from drivers and riders. Go meta.

by Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic |  Read more:

Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified

Stardom is Not a Worthy Pursuit’: Julia Louis-Dreyfus

Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Nicole Holofcener trusted each other immediately. In the early 2010s, they met to discuss whether Louis-Dreyfus would star in the indie director’s next film, the offbeat romantic comedy Enough Said. “We got along so well that I was kind of baffled we hadn’t met until then,” says Louis‑Dreyfus. She signed up.

At the first table read, Holofcener remembers her horseplay with the actor who played Seinfeld’s infamous Elaine Benes all but overshadowing the co-lead, James Gandolfini: “We could finish each other’s sentences – she so got the materials, she so got me. She would jump in with ideas that were generally fantastic. And we would laugh until we peed. Jim would look at us like: ‘Boy, am I in a chick flick or what?’” (...)

Their forthright, secure relationship couldn’t be in starker contrast to the rattled bond depicted in You Hurt My Feelings. Louis-Dreyfus plays Beth, a memoir writer worried that her first novel is a dud. Her husband, Don (Tobias Menzies), reassures her that he loves it. Then she overhears him telling his brother-in-law that he hates it. “If I say the slightest thing, she falls apart,” he says. Moments later, Beth is dry-heaving on the streets of Manhattan.

It is classic Holofcener: petty, narcissistic and pitiable, yet hilarious and relatable. Louis-Dreyfus knew she could trust Holofcener because of that unique perspective: “There’s an honesty and authenticity in her writing that makes me comfortable with her point of view.” (...)

Louis-Dreyfus is 62. With age, she says, it has become easier to untangle self-worth from work, although not entirely: “It’s tricky. We actors are in a business where you’re selling your brand and you have to bring a truthfulness to what you do.” Has she ever wished someone had been more honest with her about her work, as Don fails to be? “Gosh,” she says. “Actually, no, I don’t think so.”

Fair enough: from the outside, it’s difficult to identify any missteps across her 40-year career. Having played the self-serving vice-president Selina Meyer in Veep from 2012 to 2019, Louis-Dreyfus is as beloved today as she was in the early 90s, when she incarnated Seinfeld’s self-serving, big-haired shover. She is the most garlanded Primetime Emmy and Screen Actors Guild award-winner in history; in 2018, she received the Mark Twain prize for American Humor.

Louis-Dreyfus’s appeal, agree Holofcener and Armando Iannucci, the creator of Veep, is her hunger to stray beyond the pale. With the hapless Selina, says Iannucci, “she was always the first pushing it further in terms of her having no principles. She’s put in charge of a healthy eating project, one of the pathetic things presidents give their vice-presidents to keep them busy. And Julia was quite keen to push the fact that Selina cannot abide anyone who’s overweight, in a slightly uneasy way. She’s quite happy for the audience to be appalled by her character.”

At the same time, says Iannucci, “there’s a genuineness there as well. You can see why those characters might have arrived at that point psychologically.”

If Louis-Dreyfus did have anything close to a misstep, it was her dispiriting spell at Saturday Night Live, from 1982 to 1985. She had a hard time as the youngest female cast member in what she has characterised as a druggy boys’ club. (She did, though, forge a bond with an equally miserable Larry David, who would later co-create Seinfeld.) But even that cultivated a guiding presence of mind: when she got the boot, she resolved that she would only keep acting if it was fun.

Most young actors would cut off a limb to make it. Why not Louis-Dreyfus? “Maybe because I was so fundamentally unhappy for those three years,” she says. She knew it didn’t have to be like this from her time in the Chicago improv troupes the Second City and the Practical Theatre Company. “I really enjoyed doing work with my friends that was thrilling and collaborative and ensemble-y. And so I knew from having fun, right?”

SNL wasn’t “the most wretched experience of my life”, she concedes. “But it was very challenging. I knew I couldn’t keep that going. And if this was what it meant to be in showbusiness, I wanted nothing to do with it. I had this feeling: if I can’t find the fun again, I can walk away from this.”

Fun and practicality seem to be the cornerstones of Louis-Dreyfus’s attitude. In 1989, David and Jerry Seinfeld signed her up to play Elaine. A recent New York Times article marking 25 years since the Seinfeld finale posited that it still resonates because the characters “flouted societal conventions and the rules of traditional adulthood”, constructs increasingly inaccessible to younger viewers. Louis-Dreyfus isn’t sure. “I don’t know if I’m smart enough to draw a conclusion like that,” she says. “At the end of the day, it was just fucking funny, and that holds up.”

She declined to capitalise on her status as one of the 90s’ biggest television stars, turning down movies to raise her two sons, who were born during Seinfeld’s run (although she says the rumour that she passed on playing Mia in Pulp Fiction is untrue). Iannucci recalls her prioritising home life during the filming of Veep: “She’s very much a family-oriented person, and that seems to be her rootedness.” (...)

In 2017, while shooting Veep, Louis-Dreyfus was diagnosed with breast cancer, suspending filming for a year. She was treated and underwent a double reconstruction (and has campaigned for all women get the same opportunity, regardless of financial ability). The producer of You Hurt My Feelings recently remarked on her and Holofcener’s wonder at human narcissism. That hasn’t changed since her brush with mortality, she says: “The bullshit is always there and I love exploring it. I’m very interested in the warts and all of human beings and their interactions with each other.” (...)

Beyond cinema, she has made the inevitable celebrity foray into podcasting.

In Wiser Than Me, Louis-Dreyfus interviews older women, from Amy Tan to Jane Fonda, about their life experiences. Fonda’s documentary Jane Fonda in Five Acts inspired the idea. “I was completely stunned by the scope of her life, and that I didn’t really fully understand everything that she had done, accomplished, experienced,” she says. “It led me to the next thought: what about all the other older women out there who have had a lot of life? I want to hear from them, too. There’s enormous value in speaking to women who have been there, done that and can give you the sage advice.”

Fonda told her that she regretted getting cosmetic surgery. Last year, Holofcener told this paper that virtually every female actor over 50 had “distorted their own face” with surgery. Louis-Dreyfus’s stance is that people should do what they want: “I’m not making any judgment whatsoever of anyone who does it. Having said that, I have not had any plastic surgery. It’s not something I’m keen on doing – as, you know, demonstrated by my face in the movie.” (...)

Holofcener has previously said that Louis-Dreyfus “should be a huge movie star”. Does she want that? “Well, I don’t know what it means to be a huge movie star,” she says. “Stardom – that’s like air. In my view, that’s not a worthy pursuit. But I’m trying to find more material that’s fresh, and material that I would like to see myself. It’s like this movie: if I weren’t in it, I would go opening weekend to see it, because it’s the kind of film that I enjoy watching.” She lets out a huge, broad laugh as she considers a hypothetical insecurity. “And then I’d have a complete shit fit that I wasn’t in it!”

by Laura Snapes, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Ryan Pfhluger

[ed. A promo piece, but she is still one of the greatest comediennes of our time. And seems to do it so effortlessly. See also: You Hurt My Feelings review (Guardian).]

The Great Rolex Recession is Here

The great Rolex recession is here: How the Fed crushed the luxury-watch boom (Business Insider)

Image: Rolex

"The WatchCharts Overall Market Index — which tracks the prices of 60 timepieces from top brands including Rolex, Patek Philippe, and Audemars Piguet — has plunged 32% from a March 2022 peak. A separate index for just Rolex models fell 27% over a similar period."

[ed. Maybe people who can afford them, or aspire to, only need one?]

X Will Never Be the “Everything App” But Uber Might

Today shares of Uber are hitting a new 52-week high. They report earnings tomorrow (Tuesday) before the opening bell. The stock has doubled this year and has now become my single largest holding personally. And if it should fall tomorrow, because of fund manager short-sightedness or daytrader idiocy, I will buy even more, likely raising my average cost (currently mid-30’s after three years worth of adding to my position) in the process.

My personal opinion (not prediction, opinion) is that this is a stock that could trade to $100 per share over the next two to three years. And the reason why I think this is possible is not a stretch to imagine today. While Elon Musk fantasizes about the possibility of Twitter users turning over their financial information to his demented fighting pit circus, Uber has already laid the groundwork to actually become the “Everything App” that “X” will never be. Uber has a ten year head start technologically, a massive user base (that is actually paying money) and a revenue base across which to spread the cost of this vision.

Uber is a verb. It’s how people get places. Not just on short notice like the original black town car-hailing service it started out as. You can book a car days or hours in advance now. You can be picked up by a professional driver in a Cadillac Escalade or an amateur driver in a Kia Sorento, depending on how much you want to spend. This business was crippled during the pandemic, which is why the stock fell into the 20’s. It’s come back with a vengeance. Every kind of user – business travelers, work commuters, vacationers, drinkers, partiers, urbanites without cars, teens, the elderly, you name it, they’re riding again.

Additionally, Uber has become a verb describing not just how people get places but also how they get things. The Uber Eats business now has more regular users than the Uber Rides business. Before the pandemic, Eats looked like a loser and many in the investment community were exhorting the company to wind it down or sell it off. When the plague came, Eats literally saved this company’s life. It’s now in a hyper-scaling phase with new users and drivers flocking to the platform as other, less reliable services fade away. This business has not slowed down during the reopening, like so many lockdown businesses have (Zoom, Docusign, Peloton, Zillow). If anything, it has accelerated.

Finally, Uber has been adding even more services now that its logistics and payments have been built out and proven. They’re delivering groceries. They’re bringing people items from the convenience store. Their Drizzly app delivers wine, beer and liquor all day and night. They’re bringing customers prescriptions from the pharmacy. They launched a freight business to help companies ship items by truck.

If any company today has the chance of becoming the “everything app”, it’s this one. Unlike legacy Twitter (I refuse to call it X), which barely knows anything about its users (hence the failure to build a profitable advertising business), Uber knows quite a bit about the people who use its app. For starters, they use it to pay for things. They’re using it in their own name with a credit card on file, not anonymously or pseudonymously. Most importantly, people don’t open the Uber app to argue over abortion rights or Ukraine or to casually join outrage mobs and accuse random strangers of racism. They open it because they have better things to do. They want to go somewhere or get something. Twitter is for people who have nothing to do, so they scroll it looking for a laugh or a fight.

I should point out that almost no one uses Twitter. It’s got an outsized voice in our culture because journalists and people in the media are obsessed with it and constantly talking about it. Twitter is the stock market for reporters – it’s how they can see what takes are rising and falling in popularity and what (or whom) they should be covering. In the real world, only the weirdest people you know (maybe yourself included) are on it. Only 23% of US adults use Twitter (Facebook is 69%, YouTube is 81%). In a survey this past spring, 60% of people who had used Twitter told Pew they were taking a break from it. Some 25% of current users said they were unlikely to still be using it in a year. With the name change and unintentional (intentional?) destruction of the product, 25% might be low. The odds of this platform evolving to provide financial services, rides, deliveries, video chat, gaming, etc like the super-apps in China do is very low.

Uber had a formidable competitor in Lyft in the United States but they’ve basically beaten it into submission. They need Lyft to stay alive so that they can’t be seen as a monopolist but, in practice, that’s what they are becoming on the Rides side. Lyft needs an activist to step in. It’s not big enough to compete with Uber and might make more sense as a part of someone else’s larger business. If anyone wants it. The CEO of Uber, Dara Khosrowshahi, who had taken over when the founder, Travis Kalanick, was pushed out a decade ago, rightfully saw that a robust driver ecosystem was the key to winning the category. Offering a more generous take-rate for the drivers meant a fully-stocked supply side so that users would always have cars ready to get them. This became habit-forming as people began to check Uber first. It was expensive but it paid off. Dara won the user experience game by simultaneously winning the drivers game. They’ll be writing about this in business school textbooks someday. (...)

Now, I want you to keep in mind that this is a global business and it is a large one, despite the fact that Uber is not yet mentioned in the same breath as the Googles, the Apples and the Amazons. It’s not yet as profitable as the Magnificent Seven companies and it is a much younger company (founded in 2008, public since the spring of 2019). But it is huge and growing fast.

by Joshua M. Brown, The Reformed Broker |  Read more:

Image: Ritholtz Wealth Management LLC/YCharts

Bajau: Last of the Sea Nomads

The Last of the Sea Nomads (The Guardian)
Image: Enal with his pet shark. Photograph: James Morgan

Diana Botutihe was born at sea. Now in her 50s, she has spent her entire life on boats that are typically just 5m long and 1.5m wide. She visits land only to trade fish for staples such as rice and water, and her boat is filled with the accoutrements of everyday living – jerry cans, blackened stockpots, plastic utensils, a kerosene lamp and a pair of pot plants.

Diana is one of the world's last marine nomads; a member of the Bajau ethnic group, a Malay people who have lived at sea for centuries, plying a tract of ocean between the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia. The origins of the Bajau diaspora are recounted in the legend of a princess from Johor, Malaysia, who was washed away in a flash flood. Her grief-stricken father ordered his subjects to depart, returning only when they'd found his daughter.

Over generations, the Bajau adapted to their maritime environment and, though marginalised, their knowledge was revered by the great Malay sultans, who counted on them to establish and protect trade routes. They are highly skilled free divers, plunging to depths of 30m and more to hunt pelagic fish or search for pearls and sea cucumbers – a delicacy among the Bajau and a commodity they have traded for centuries.

Since diving is an everyday activity, the Bajau deliberately rupture their eardrums at an early age. "You bleed from your ears and nose, and you have to spend a week lying down because of the dizziness," says Imran Lahassan, of the community of Torosiaje in North Sulawesi, Indonesia. "After that you can dive without pain." Unsurprisingly, most older Bajau are hard of hearing. When diving, they wear hand-carved wooden goggles with glass lenses, hunting with spear guns fashioned from boat timber, tyre rubber and scrap metal.

[ed. More pictures here. See also: Freediving: is this a sport – or ‘French existentialist swimming’? (On the new Netflix documentary The Deepest Breath).]

My Beautiful Friend

Toward the end of my teens, it began to dawn on me that my face was probably fully formed. That no radical change was forthcoming. That even back when I still held out hope, my features were meanwhile settling, treacherous, into a mediocrity which surprised, humiliated, crushed me. In other words, I was not going to be any great beauty. I was only going to be what I was: attractive occasionally, like most people, relative to whoever happened to stand nearby. I was horrified; I couldn’t get over it. Being average-looking is, by definition, completely normal. Why hadn’t anyone prepared me for it?

I could not have discovered I was plain without discovering K was pretty. She is my friend of many years. Back then, it obsesses me: how we make each other exist. We attend elementary school together, then high school. She enrolls at a nearby college. Her tall grants me my short; my plump her skinny; her leonine features my pedestrian ones. I resent her as much as I exult in her company. In between us, and without words for it, the female universe dilates, a continuum whose comparative alchemy seems designed to confront me, make me suffer, lift her up. Her protagonism diminishes me, or does it? I confuse myself for a long time thinking I am the planet, and K is the sun. It takes me a long time to forgive her.

Comparison steals my joy, but it also gives me a narrative. All in all, it feels radical to make a world together, she and I, a silent tournament of first kisses, compliments, report cards. I live at a fixed point from K, her lucky arms, her lucky neck, her lucky elbows. I pursue beautiful friends like some women do men who will strike them in bed at night. On account of our addictive relativity. On account of my envy, which I’ve made, like many women, the secret passion of my life.

There’s something gorgeously petty about many women’s lives. They’re not trying to be great. They’re trying to be better. It’s why women diet together; dye their hair light, then dark, then light again; dress for each other; race to get engaged; wait to get divorced; find a taken man more attractive than a free one. Become girlbosses in droves and then give it up. A woman can spend her whole life in real or imagined competition with her friends, finding herself in the gaps between them. Especially in the game of looks, there is no excellence that is not another woman’s inadequacy, no abundance that does not mean lack. A great beauty is discovered, like crude oil, or gold. That means in a parched desert, or a dirty riverbed, where the rest of us must languish. Our democratic sensibility commands us to raze all unfairness. Yet the way we sacralize beauty, our treatment of the women who try to level it, our satisfaction when no one can, calls our bluff.

For me, the humiliations stack up. I nurse them like little children. I pick at them like scabs. The horrid boy I desperately love, who pretends to love me, studying K’s legs on the trampoline. We are seventeen, and I study them too. Up and down, slender, hairless, vanishing up the thighs, into the sun. Later he sends her a message on Facebook. She does nothing to betray me. What I want is for those legs and the mat of the trampoline to go rigid, to snap, for her bones to spray and splinter, to pierce me through the eyes, so I cannot look at either of us anymore.

Or, a couple years later, when I believe I’ve matured, gotten over it, displaying my fake ID at a college party. It’s my friend’s, I explain. It’s K’s. How funny. It works, we look just enough alike. A drunken classmate laughs. “Yes,” he says. “Except she’s hotter than you.” My face silences him, then the room. His words spread my legs, pass a hand through me, find something dying. He apologizes until I console him. I return to my dorm and drown in abjection, almost pleasurably at this point. I’d like to call my mother, whom I resemble. Except that in all of our talks of puberty, she omitted this. She gave me my face and felt guilty; I had to learn for myself how my suffering held something up.

My own inglorious adolescence ends with me dumped, over brunch, at twenty. He has a strong jaw which dazes and a soft birthmark, near the mouth. He is ten years older than me. That last bit is not the part that hurts. It’s that he’s telling me about another girl. “She’s amazing,” he says. “I haven’t felt like this in a long time.” I think of what we’ve done for a long time and I go to the bathroom and vomit. When I come back he’s still speaking. I wonder, in silence, what it would be like to be the sort of girl about whom they say, he can’t shut up about her. “She’s a writer,” he tells me, with love in his eyes. He looks so handsome, I want to kiss him, exactly now, when, because, he can’t shut up about her. I go home, look her up, write a poem, get over him as soon as I get it published, thinking vaguely, see, there, that was easy, take that—I might be less lovely, but there are other competitions, I can be a writer too. (...)

From Austen to Ferrante, women’s literature is ripe with dyads of women, made up of a beautiful half and a less beautiful half. Here, the arbitrariness of beauty plays out in long, anguished plots, games of chutes and ladders, whereby some women find themselves socially, magically, economically mobile, and others do not, at least not so easily. We recognize the “winner” as soon as we read what she looks like. In first-person stories, more often than not, it’s not the narrator. These plain heroines yearn for, resent, are fascinated by, love, hate, cannot stay away from, their more beautiful, fortunate counterparts. They articulate a precisely feminine pain I know well, worse than menstrual cramps. A sense of one’s own plainness. Inferiority. An envy so profound and wistful it is almost sexually charged.

by Grazie Sophia Christie, The Point |  Read more:

Image: Prudence Flint, The Promise

Accelerating the Discovery of New Nasca Geoglyphs Using Deep Learning

AI in nature is always interesting, but nature AI as applied to archaeology is even more so. Research led by Yamagata University aimed to identify new Nasca lines — the enormous “geoglyphs” in Peru. You might think that, being visible from orbit, they’d be pretty obvious — but erosion and tree cover from the millennia since these mysterious formations were created mean there are an unknown number hiding just out of sight. After being trained on aerial imagery of known and obscured geoglyphs, a deep learning model was set free on other views, and amazingly it detected at least four new ones, as you can see below [ed, above]. Pretty exciting! via: (TC)

[ed. See also (original paper): Accelerating the discovery of new Nasca geoglyphs using deep learning (ScienceDirect).]

The Secret History of Gun Rights: How Lawmakers Armed the N.R.A.

The Secret History of Gun Rights: How Lawmakers Armed the N.R.A. (NYT)

Image: Mark Harris
[ed. My admiration for Representative John Dingell (Michigan) just suffered a severe hit. You can be right about a lot of things but blind to others. See his Wikipedia entry for a full accounting of his many accomplishments:]

"During his time in Congress in addition to protecting the automobile industry important to his district, Dingell was instrumental in passage of the Medicare Act, the Water Quality Act of 1965, Clean Water Act of 1972, the Endangered Species Act of 1973, the Clean Air Act of 1990, and the Affordable Care Act, among others. He was most proud of his work on the Civil Rights Act of 1964." (Wikipedia)

The Lunar Codex

A Time Capsule of Human Creativity, Stored in the Sky (NYT)

The Lunar Codex, an archive of contemporary art, poetry and other cultural artifacts of life on Earth, is headed to the moon.

Later this year, the Lunar Codex — a vast multimedia archive telling a story of the world’s people through creative arts — will start heading for permanent installation on the moon aboard a series of unmanned rockets.

The Lunar Codex is a digitized (or miniaturized) collection of contemporary art, poetry, magazines, music, film, podcasts and books by 30,000 artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers in 157 countries. It’s the brainchild of Samuel Peralta, a semiretired physicist and author in Canada with a love of the arts and sciences. (...)

“This is the largest, most global project to launch cultural works into space,” Peralta said in an interview. “There isn’t anything like this anywhere.” (...)

It’s divided into four time capsules, with its material copied onto digital memory cards or inscribed into nickel-based NanoFiche, a lightweight analog storage media that can hold 150,000 laser-etched microscopic pages of text or photos on one 8.5-by-11-inch sheet. The concept is “like the Golden Record,” Peralta said, referring to NASA’s own cultural time capsule of audio and images stored on a metal disc and sent into space aboard the Voyager probes in 1977. “Gold would be incredibly heavy. Nickel wafers are much, much lighter.”

by J. D. Biersdorfer, NY Times | Read more:
Image: “New Moon,” a 1980 color serigraph by the Canadian artist Alex Colville