Hyperloop Bites the Dust

Elon Musk‘s high-profile transportation startup, Hyperloop One, is shuttering its airless tubes.

The company is laying off employees, selling remaining assets (which include a test track and machinery), and closing its offices, Bloomberg reports. After hiring more than 200 people in 2022, remaining workers — who are tasked with supervising the asset sale — were told their employment ends Dec. 31. All of Hyperlooop One’s intellectual property will be handed over to majority stakeholder, Dubai-based DP World.

The billionaire estimated in a 2013 proposal that a pod would be able to whisk passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in just 35 minutes and “feel a lot like being on an airplane.” After its founding in 2014, the buzzy startup raised around $450 million in venture capital funds and other investments, and even constructed a test track near Las Vegas to develop its technology.

For a moment, things looked promising for the Musk-owned company that vowed to end traffic once and for all. Originally founded as Hyperloop Technologies, the business changed its name to Hyperloop One in 2016, and then rebranded to Virgin Hyperloop One after Richard Branson invested in the company and joined its board of directors. After an exodus of top execs, Virgin dropped its name from Hyperloop One after opting to focus on cargo rather than passengers.

A former SpaceX subsidiary, the Boring Company, spun out as a separate business in 2018, did build a few short tunnels, including a mile-long prototype tube near SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. However, other proposed loops never materialized. A route from East Hollywood to Dodger Stadium, with a set completion date of 2020, remains a pipe dream, and elsewhere, slated projects in Chicago and Washington, D.C. were quietly shelved.

News of Hyperloop One’s shuttering follows the recent revelation that two million Tesla vehicles were recalled following a two-year investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The agency found that the car models featuring the self-driving feature — including models Y, S, 3, and X produced between Oct. 5, 2012, and Dec. 7, 2023 — contain a high-risk software flaw that likely contributed to an increase in wrecks and crashes.

by Charisma Madarang, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia (Alexander-93)

[ed. Crazy from the get go. Musk isn't crazy, but it shows how someone with a Great Man complex and billions to spend goes about building his legacy (and indulging his impulses). See also: Twitter was so many things...Elon Musk killed Twitter (The Verge); and, The Hyperloop was always a scam; and, The media's failure on Elon Musk; and, Elon Musk built his own reality. Now it's consuming him. (Disconnect).]

Only Medicare is Medicare

President George W. Bush and Republicans (and a handful of on-the-take Democrats) in Congress created the Medicare Advantage scam in 2003 as a way of routing hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars into the pockets of for-profit insurance companies. (...)

Real Medicare pays bills when they’re presented. Medicare Advantage insurance companies, on the other hand, get a fixed dollar amount every year for each of the people enrolled in their programs, regardless of how much they spent on each customer.

As a result, Medicare Advantage programs make the greatest profits for their CEOs and shareholders when they actively refuse to pay for care, something that happens frequently. It’s a safe bet that nearly 100 percent of the people who sign up for Advantage programs don’t know this and don’t have any idea how badly screwed they could be if they get seriously ill.

Not only that, when people do figure out they’ve been duped and try to get back on real Medicare, the same insurance companies often punish them by refusing to write Medigap plans (that fill in the 20% hole in real Medicare). They can’t do that when you first sign up when you turn 65, but if you “leave” real Medicare for privatized Medicare Advantage, it can be damn hard to get back on it. (...)

With real Medicare and a Medigap plan, you talk with your physician or hospital and decide on your treatment, they bill Medicare, and you never see or hear about the bill. There is nobody between you and your physician or hospital and Medicare only goes after the payment they’ve made if they sniff out a fraud.

With Medicare Advantage, on the other hand, your insurance company gets a lump-sum payment from Medicare every year and keeps the difference between what they get and what they pay out. They then insert themselves between you and your doctor or hospital to avoid paying for whatever they can.

Whatever you decide on regarding treatment, many Advantage insurance companies will regularly second-guess and do everything they can to intimidate you into paying yourself out-of-pocket. Often, they simply refuse payment and wait for you to file a complaint against them; for people seriously ill the cumbersome “appeals” process is often more than they can handle.

As a result, hospitals and doctor groups across the nation are beginning to refuse to take Medicare Advantage patients. California-based Scripps Health, for example, cares for around 30,000 people on Medicare Advantage and recently notified all of them that Scripps will no longer offer medical services to them unless they pay out-of-pocket or revert back to real Medicare.

They made this decision because over $75 million worth of services and procedures their physicians had recommended to their patients were turned down by Medicare Advantage insurance companies. In many cases, Scripps had already provided the care and is now stuck with the bills that the Advantage companies refuse to pay.

Scripps CEO Chris Van Gorder told MedPage Today:

“We are a patient care organization and not a patient denial organization and, in many ways, the model of managed care has always been about denying or delaying care – at least economically. That is why denials, [prior] authorizations and administrative processes have become a very big issue for physicians and hospitals...”

Similarly, the Mayo Clinic has warned its customers in Florida and Arizona that they won’t accept Medicare Advantage any more, either. Increasing numbers of physician groups and hospitals are simply over being ripped off by Advantage insurance companies.

by Thom Hartman, Alternet |  Read more:

Image: Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP); Our Payments Their Profits (pdf)
[ed. As this article notes, we're currently in an open enrollment period for Medicare, and MA scammers are carpet-bombing America with advertisements, relying on confusion and deceptively low initial or monthly payments to entice people to essentially screw themselves (60 million of them). See also: As Scandals Mount, So Do Calls to Abolish Private Medicare Advantage Plans (CD);  How Medicare Advantage Plans Dodged Auditors and Overcharged Taxpayers by Millions (Kaiser Health News); and if that's not enough: Seniors’ Medicare Benefits Are Being Privatized Without Consent (The Lever). Our American health care system. Hardly a system at all, just a free for all rip-off spree - left to right, top to bottom. Three words: Medicare For All.]

The Only War is Culture War

What the Ivy League hearings on anti-Semitism reveal about the American elite.

As tensions escalated over the summer between the US and its rivals, Russia and China, the American media was ablaze with talk, not of nuclear apocalypse, but about the movies Oppenheimer and Barbie, the two blockbusters archly referred to as “Barbenheimer” – as if the creator of the atomic bomb and the child’s doll had anything in common. Now, more than two months after Hamas butchered and raped hundreds of Israeli civilians and took dozens more into a living hell as hostages, and as Israel continues to raze Gaza, turning it into a charnel house, slaughtering thousands of Palestinian civilians while killing, injuring or detaining thousands more in the West Bank, the US media has, for the past week, been consumed with the subject of America’s Ivy League universities. No one is talking about Israel, the Palestinians, or the war between them.

In an America where just about every solid social or political meaning has melted with a late-capitalist liquescence that would have taken even Karl Marx’s breath away, an event is rarely interpreted in its actual context. Like the protagonist of the satirical 1920s Soviet play, The Suicide, whose declared intention of taking his own life is immediately followed by numerous groups requesting that he kindly kill himself on their behalf, singular events are seized upon simultaneously by competing groups as proof of one or another’s assumptions.

So when, on 5 December, the presidents of three elite universities – University of Pennsylvania, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard – two of them, Penn and Harvard, rarefied Ivies, were summoned to appear at a congressional hearing convened to address the anti-Semitism that seems to have surged on college campuses since the start of war in Israel/Palestine, the result was chaos. Asked by Representative Elise Stefanik, a New York Republican who has expediently converted herself into a Trump stalwart, and is now the fourth-most powerful figure in Congress, if pro-Palestinian students “calling for the genocide of Jews violate[s] Harvard’s rules on bullying and harassment”, Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, replied: “It can be, depending on the context.” Elizabeth Magill, Penn’s president, answered, “If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment.” Sally Kornbluth, president of MIT: “That would be investigated as harassment if pervasive and severe.”

The college presidents’ clownishly ambiguous and infirm replies were predictably met with howls of execration. For conservatives, this was an instance where, at last, as a headline in the Wall Street Journal put it, “The Ivy League mask falls”, and the so-called woke project of replacing the academic discipline of the humanities with the enforcement of “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI), as the progressive war cry goes, was revealed as the destruction of civilised standards and values that, in conservative eyes, it is. For liberals, the hearing was a cynical stunt. As a New York Times headline stated, “As fury erupts over campus anti-Semitism, conservatives seize the moment”, with the article concluding that, among other things, Stefanik was taking sweet revenge on Harvard, her alma mater, because it removed her from the board of its Institute of Politics for supporting Trump’s false claims of a stolen election in 2020.

Social media has the effect of reducing language to mere words, empty of context and intention. That is what happened at the hearing. The formative circumstances here, which made the presidents’ replies logical and rational, if not immediately morally coherent, were evidence of the revolution in mores that has occurred since Trump’s election in 2016.

Trump’s catering to the racial and cultural prejudices of his white working-class base, accompanied by bouts of authoritarian blustering, created an equally illiberal response on the part of American progressives, who are to the left of increasingly silent American liberals. The former US president’s appeals to prejudice fostered, on the left, a general policing of social attitudes, particularly around “harmful” speech. Such policing found its fullest expression at the nation’s universities, where many offices devoted to the enforcement of DEI guidelines sprang up. Nowhere, however, were the new DEI guardians more empowered than at private American universities that, unlike America’s publicly funded colleges, are not bound by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech.

Over several years, one professor after another, mostly at private institutions of higher learning, was accused of saying something that a student or students claimed caused them mental and emotional harm. Such complaints often resulted in a DEI officer – working in a university’s Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action – filing a formal charge of “discriminatory harassment” and beginning a formal investigation. For language to be considered discriminatory harassment, it must, to quote the Supreme Court’s legal definition of the term, be “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it can be said to deprive the victim… of access to the educational opportunities or benefits provided by the school”. By shrewdly referring to the universities’ “rules on bullying and harassment”, Stefanik abruptly focused the presidents’ attention on the technical language of academic enforcement, and they directed their answers precisely to that language. Kornbluth, the MIT president, quoted virtually verbatim the legal definition of discriminatory harassment.

In the event a university does find a professor guilty of discriminatory harassment and takes punitive action, the professor can threaten to cross over to the parallel universe of actual American law, where they could then sue on various grounds of discrimination themselves. As a result, private American higher education institutions have been quietly paying significant sums of money out in negotiated settlements for years. In many instances, DEI investigators are the bane of university lawyers.

Considering the issues of legal jeopardy and conservative accusations of a war on free speech, those three university presidents were no doubt grateful for the opportunity to demonstrate that they do not suppress free speech on their campuses. Here was the proof they had not: even the most disturbing pro-Palestinian slogans were protected so long as those uttering them did not cross over into actionable conduct. But in creating a vacuum of legal terminology, a moral emptiness in which, after all, DEI often thrives, the presidents robotically missed the opportunity to speak clearly and definitively about the actual issue of campus anti-Semitism. It was muddled language for muddled times, and the muddled and muddling right-wing Republicans are having themselves a feast. (...)

The whole thing was like the Marx Brothers meeting the psychiatric experiment The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, the account in which three patients think they’re Christ: Stefanik, every bit the polished Ivy Leaguer, trimmed her political sails right past the real issues at stake, and as the polished Ivy League presidents – far too polished to ever publicly countenance an anti-Semitic sentiment – looked right past what Stefanik was actually saying to their own public relations. Currently the outcome is unfolding along the lines of the new social justice algorithm. As I write, Magill, the white president has resigned; Gay, the black president, has so far survived efforts to remove her; and Kornbluth, the Jewish president, has emerged unscathed from charges that she was enabling anti-Semitism.

Only the media, it seems, is obsessed with the incident, especially with Harvard, since much of the elite media is composed of Ivy League graduates – especially Harvard. Not much attention, if any at all, has been paid to the countless pro-Palestinian demonstrations at smaller state schools. And who, after all, but someone who self-flatteringly treasures Harvard as the perfect symbol of status and achievement could think that Stefanik was animated by revenge for being shunned by Harvard rather than by cold political calculation? The rest of the country – for whom Harvard is, if they have any sense of the place at all, either an expensive finishing school dedicated to the high-minded production of high-functioning sociopaths or a perpetual rash on the ageing skin of American meritocracy – really couldn’t care less about what happens there.

The true significance of the congressional hearing lies beyond the ships-passing-in-the-night myopias of either the three presidents or their inquisitor. It lies in the perpetual scrimmage among America’s social groups for status and power, of which the woke revolution is the latest iteration.

by Lee Siegel, New Statesman |  Read more:

Image: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
[ed. No kidding. How did none of them just simply say "It's complicated but using the term genocide is inflamatory and not at all helpful. Of course we're against that in any form". But no. How much do these people get paid, anyway?]

Ohno Bakufu, Crucian Carp, Surinaka River

via:

via:

Architecture as Entertainment

Click on picture (X)

Images: X/TikTok

[ed. I can't even process how awful it must be to have something like this plunked down in the middle of your city. Even Las Vegas. A Giant eyeball? Wow. See also: Sphere Eats the Soul (Baffler), and the new Mukaab in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.]

It’s All Bullshit

Performing productivity at Google

Free food, nap rooms, wellness walks, unlimited vacation days: such are the workaday perks of a job in tech. These perks, along with the six- and sometimes seven-figure salaries that accompany them, are, we’ve long been told, well-deserved. Not only are tech workers portrayed as feverishly hardworking, they are the epitome of innovation and productivity.

However, it’s become apparent that they aren’t as productive as we’ve been told to think. Ex-Meta employee Madelyn Machado recently posted a TikTok video claiming that she was getting paid $190,000 a year to do nothing. Another Meta employee, also on TikTok, posted that “Meta was hiring people so that other companies couldn’t have us, and then they were just kind of like hoarding us like Pokémon cards.” Over at Google, a company known to have pioneered the modern tech workplace, one designer complained of spending 40 percent of their time on “the inefficien[cy] overhead of simply working at Google.” Some report spending all day on tasks as simple as changing the color of a website button. Working the bare minimum while waiting for stock to vest is so common that Googlers call it “resting and vesting.” ​(...)

For much of this century, optimism that technology would make the world a better place fueled the perception that Silicon Valley was the moral alternative to an extractive Wall Street—that it was possible to make money, not at the expense of society but in service of it. In other words, many who joined the industry did so precisely because they thought that their work would be useful. Yet what we’re now seeing is a lot of bullshit. If capitalism is supposed to be efficient and, guided by the invisible hand of the market, eliminate inefficiencies, how is it that the tech industry, the purported cradle of innovation, has become a redoubt of waste and unproductivity?

In tech, bullshit jobs—which the late David Graeber defines as “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence” even though they are obliged to pretend otherwise—come mostly from bullshit projects. At Google, such projects are aplenty. According to Killed By Google, an archival project that documents discontinued Google services, products, devices, and apps, the company has discontinued nearly three hundred projects since its founding. These range from software systems to help businesses distribute and manage job applications (Hired by Google) to social media platforms that tried to mimic Facebook’s success (Google+) to manifestly uncool wearable technology (Google Glass). But projects at that scale are far and few between. Many were small and hackathon-sized in ambition. All failed to make a splash on the balance sheet. These “dead” projects are also just the tip of the iceberg. The website only documents projects that have been publicly launched; untold more have been nixed before ever being announced.

Google has always had a founders-first mentality; it’s ingrained into the company’s DNA. According to a former employee, Google tries “to reproduce the circumstances that led to their initial success” by recreating the environment in which it was founded: On top of having the flexibility to decide when to work, how to work, and, in some cases, what to work on, Google allows employees to spend 20 percent of their paid working time on side projects. Senior employees can also pitch project ideas to upper-management and get funding to work on them, while junior employees are encouraged to “take ownership” over their assigned projects and to act as if they were the CTO of it. Google even has a literal startup incubator—called Area 120—for employees to pitch projects and start new companies.

To tech optimists, projects that don’t immediately contribute to a company’s bottom line are seen as sustaining the intrepid spirit of innovation—necessary to achieve breakthrough technologies that could generate profit at some point in the future. As one employee puts it, Google is into “generating luck,” since they are willing to try “a whole bunch of stuff in the hopes that a few efforts will pay off” for the rest of their failed projects. Many will fail but those that succeed are supposed to rake in so much cash that they pay for the failures. But for this model of innovation to work as intended, employees have to believe in it; to the faithless, it has become little more than a means of personal advancement.

The compulsion to launch new projects in order to scale the corporate ladder has become so ubiquitous that employees call it the LPA cycle: launch, promo, abandon. “The [promo] incentive throughout,” as explained by a former employee, “is to create a product, launch it, apply for promotion, and move on to bigger and better things as soon as possible.” For years at Google, promotions weren’t given at the discretion of an employee’s manager; instead, employees initiated a promotion by compiling a “promo packet”—a collection of essays that explain why their contributions merit a promotion, corroborating evidence, and recommendations from teammates. This packet was then evaluated by upper-level engineers and management, who then determined an employee’s “impact.” But because the vast majority of projects do not, in any direct way, contribute to revenue, impact can be difficult to assess. So the number of product launches became a proxy measure of value. As one Google employee posted on Hacker News: “You cannot get promoted beyond a certain level in this place unless you ‘launch’ something big. So what do you get when you add all of these perverse incentives? Nine thousand, eight hundred and eighty-three chat apps.”

Writing promo packets became an artform at Google, one untethered to productivity. Instead of solving legitimate problems, many engineers found themselves gravitating toward tasks that could build their case for a promotion. This frequently led teams to build new products that compete internally, creating confusion for all parties involved, while pressing engineering tasks get neglected for months at a time. Sometimes, projects were simply redundant. One employee told me that “there are some people who launch a project then switch to another org to launch the same project.” The performance of usefulness thus replaced the act of actually being useful.

Even failed launches could land someone a promotion. One employee told me the story of his team’s tech lead, who was “super-gifted [and] one of the smartest engineers” he has worked with, but “going from project to project without a final launch is routine to the way he did things.” Even after eight years at Google where he worked his way up to the title of staff engineer—a highly respected role—none of his code has ever made it to Google’s production servers. Instead, he has swung from one failed or canceled project to the next, collecting promotions along the way. As the employee put it to me: “It’s literally failing upwards with no end in sight.”

Bullshit projects are abundant, in large part, because of the LPA cycle, and its proliferation is only aggravated by Google’s army of increasingly despised middle managers. Employee dissatisfaction with middle management is hardly a new phenomenon. Writing in the 1990s, labor economist David Gordon argued that U.S. businesses are addicted to expanding the ranks of middle management, resulting in corporations that are “Fat and Mean,” which is also the title of his last book. According to Gordon, the waning competitiveness of American industries could be attributed to the bloating of middle managers who are at once expensive (fat) and prone to suppress wages (mean).

Google managers may not be mean, but they have—by Gordon’s definition—become fat. In the early days of the company, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin thought that middle managers were a layer of bureaucracy that obstructed engineers from doing good work, so they kept the number of managers to a minimum—and even experimented with eliminating them altogether. In 2009, they funded a multiyear research initiative called Project Oxygen to test whether managers mattered (the results indicated that, yes, apparently, they did). But while the project gave Google the data to justify the role of management, the ensuing lack of scrutiny over the role has resulted in bloat. Today, about 15 percent of Google’s workforce is made up of middle managers, roughly one manager for every five to six employees, far surpassing the average manager to employee ratio in the service sector of one to fifteen. Where it was possible for a hundred engineers to report to a single manager in the aughts, most engineers are now placed on teams of no more than a dozen, frequently less. (...)

Another major stumbling block to actual innovation is that projects that may not actually be bullshit get nixed all the time, transforming all that work into bullshit. The primary reason projects get cut is because of Google’s pathological addiction to reorganization, or reorgs—when organizational boundaries get shuffled often because of a power struggle among managers. Sometimes reorgs are productive and can result in the elimination of redundant work. However, reorgs aren’t always economically motivated. If a manager can use a reorg to expand the size of their team, it is almost certainly the right career choice even if it doesn’t make the company more efficient. For employees, this can inhibit their ability to perform their jobs, participate in launching projects, and, as a result, build their case for promotions. According to a why-I-quit-Google blog post by former employee Michael Lynch, this was a central concern:

Six weeks before the performance period ended, my project was canceled. Again. Actually, my whole team was canceled. This was a common enough occurrence at Google that there was a euphemism for it: a defrag . . . My teammates and I all had to start over in different areas of the company.

In some cases, workers anticipating a re-org may stop working altogether since they expect their project to get canned. Lynch sums it up: “Google kept telling me that it couldn’t judge my work until it saw me complete a project. Meanwhile, I couldn’t complete any projects because Google kept interrupting them midway through and assigning me new ones.” Between the drive for headcount and the never-ending square dance of reorgs, it’s clear that middle management is just as responsible for waste as their promo-hungry employees. Bullshit, it would appear, permeates every level of the organization.

Innovation at Google is clearly in crisis. After establishing search advertising as a veritable cash cow, Google has spent hundreds of millions trying to reproduce that initial success—with little to show for it. In its early years, the company quickly developed platforms like Gmail, Google Maps, among others that locked users into the company’s ecosystem, driving traffic and ad spending. Today, the platform economy has calcified. The platforms that most people might want already exist; and major ones like Facebook and X, the platform previously known as Twitter, are even past their peak.

“Google got lucky 15 years ago and managed to turn on an absolutely massive firehose of money in ads,” wrote a Google employee on HackerNews. This model of innovation is also the reason Google employs more people than it needs, according to the employee, who added that because the company may never “strike it lucky [again] . . . they have to settle for attempting to starve potential competition of talent.” For Google, however, this stagnation hasn’t produced an urgent existential crisis: advertising revenue has grown to $224 billion from $43 billion in 2012. Today, Google has over 90 percent of the search market in the United States. With virtually no credible competition to threaten the firm’s position, it can sit back and collect its fat paycheck.

by JS Tan, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: Servizi Multimediali

Two Big Bangs

Two cosmological mysteries continue to fascinate scientists and science enthusiasts alike. The first is understanding in detail how the Universe came into existence. The second is the nature of dark matter, a substance which is thought to be far more prevalent than all the stars and galaxies in the Universe. A recent paper explores a possible intricate connection between these two phenomena and proposes that the beginning of the Universe included not one, but two, Big Bangs.

To understand the implications of this interesting new idea, we must first consider the prevailing understanding of both the Big Bang and dark matter.

In the Beginning

According to the accepted theory of the beginning of the Universe, a tiny fraction of a second after the Universe began, there was a period called “inflation.” During inflation, the Universe expanded very quickly—faster than the speed of light. Inflation was driven by the existence of a form of energy called “vacuum energy.” Inflation persisted only for a very short time, lasting far less than a second, during which our visible Universe expanded from a size smaller than an atom to about the size of a football stadium.

As the inflation period ended, the energy driving the expansion changed form and created the matter that evolved into the Universe we see today. The moment that the Universe transitioned from being governed by inflation to being filled with a hot and dense plasma is the beginning of what scientists call the Big Bang.

The other interesting phenomenon is dark matter, a proposed substance that, if it exists, explains some observed astronomical anomalies. Galaxies, like people, are made of ordinary matter, and we can use the laws of physics to predict how they should move. However, when astronomers study the heavens, they see some surprises. One example is that galaxies rotate faster than expected. A second example is that certain galaxy clusters shouldn’t exist, as individual galaxies are moving so fast that they should escape the gravitational attraction of their neighbors.

While there are several possible explanations for these and other astronomical mysteries, most scientists believe that in addition to the visible matter of stars and galaxies, there exists another form of matter, called dark matter. If dark matter exists, it is five times more prevalent than ordinary matter, and this additional mass exerts additional gravity, which means that galaxies can rotate faster and move more quickly than expected. The only way researchers have inferred the existence of dark matter is by how it affects nearby ordinary matter through gravitational attraction. There is no evidence that dark matter interacts in any other way.

Two Big Bangs

In the prevailing theory of the origins of the Universe, both familiar matter and dark matter were created at the same time, less than a second after the Universe began. Effectively, it is thought that a series of steps converted the energy that governed inflation into matter and dark matter.

However, the new paper raises a different possibility. Given that ordinary matter and dark matter only interact via gravity, perhaps they didn’t appear at the same time in the early Universe. This paper suggests that while the energy of inflation eventually transitioned into ordinary matter, dark matter might have had a different origin. In the new theory, there was a second form of energy, similar to the vacuum energy that caused inflation, but this new energy was dark vacuum energy, which became the origin of dark matter.

If it is true that ordinary vacuum energy and dark vacuum energy are different, it is not necessary that they convert into particles at the same time. Indeed, the new theory suggests that instead of being created a split second after the Universe began, vacuum dark energy could have created dark matter particles as long as a month later. This is still a short time compared to the lifetime of the Universe, but a long time compared to the timescales involved in particle physics.

by Don Lincoln, JSTOR |  Read more:

Image: A representation of the evolution of the universe over 13.77 billion years, via Wikimedia Commons

[ed. Hmm. How does the universe expand at a speed faster than light? I thought that was a physical constant.]

Last Minute Shopping

Lego Cities: Gaza Edition

via:

[ed. Reddit satire.]

Gretchen Bender, You & Me Accessible, 1984

via: Speaking in Tongues (N+1)

Nitrogen Cycling by Microbes in Native Hawaiian Culture

Peeing in the pool

via: Aeon

[ed. He’eia fishpond. A success story (for now), but how will climate change affect coastal communities and fragile ecological systems like this in the future. Nice documentary on my home though, far removed from the usual tourist attractions.]

Son Of Bride Of Bay Area House Party

It has been three weeks since Sam Altman was fired, but the conversation won’t move on. “What did Ilya see?” asks your Uber driver, on the way to the airport. “What wasn’t he consistently candid about?” ask people on the street, as you walk your dog. “What was Adam D’Angelo’s angle?” asks the cop, as he writes you a ticket. “Was the Microsoft move just a bluff?” asks the robber at gunpoint, as he ransacks your apartment.

You need to get away from it all, just for one moment. So against your better judgment, you find yourself heading to another Bay Area House Party.

Of course it doesn’t work. Everyone is talking about Sam Altman. One person is wearing a shirt that says SAM ALTMAN DIED FOR YOUR SINS. Others are dressed in red polo shirts over green polo shirts, a viral new fashion trend called Altmancore.

“I heard Q-star broke AES-192 encryption, Ilya used it to read Sam’s credit card transactions, and he found Sam spent all the Microsoft money on Aella’s OnlyFans,” says a woman, in a hushed whisper.

“That’s just a myth. I heard that Ilya checked inside one of the mainframes and found a Turkish dwarf who was answering all the questions. He confronted Sam, and Sam admitted ‘GPT’ was just a trick to scam Satya Nadella out of $8 billion in cloud compute so he could use it to mine Bitcoin,” says a man.

“That’s an urban legend,” says another man. “I heard the Winklevoss twins were behind everything. Ever since that one movie, I never trusted them.”

You need to get away. You head into the kitchen and take a potato chip from the bowl. It’s completely tasteless. You almost spit it out in surprise.

“What is this?” you ask Hans and Jonathan, the caterers. “Is this another one of your weird food startup schemes?”

“Well we were thinking . . . “ says Hans.

“People say that modern food is addictive,” interrupts Jonathan. “But it really isn’t. It’s shocking how little work people put into optimizing the addictiveness of food. Like, the one thing you learn in every Intro Psychology class . . . “

“ . . . is that intermittent reward is the most addictive reinforcement schedule,” interrupts Hans. “It’s what drives gacha games and slot machines. So we invented . . . . “

“ . . . the intermittent reinforcement potato chip!” concludes Jonathan. “Four out of every five are just plain potato slices. But the fifth has more salt and oil than any of the other leading brands.”

You take another potato chip. Tasteless again. Another. Still tasteless. A fourth. Your mouth explodes with a sudden shock of flavor, even stronger for its unexpectedness.

“So, you’re, like, trying to make even worse, more addictive food than everyone else? Isn’t that a little, you know, unethical?”

“On contraire!” says Jonathan. “A bag of these potato chips only has a fifth as much salt and oil as the normal brand. But they’re more addictive! You’ll replace those ones with ours, and cut your sodium and fat intake 80%!”

You do find yourself oddly driven to keep munching on the potato chips. Before you become a hopeless addict, you bid Hans and Jonathan good-bye. On your way out of the kitchen, you almost knock over a guy in a t-shirt that says “THE BURROWING COMPANY”.

“I am desperate for non-Sam-Altman-related conversation,” you say. “Tell me about your startup.”

His eyes light up. “So. The Boring Company. Exciting idea! Dig tunnels, end traffic. But Elon’s grown old. Gotten distracted. It’s been five years and he’s dug a grand total of two miles. The machines just don’t drill fast enough. It’s sad to see a great founder lose his touch like that. Not that I had a better idea. Until last month! That was when I read about paleoburrows. These are long tunnels they find in Brazil. Farmers would be plowing their field and fall into one. Nobody knew where they came from. Until they brought in a paleontologist. He figured it out right away. They’re the burrows of giant ground sloths. People describe them as ‘a hamster the size of an elephant’. Some of the tunnels go half a mile. Let’s say it took a year for the sloth to dig that. So give three sloths two years, and you’ve beaten Musk!

“Aren’t giant ground sloths extinct?” you ask.

“Yeah,” said the man. “That’s our moat! We called up George Church, the guy who’s using cloning to try to bring back the woolly mammoth. Asked him, what’s the ROI on mammoths? Not great, right? We’ll buy as many ground sloths as you can produce. He lent us a grad student. We’re making progress. All we need is funding. It’s the same old mon -”

“Are you talking about Sam Altman?” asked a man who you didn’t even realize was listening to the conversation. “I’ve been trying to figure the whole situation out. I understand that Toner was part of the deep state conspiracy and McCauley was part of the effective altruist conspiracy. And D’Angelo, he used to work for Zuck, so he must have been part of the Meta conspiracy - Meta as in Facebook, not meta-conspiracy in the sense of a conspiracy controlling all the others. There was a meta-conspiracy controlling all the others, but that was . . . “

You desperately search for another conversation, and stumble right into your old friend Ramchandra. “Please,” you say. “Talk to me about some demented financial scheme or something. Anything!”

“Really?” says Ramchandra. “That’s how you greet a friend? Although now that you mention it, Bob and I have been working on something.”

“Anything,” you repeat.

“Have you read Going Infinite? The book on Sam Bankman-Fried? Not that I generally approve of Sam Bankman-Fried. It’s just that - the book says Sam tried to bribe Trump not to run in 2024. Apparently Trump was willing to do it for $5 billion. And again, not to say Sam Bankman-Fried was right or anything, but obviously if you have $5 billion and you’re a Democrat, then that’s the best use of your money, right? And not to say that I wish he was never caught and had gone on to become a multi-deca-billionaire, but, well, you know . . . “ he trailed off. “Anyway, I was reading about all these delicate negotiations between Sam’s people and the Trump team, and it was funny - here’s this guy who’s famous for creating markets, and he’s stuck with boring old Mk 1.0 backchannel negotiations. So I thought - what if there was an Amazon or an eBay for paying politicians not to run? We wouldn’t have to get Trump our first year. We could start with your local city council member - Aaron Peskin, someone like that. Lots of people would pay Aaron Peskin money not to run. Then we build up from there.”

“Is that even - “

“Of course, there’s a coordination problem. Peskin doesn’t want to advertise that he’ll drop out for $500,000, because then his constituents will know he’s mercenary, and people can just wait for him to lose instead of paying. What you need is for buyers to publicly post their bid, and then Peskin can accept in one click. I’m imagining the marketplace as a sort of Kickstarter, where everyone who hates a certain politician can add more money to the pot, and politicians can go on, see how much is in their pot, and accept once it gets big enough.”

“Doesn’t this make a mockery of democracy?”

“This fortifies democracy. People like Donald Trump who are just in it for themselves will drop out, leaving only the true patriots.”

“But doesn’t it incentivize politicians to be as annoying and confrontational as possible, so that the maximum number of people will be willing to donate to take them out?”

“The way I see it, our system already incentivizes politicians to be as annoying and confrontational as possible, just for press coverage and primary victories. At least in my system, you eventually get rid of them.”

“And isn’t it illegal to bribe politicians?”

“It’s a gray area. It’s illegal to bribe them to do a specific thing once they’re in office. But I don’t think it’s illegal to bribe them not to run. If you think about it, imagine Mitt Romney’s company was unhappy that they’d lose him to a presidential run, so they offered him a higher salary, and he decided to stay. That’s got to be legal, right? And all we’re doing is the equivalent of that. Of course, I don’t know if the SEC will see it that way. That’s why we’re going to use crypto. We’ll come up with some altcoin . . . “

“Did you say Sam Altman?” asks a woman who has apparently been lurking at the edge of your conversation. “Because I think I’ve got it all figured out. 

by Scott Alexander, ACX/Slate Star Codex |  Read more:

Image: Heinrich Theodore Frank; Esteban De Armas/Alamy
[ed. Some light West Coast/SF humor for the morning. However, giant sloth paleoburrows really are a thing! Click the link or go here. See also: OpenAI: Leaks Confirm the Story (DWAV).]

50 Greatest Moments in Electric Guitar History

The 50 greatest moments in electric guitar history (Guitar World)

Images: Future; Earnie Ball

[ed. Amazingly, they left out cheap guitar tuners - like the vibration-based, clip-on Snark pictured below. In my mind, one of the most awesome innovations of the last few decades. Before then you either had mostly awful acoustic tuners (or, awfully expensive tuners), or just a tuning fork.]   

 
Rocky and Bullwinkle
via:

Phoebe Bridgers x Arlo Parks

Sylvan Serenity Residence, Phu Quoc Island, Vietnam

Sylvan Serenity Residence, Phu Quoc Island, Vietnam
Mahna Momenzade

"This modern farmhouse is nestled amidst the lush landscapes of Vietnam and offers a blend of minimalism and enchanting charm of nature. Surrounded by verdant hills, the residence is a serene sanctuary that welcomes residents to escape the frenetic pace of city life. The architectural marvel strikes a perfect equilibrium between sleek modernity and rustic allure, creating an ambiance that seamlessly melds with the surrounding picturesque scenery. The exterior facade is a testament to this fusion, marrying light wood and concrete in a contemporary dance that gracefully integrates the dwelling with its environment.

Once inside, the farmhouse reveals a warm and inviting atmosphere dominated by earth tones, providing a cozy retreat from the outside world. The living spaces are adorned with meticulously chosen handcrafted furnishings that exude both simplicity and sophistication. The modern kitchen, a still-life masterpiece, boasts state-of-the-art appliances, elevating the culinary experience. Natural light floods the spacious interior, establishing a seamless connection between the inside and the mysterious jungle just beyond the doorstep."

via: Amazing Architecture, more here

Images: Liliana Alvarez

Stop Press! Mencken’s Obituary for William Jennings Bryan

Shortly after the famous Scopes Trial, the first trial ever broadcast live on national radio, William Jennings Bryan died. H.L. Menken was less than kind to him in this anti-thesis of a eulogy. This is easily the most vicious, scathing obituary I have ever read.

William Jennings Bryan

It was plain to everyone, when Bryan came to Dayton, that his great days were behind him -- that he was now definitely an old man, and headed at last for silence. There was a vague, unpleasant manginess about his appearance; he somehow seemed dirty, though a close glance showed him carefully shaved, and clad in immaculate linen. All the hair was gone from the dome of his head, and it had begun to fall out, too, behind his ears, like that of the late Samuel Gompers. The old resonance had departed from his voice: what was once a bugle blast had become reedy and quavering. Who knows that, like Demosthenes, he had a lisp? In his prime, under the magic of his eloquence, no one noticed it. But when he spoke at Dayton it was always audible.

When I first encountered him, on the sidewalk in front of the Hicks brothers law office, the trial was yet to begin, and so he was still expansive and amiable. I had printed in the Nation, a week or so before, an article arguing that the anti-evolution law, whatever its unwisdom, was at least constitutional -- that policing school teachers was certainly not putting down free speech. The old boy professed to be delighted with the argument, and gave the gaping bystanders to understand that I was a talented publicist. In turn I admired the curious shirt he wore -- sleeveless and with the neck cut very low. We parted in the manner of two Spanish ambassadors.

But that was the last touch of affability that I was destined to see in Bryan. The next day the battle joined and his face became hard. By the end of the first week he was simply a walking malignancy. Hour by hour he grew more bitter. What the Christian Scientists call malicious animal magnetism seemed to radiate from him like heat from a stove. From my place in the court-room, standing upon a table, I looked directly down upon him, sweating horribly and pumping his palm-leaf fan. His eyes fascinated me: I watched them all day long. They were blazing points of hatred. They glittered like occult and sinister gems. Now and then they wandered to me, and I got my share. It was like coming under fire.

II

What was behind that consuming hatred? At first I thought that it was mere evangelical passion. Evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love. But even evangelical Christians occasionally loose their belts and belch amicably; I have known some who, off duty, were very benignant. In that very courtroom, indeed, were some of them -- for example, old Ben McKenzie, Nestor of the Dayton bar, who sat beside Bryan. Ben was full of good humor. He made jokes with Darrow. But Bryan only glared.

One day it dawned on me that Bryan, after all, was an evangelical Christian only by sort of afterthought -- that his career in this world, and the glories thereof, had actually come to an end before he ever began whooping for Genesis. So I came to this conclusion: that what really moved him was a lust for revenge. The men of the cities had destroyed him and made a mock of him; now he would lead the yokels against them. Various facts clicked into the theory, and I hold it still. The hatred in the old man's burning eyes was not for the enemies of God; it was for the enemies of Bryan.

Thus he fought his last fight, eager only for blood. It quickly became frenzied and preposterous, and after that pathetic. All sense departed from him. He bit right and left, like a dog with rabies. He descended to demagogy so dreadful that his very associates blushed. His one yearning was to keep his yokels heated up -- to lead his forlorn mob against the foe. That foe, alas, refused to be alarmed. It insisted upon seeing the battle as a comedy. Even Darrow, who knew better, occasionally yielded to the prevailing spirit. Finally, he lured poor Bryan into a folly almost incredible.

I allude to his astounding argument against the notion that man is a mammal. I am glad I heard it, for otherwise I'd never believe it. There stood the man who had been thrice a candidate for the Presidency of the Republic -- and once, I believe, elected -- there he stood in the glare of the world, uttering stuff that a boy of eight would laugh at! The artful Darrow led him on: he repeated it, ranted for it, bellowed it in his cracked voice. A tragedy, indeed! He came into life a hero, a Galahad, in bright and shining armor. Now he was passing out a pathetic fool.

III

Worse, I believe that he somehow sensed the fact -- that he realized his personal failure, whatever the success of the grotesque cause he spoke for. I had left Dayton before Darrow's cross-examination brought him to his final absurdity, but I heard his long speech against the admission of expert testimony, and I saw how it fell flat and how Bryan himself was conscious of the fact. When he sat down he was done for, and he knew it. The old magic had failed to work; there was applause but there was no exultant shouts. When, half an hour later, Dudley Field Malone delivered his terrific philippic, the very yokels gave him five times the clapper-clawing that they had given to Bryan.

This combat was the old leader's last, and it symbolized in more than one way his passing. Two women sat through it, the one old and crippled, the other young and in the full flush of beauty. The first was Mrs. Bryan; the second was Mrs. Malone. When Malone finished his speech the crowd stormed his wife with felicitations, and she glowed as only a woman can who has seen her man fight a hard fight and win gloriously. But no one congratulated Mrs. Bryan. She sat hunched in her chair near the judge, apparently very uneasy. I thought then that she was ill -- she has been making the round of sanitariums for years, and was lately in the hands of a faith-healer -- but now I think that some appalling prescience was upon her, and that she saw in Bryan's eyes a hint of the collapse that was so near.

He sank into his seat a wreck, and was presently forgotten in the blast of Malone's titanic rhetoric. His speech had been maundering feeble and often downright idiotic. Presumably, he was speaking to a point of law, but it was quickly apparent that he knew no more law than the bailiff at the door. So he launched into mere violet garrulity. He dragged in snatches of ancient chautauqua addresses; he wandered up hill and down dale. Finally, Darrow lured him into that fabulous imbecility about man as a mammal. He sat down one of the most tragic asses in American history.

IV

It is the national custom to sentimentalize the dead, as it is to sentimentalize men about to be hanged. Perhaps I fall into that weakness here. The Bryan I shall remember is the Bryan of his last weeks on earth -- broken, furious, and infinitely pathetic. It was impossible to meet his hatred with hatred to match it. He was winning a battle that would make him forever infamous wherever enlightened men remembered it and him. Even his old enemy, Darrow, was gentle with him at the end. That cross-examination might have been ten times as devastating. It was plain to everyone that the old Berseker Bryan was gone -- that all that remained of him was a pair of glaring and horrible eyes.

But what of his life? Did he accomplish any useful thing? Was he, in his day, of any dignity as a man, and of any value to his fellow-men? I doubt it. Bryan, at his best, was simply a magnificent job-seeker. The issues that he bawled about usually meant nothing to him. He was ready to abandon them whenever he could make votes by doing so, and to take up new ones at a moment's notice. For years he evaded Prohibition as dangerous; then he embraced it as profitable. At the Democratic National Convention last year he was on both sides, and distrusted by both. In his last great battle there was only a baleful and ridiculous malignancy. If he was pathetic, he was also disgusting.

Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.

The job before democracy is to get rid of such canaille. If it fails, they will devour it.

End of H.L. Mencken's eulogy of William Jennings Bryan.

via: National Center for Science Education (here); and, Peenie Wallie (here)

Images: NR

[ed. Sounds like a future obituary I can imagine. They say history doesn't repeat itself exactly but does echo. When the dam breaks, sometimes it happens suddenly. WJB, McCarthy (Joe), many others. We'll see.]

Rainbows

via:

Elvis - '68 Comeback Special

[ed. From his famous '68 Comeback Special. Did anyone wear leather better than Elvis (in his prime)? Charisma to burn! Many more, like this one.]

What Time Is It?

The Terrible Twenties? The Assholocene? What to Call Our Chaotic Era

In the winter of 2020, on one of my aimless, frigid quarantine walks around my silent neighborhood, I remember being struck by a thought: did a medieval European peasant know that he was living through what is now widely known as the Dark Ages? Was there some moment when he leaned against his hoe in the fields, gazed up at the uncaring sky, and dimly perceived that he was unlucky enough to have been born into a bad century, perhaps even a bad millennium, too late for classical antiquity and too early for the Renaissance? I was sympathetic toward that notional peasant, because I was feeling the same way. The tide of history was overwhelming; I was minuscule, my life brought to a terrifying standstill by an airborne virus. I thought that if the humans who survived into the year 2500 looked back on my era, they would see it as cursed or benighted, the beginning of a downward slide.

Of course, that was before rioters broke into the Capitol on January 6th of 2021 to try to overturn the election of President Biden; before Russia invaded Ukraine; before artificial intelligence became both a public tool and an imminent societal threat; before a summer of climate-change-induced floods and fires ravaged cities around the world; and before, in October of this year, Hamas attacked Israel, prompting a catastrophic war in Gaza and destabilizing the global geopolitical order. Some have argued that the aggregate events of recent years call for a new label that we can apply to our chaotic historical moment, a term that we can use when we want to evoke the panicky incoherence of our lives of late. Such coinages usually happen in retrospect, but why not start now? Think of it as a universal excuse: It’s hard living through the _______, you know?

During the past weeks, I’ve been casting about to see what ideas are already out there. Suggestions I’ve found include the Terrible Twenties, the Long 2016, the Age of Emergency, Cold War II, the Omnishambles, the Great Burning, and the Assholocene. The novelist William Gibson coined “the Jackpot” in his 2014 novel “The Peripheral” for a near-future period of intersecting apocalyptic crises, when everything seems to be happening at once. In 2016, the scholar Donna Haraway deemed our time the Chthulucene, inspired by a word derived from ancient Greek, “chthonic”—of or relating to the muddy, messy, impenetrable underworld. The artist and author James Bridle titled their 2016 book on technology and our collapsing sense of the future “New Dark Age,” taking a phrase from H. P. Lovecraft.

For Bridle, our era is defined foremost by the utopian promise of the Internet and the subsequent disappointment. Online life has befuddled more than enlightened us. The New Dark Age is “an age in which the value we have placed upon knowledge is destroyed by the abundance of that profitable commodity,” Bridle writes. Part of what feels so particularly jarring about living right now is our ability to follow news events everywhere in the world at once as they’re broadcast in real time on social media. The crush of stuff happening only underscores our lack of agency in relation to it. “In history, humans as animals have lived in uncertainty and helplessness, but we haven’t had it demonstrated to us on a minute-by-minute basis. It’s hard psychologically to deal with it,” Bridle told me. In the past few years, the term “new dark age” has been used to encompass the decay of democracy and the increasingly blatant impact of climate change. The name represents “a smack in the face to the idea of progress. That there can be a dip in the line—that alone terrifies people,” Bridle said. (...)

The urge to name reflects the urge to understand. In February, Liz Lenkinski, a social strategist in Los Angeles, began referring to our era as the Age of Unhingement in conversations with friends. The phrase stuck, and she started an Unhingement-themed newsletter. “It makes me feel saner to talk about it,” Lenkinski told me. She traces the dawn of the Age of Unhingement to the election of Donald Trump, but sees its true expression in post-pandemic times, as we’ve been confronted with the realization that there are more horrors to come, and there is little sense of normalcy to return to. This knowledge can cause a kind of spiritual infirmity. “The unhingement comes from not being able to know what’s next,” Lenkinski said. “Since 2020, it feels like we have all just collectively been through one nightmare after another.” The emergencies vary drastically in scale, impacting every facet of our lives: news about climate change commingles with that of warfare, inflation, and supply-chain delays, not to mention everyday incidents like neighbors stealing your Amazon packages. “If you’re staying attached to the status quo right now, you will be unhinged, because there is nothing there,” Lenkinski said. (...)

A sense of historical chaos might just be a perennial phenomenon, a cultural pendulum that swings forth every so often without much grounding in reality. (“Perhaps we really do live in a time which begets nothing but the mediocre,” Michel de Montaigne complained of France, in the midst of the Renaissance.) Faced with a name like the Terrible Twenties, many people might point out that humans today are in some ways far better off than they’ve ever been: life expectancies are up, on the whole, compared with a century ago (though they dipped during the pandemic); extreme poverty has sharply declined. It seems possible, though, that both interpretations are true simultaneously: we are living through a time of unprecedented health and prosperity and through a time of historic anxiety and calamity.

by Kyle Chayka, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Nicholas Konrad/The New Yorker
[ed. Winter of Our Discontent? Age of Delusion? The Great Fracturing? Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment?]