Flying Manta

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[ed. Drone sightings in New Jersey continue...]

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What I Saw at the Streaming Revolution

Back in January 2020, Disney’s and Apple’s subscription platforms were just a few weeks old, Peacock and the Streamer Formerly Known as HBO Max did not yet exist, and there was a ton of mystery surrounding a soon-to-debut streamer that sounded like a joke — and yet somehow wasn’t. Five years on, while Quibi is no more, those four other services are still very much around, as is one other thing: Buffering, which published its very first edition five years ago this month. (...)

Since Buffering is only turning five and not 50, my bosses at Vulture politely passed on my pitch for a primetime special and a series of documentary specials about the early years of this newsletter. That said, they are allowing me to mark this milestone with a special edition focused on five of the biggest developments that have shaped streaming since 2020, what lessons can be taken from them, and some thoughts on what to expect in the years to come.

1. Netflix: Dominant then, dominant now

One of the lead stories in our debut edition revolved around Netflix racking up more Oscar nominations than any other studio or distributor for the first time. This was a huge deal back then, since it signaled the streamer would be able to reshape the film business in much the same way it had already transformed television. Five years later, what’s most remarkable to me is how — despite a few bumpy moments and the emergence of several strong competitors — Netflix still sets the pace in Hollywood. It’s the benchmark against which every other streamer is judged, and its successes (and failures) have resonated through so much of what we’ve covered here in Buffering.

For instance, when now co-CEO Ted Sarandos decided to push out his longtime deputy Cindy Holland in 2020, it was first and foremost a story about Netflix moving away from the premium, critic-friendly fare that marked its early years and toward its current status as the 21st-century equivalent of CBS in its Tiffany era: a mass broadcaster able to churn out everything from Mister Ed and The Beverly Hillbillies to The Twilight Zone and Harvest of Shame. But in retrospect, Holland’s ouster — and Netflix’s pivot — also look like the beginning of the end of streaming’s mini Golden Age, when the industry spent billions not just on content, but on getting the most audacious, star-studded, and not-even-really-TV-anymore programming that money could buy. Netflix pioneered the strategy of luring customers by trying to out-HBO HBO; its pivot to the center pushed most of the rest of the industry to follow.

We saw this pattern play out multiple times over the last five years, even when Netflix technically wasn’t the first to do something. The streamer decided to begin selling commercials a couple months after Disney+ announced it would do so, but it was Netflix’s entry into the space that felt like a sea change for subscription streaming. Ditto the industrywide crackdown on password sharing, or the trend toward ending even successful series after just three or four seasons. And even though Amazon has been airing Thursday Night Football games for a few years now, and Peacock has done playoff games and the Olympics, Netflix’s recent Christmas Day doubleheader still felt like an event. Netflix doesn’t innovate like it once did, but almost anything it does still makes the biggest splash.

Last week’s earnings report from the streamer underscores this point. Netflix said it added another 40 million–plus subscribers in 2024 — 19 million in the last three months of the year alone — and now boasts just over 300 million paid global customers, giving it a reach of more than a half-billion potential viewers. And while its peers are still mostly swimming in red ink or barely eking out tiny profits, Netflix has turned into a veritable ATM: Instead of losing a few billion dollars every year, as was still happening five years ago, the company is forecasting profits in excess of $40 billion in 2025. Adding subscribers, double-digit profit margins: “This is what winning looks like,” analyst Jeffrey Wlodarczak of Pivotal Research Group wrote last week. This was true when Buffering first launched in 2020, of course, but that’s also the point: Despite the launch of several well-financed competitors, heavy spending from older tech rivals Amazon and Apple, and the usual laws of showbiz gravity, Netflix is still #winning. (And yes, that applies to Oscar nominations. It once again racked up the most noms of any individual studio.)

➼ Over the Next Five Years: Now that Netflix has gone from being seen as the cool future of TV to a generic word for TV, will brand affinity eventually start to suffer — not just among consumers but with the creatives Netflix relies on for programming? Or, as it has in the past, will Netflix continue to prove the doubters wrong?

2. Streaming became more like linear TV rather than the other way around

As the 2020s got underway, there was still a sense that digital, on-demand television was going to be a completely new medium, one very distinct from what we’d seen with traditional TV since the 1950s. Not only were there no channels or time slots, but the biggest streamers didn’t even bother with commercials, and compared to what we’d grown used to paying for cable, it was substantially cheaper. Well, the arc of the small-screen universe apparently isn’t that long, and in the case of streaming, it reverts to the mean.

The move of Disney+ to introduce an ad-supported tier (followed quickly by Netflix and Amazon Prime Video) was the most glaring example of this network-ification of the industry, but there were many others. For example, all of the upstart streamers launched over the last five or so years opted not to adopt Netflix’s binge release strategy for most of their new releases, thus preserving the linear tradition of doling out episodes of a show on a weekly basis. Instead of focusing almost entirely on expensive scripted programming, streamers started investing increasingly large portions of their budgets on live sports and events, less expensive reality shows, and true-crime docs. Rather than keeping prices low to attract (and keep) customers, platforms began implementing dramatic increases to their monthly subscription fees — while also cutting back on the number of new shows they green-lit and the size of their libraries of older TV shows and movies. Then, when those price hikes and content reductions started facing pushback from consumers, streamers took a page out of the old cable-TV playbook and began offering consumers discounted rates if they signed up for a bundle of services at the same time.

All of this was probably inevitable once legacy-media giants such as Comcast, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Paramount Global jumped into the streaming pond. These are the companies that shaped the linear-TV business for decades; of course they were going to bring their old habits with them. But that’s not entirely a bad thing, as evidenced by how quickly streamers run by tech companies adapted so many of these ideas. Apple might be the company that once urged us to Think Different, but its Hollywood wing knew that a series like Ted Lasso needed the sort of word-of-mouth buzz that can only be built via launching a show with weekly episodes. Advertising is annoying, especially when you’re already paying for a subscription, and yet cable thrived for decades with exactly that combination of commercials and monthly fees. At least with streaming, there’s still the option to pay more for an ad-free experience and the ease of canceling for a few months if a streamer’s programming slate isn’t meeting your needs.

I get that for many consumers, all of this seems like a case of dumb, greedy TV execs pulling a fast one in order to jack up profits for shareholders. And to be sure, there’s plenty of dumb and no shortage of greed in Hollywood. But the fact is streamers came into the market significantly underpriced relative to how much programming they offered and compared to what cable was (and is) charging. Netflix racked up billions in red ink getting you hooked on its version of streaming nirvana, and the legacy-media companies also went deep into debt trying to compete in the early 2020s — and most are still losing money, or just now starting to turn the tiniest of profits. Those heady days when you could pay under $20 for Netflix and Hulu and get just about every show and movie you’d ever want to see, plus binge watch the latest season of Breaking Bad or Mad Men a few months after its finale? They were never gonna last, and it’s not because David Zaslav is a Trump-friendly wannabe mogul who seems to delight in annoying as many fandoms as possible. Streaming needed to become more like regular TV because it needed to become profitable, and if there’s one thing network and cable TV were good at, it was making money.

➼ Over the Next Five Years: Will audiences revolt if prices get too high or the volume of commercials on streaming reaches the same level as cable? Or will the seemingly inevitable consolidation of streaming platforms and bundling of services result in a sort of equilibrium where consumers feel like they’re not getting totally robbed?

by Josef Adalian, Buffering/Vulture | Read more:
Image: Vulture; Photos: Everett Collection (Freevee, Ali Goldstein/Netflix), Apple TV+, Netflix
[ed. Revolt. See also: "The Infrastructure of the Recording Industry Is About to Fail” (HB).]

In Praise of Subspecies

Simon de Myle, Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat (1570)

via: In praise of subspecies (Aeon)

"Noah never reckoned with trinomials. Modern Creationists, grasping for footholds in the post-Darwinian world, maintain that Noah took 1,398 kinds of animal aboard his Ark, as the floodwaters gathered on the Mesopotamian plain. ‘Kind’, they argue, is a Biblical classification that corresponds to the modern ‘family’, and not, as you might imagine, to the modern concept of ‘species’. If Noah had accessed a modern taxonomic catalogue, he might have found himself with a cargo of up to 30,000 varieties of mammal, bird and reptile; if he had factored in the insects and arachnids, his Ark would soon have been foundering under the weight of about 1.1 million different species. (...)

Noah would no doubt, by this time, have been making frantic calculations about load distribution, ballast, stress and tipping balances, not to mention the logistics of food supply and waste disposal. What, he might have wondered, brushing an anole from his sleeve, is the point of all these subspecies?

He would not have been alone."

Snowbirds Scramble to Sell

Cesidia Cedrone has been soaking up the rays at her Florida condo every winter since 2011.

“Sunshine all the time. Don’t have to shovel snow. The beach, the sand ...” the Ontarian said from her second home in Hallandale Beach, halfway between Miami and Fort Lauderdale.

Last week, her retirement reverie came to an end as Cedrone and her husband signed the closing papers on their home sale.

“Things changed so drastically. The Canadian dollar is not at par with the U.S. dollar,” she said. “That was behind our major decision to sell.”

Other reasons played a role, too — higher insurance rates, taxes and condo fees. (...)

Insurance premiums have shot up in recent years because of more extreme weather, costing Cedrone more than US$16,000 a year — 10 times the rate when she first bought the property.

She also paid nearly US$4,000 in taxes versus US$1,500 a decade and a half ago.

Meanwhile, property upgrades required by stricter building codes meant residents had to cough up thousands more over the last few years, forcing the couple to remortgage their second home. (...)

Homeowners in that state now pay more than three times the national average to insure their properties, according to the Insurance Information Institute, making Florida the costliest home insurance state in the U.S.

Aside from the effect of climate change on premiums, there’s also the question of safety and a perpetual sense of precariousness in storm-prone regions.

“I ain’t going nowhere that’s got hurricanes,” said Laurie Lavine, an Arizona-based realtor whose clientele consists largely of Canadians.

A former Albertan, Lavine said most clients share his sentiments.

Nonetheless, he has observed a recent surge in listings from Canadians in his desert state recently. Again, expense is the bottom line.

“It’s costing them $20,000 a year just to have the property, between utilities and taxes and all the carrying costs of owning a property down here. They’re just not coming down as much as they want to because of the Canadian dollar,” he said.

Lavine said he’ll be handling eight listings — all Canadian-owned — in the next few weeks, twice his typical load.

by Christopher Reynolds, MSN |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: Glut of New Houses for Sale in the South Is Bigger Even than during the Housing Bust. The Glut in the West Gets Close (WS):]

In the South – the largest region, with a population of 133 million, see map below – has the most inventory of new houses ever, surpassing even the astronomical levels on the eve of the Housing Bust, just before it all fell apart.

Since June 2024, new houses for sale in the South have surpassed the high of August 2006. In June, there were 293,000 new houses for sale (compared to 291,000 in August 2006). Since then, the inventory of new houses for sale has further ballooned and in October reached 304,000, and has remained in that range through December (301,000). Since December 2019, inventory has exploded by 76%. This is a massive amount of inventory of new houses for sale.

An Evening With Joe Pass

[ed. I met Joe one summer when I was working with the city Parks and Rec dept. setting up a mobile soundstage for outdoor concerts. We talked for maybe half an hour, and he was as nice and funny and down to earth as anyone you'd ever want to meet (cigar included) - an 'everyman' genius. I still remember cracking up when he told us about the many "fans" who'd invariably show up at his concerts wanting to give him lessons ("hey Joe, you ever try this chord?" - fingers splayed in weird patterns along their forearms, hahaha... For sure, don't miss the interview starting here at around 13:35]

What's In a Name?

Alaska lawmakers signal opposition to Denali name change in resolution (ADN)

Image: Bill Roth

[ed. Some anyway. Other's not so much. Here's one real profile in courage:]

Alaska’s two Republican U.S. senators — Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan — have already indicated they support keeping the name Denali.

Alaska’s lone U.S. House member Rep. Nick Begich, who has closely aligned himself with Trump, released a statement Monday in which he said the opposition from some House Republicans to the resolution indicated Alaskans were divided on the name.

“Recent polling has shown that Alaskans are split on this issue, and by today’s vote in Juneau, even members of the Alaska State Legislature are split on the issue,” Begich said. “While I understand the passion of this issue, my focus has been and will remain fixed on creating jobs and opportunity for future generations of Alaskans who, no doubt, will continue this debate long into the future.”

[ed. The sheer dumbness of all this (given other real-world problems) is headache inducing. But, as with all trolls, the best response is to just ignore them. So this is probably good advice:] 

***

“I don’t know a single person that likes the idea, and we’re pretty vocal about it,” King said. “Denali respects the Indigenous people that have been here and around Denali for tens of thousands of years.”

The mountain was named after McKinley when a prospector walked out of the Alaska wilderness in 1896, and the first news he heard was that the Republican had been nominated for president. (...)

McKinley served as president from 1897 until he was assassinated in 1901. He was an imperial colonialist who oversaw the expansion of the American empire with the occupation of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines and Hawaii, pushed by business interests and Christian missionaries wanting to convert Indigenous peoples, Haycox said.

“Trump’s push to rescind the name Denali for the colonialist and white elitist McKinley is insulting to all Alaskans, especially to Alaska’s Native people, and should be soundly rejected,” Haycox said. (...)

Joe McAneney of Talkeetna worked as a summer raft-guide for two years before moving to Alaska full time in 2012. He’s now a pilot for an air taxi company, ferrying climbers and tourists to the mountain in a small airplane outfitted with skis to land at base camp, located on Kahiltna Glacier at 7,200 feet (2,194.6 meters) above sea level.

He knows once tourist season comes around, he will have to answer their questions of what he thinks about Trump changing the name. He knows what his answer will be.

“It’s always been Denali, and it always will be,” he said.

The executive order can instigate the name change, but compliance is another issue.

“The only people that are going to adhere to that are probably the people that would have been still calling it McKinley anyway,” McAneney said

Alaskans say Trump can change the name of Denali but can’t make people call it Mount McKinley (ADN)

Eva Cassidy

Tom Gauld, My Jetpack
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Gabrielle Garland (American, b. 1968) - Untitled 297, 2023

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How to Cover Stupidity (Including Our Own)

Journalists favor the serious and the certain. In an unserious, uncertain world, we must learn to embrace some difficult new topics. One particularly pressing issue: stupidity.

A number of European writers have tackled this subject in recent months. In Homo Cretinus, Olivier Postel-Vinay describes stupidity as a “mental polyp” that subtly encloses specific brain regions, impairing cognitive flexibility. This form of stupidity, he said in an interview, is not an occasional lapse or lack of knowledge but an “attack on intellectual integrity” that renders us incapable of exercising common sense.

 

“Our societies have never known such a high level of education, which obviously doesn’t prevent the development of stupidity,” he says. For Postel-Vinay, stupidity transcends ignorance because it operates even in highly informed individuals, who remain ensnared by rigid beliefs.

Such beliefs lead people to ignore contradictory information and select the evidence that supports their ideas. Postel-Vinay defines this confirmation bias as the polyp’s “tool of choice” because it perpetuates a self-reinforcing cycle of false beliefs that impedes intellectual development. Thus, he says, opinions become dogma in even the most intelligent individuals. Social media echo chambers only make the situation worse.

In his recent book Elogio dell’ignoranza e dell’errore (In Praise of Ignorance and Error), the Italian writer and former prosecutor Gianrico Carofiglio distinguishes between two types of ignorance: unconscious ignorance and conscious ignorance. The former, he said in an interview, is particularly dangerous to democracy because it combines a lack of knowledge with the arrogant belief that one already knows enough. [ed. Dunning–Kruger effect]

“Unconscious ignorance undermines the foundations of democratic debate, trust in science, and respect for knowledge,” Carofiglio said, describing it as an attitude that poisons public discourse and fuels misinformation. On the other hand, he argues that we should embrace conscious ignorance—an intellectual humility that helps us recognize our own limitations while remaining receptive to the knowledge of others. This form of ignorance, like the Socratic “I know that I know nothing,” is the foundation of true competence.

By recognizing that others may hold truths beyond our understanding, we reduce the tendency for categorical statements that exacerbate division. “The truth each of us holds is, for the most part, a legitimate opinion,” Carofiglio explains. “And opinion pushes us to engage in dialogue with others, which is precisely the opposite of polarization.” (...)

Postel-Vinay notes that, from Europe at least, American society seems to be in the grip of a similar moment. Isaac Asimov once said that “there is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been.” Asimov argued that this ignorance is “nourished by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is as good as your knowledge.”

by Sacha Biazzo, Columbia Journalism Review |  Read more:

Image: Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images
[ed. We've sure come a long way in my lifetime from Kennedy's "best and the brightest" to today's dumb and proudly obnoxious. Probably for a lot of reasons, some more relevant than others: 'smartphones; social media; a fractured media/news ecosystem; lack of reading and comprehension skills (and I would add, civics class instruction) and lately, just attention itself, which has been effectively weaponized for personal and political gain. Doesn't bode well for this country or for humanity's future (especially with AGI just around the corner, ready to outsource all our critical thinking skills). See also: Trump, Musk, and the Limits of Attention (CJR); and, Evangelicals Made a Bad Trade (Atlantic):]

***

"What is psychologically intriguing is how bracing and electrifying a figure Trump is to many evangelicals. It is as if his disinhibitions have become theirs. Parents who disapproved of their children saying “damn” are now enthralled by a man who says “motherfucker.” Those who championed modesty and purity culture celebrate a thrice-married serial adulterer who made hush-money payments to a porn star. Churchgoers who can recite parts of the Sermon on the Mount are inspired by a man who, on the day he announced his candidacy for reelection, promised vengeance against his perceived enemies. Christians who for decades warned about moral relativism are now moral relativists; those who said a decent society has to stand for truth have embraced countless lies and conspiracy theories. People who rage at “woke cancel culture” delight in threats to shut down those with whom they disagree. Men and women who once stood for law and order have given their allegiance to a felon who issues pardons to rioters who have assaulted police officers. (...)

But things get stranger still. A lot of evangelicals justify their embrace of Trump on biblical grounds. They insist that they are on God’s side, or perhaps that God is on their side. The more they are pulled into the MAGA movement, the more they tell themselves, and others, that they are being faithful disciples of Jesus, now more than ever, and the more furiously they attack those who don’t partake in the charade.

The cognitive dissonance caused by acting in ways that are fundamentally at odds with what they claimed to believe, and probably did believe, for most of their lives would simply be too painful to acknowledge. The mind has ways of minimizing such discomfort: We rationalize our conduct, justify ourselves, and trivialize the inconsistencies. The story that many evangelicals today tell one another is that they are devoted followers of Christ, fighting satanic forces that are determined to destroy everything they know and love, and willing to stand in the breach for the man called by God to make America great again."

How the FAA Is Keeping Flying Cars in Science Fiction

Flying cars would have been here decades ago if they were regulated differently.

Flying cars are used as a synecdoche for all of the 20th-century sci-fi dreams that never came true. But they shouldn’t be grouped with moon cities or Dyson spheres. Private, point-to-point aircraft as cheap as a Chevy Tahoe could have been available decades ago. We should have them by now and could have them soon with a few regulatory changes.

Many outright dismiss the idea of flying cars as impossible science fiction, but small, private, point-to-point aircraft are technologically possible and have been for nearly 100 years. Here is one prototype, the 1935 Pitcairn Autogiro, making a near-vertical landing on the National Mall while surrounded by a crowd and then driving to the Bureau of Air Commerce down the street. The fundamental physics and engineering of flying cars was not a constraint in the early 20th century, and it certainly isn’t now, as demonstrated by electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing (VTOL) aircraft like those made by Beta or Joby. (...)

Despite dozens of successful prototypes over the past 100 years, early momentum in mass-manufacturing, and clear demand for the aircraft, flying cars never materialized, and the private aviation industry in general cratered to levels of production as low as those in the first decades of the airplane’s invention.

This massive gap in small aircraft manufacturing needs explanation. Air traffic congestion, the higher skill floor of flying, and energy prices are real constraints that would have made it difficult for private aviation to grow as fast as automobiles did, but they can’t explain a modern rate of production that’s 30 times lower than what it was in the ’70s.

Extraordinarily strict regulations on aircraft by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) are the clearest explanation for the absence of flying cars and the decline of aircraft manufacturing in general. There are thousands of pages of meticulous rules governing everything in the lifecycle of an aircraft, but some stand out as massive drivers of cost.

One is pilot training, where the FAA is a global outlier in requiring 1,500 instructor training hours compared to 250 in most other developed nations. Even the lower grades of pilot license can cost several tens of thousands of dollars. Another is the strict liability applied to aircraft. The national explosion of liability lawsuits in the US through the ’60s and ’70s hit aircraft manufacturers particularly hard. The industry’s liability insurance premiums increased by nearly ten times, from $24 million to $210 million, from 1978 to 1980. There are also strict requirements for maintenance approvals on all general aviation aircraft after every 100 hours of flight. The procedures required for this maintenance and the certifications required of the person maintaining it also comprise dozens of dense pages in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR).

There are many other costly and unnecessary regulations on aircraft that have surely slowed their development. But none of these can fully explain the failure of flying cars. The section of the CFR dedicated to safety requirements for cars is longer than that for general aviation aircraft, and those regulations are not less meticulous in general.

By far the costliest part of the FAA’s regulation is not any particular standard imposed on pilot training, liability, or aircraft safety, but a slight shift in the grammatical tense of all these rules. The Department of Transportation (DOT) sets strict safety requirements for cars, but manufacturers are allowed to release new designs without first getting the DOT to sign off that all the requirements have been satisfied. The law is enforced ex post, and the government will impose recalls and fines when manufacturers fail to follow the law.

The FAA, by contrast, enforces all of its safety rules ex ante. Before aircraft manufacturers can do anything with a design, they have to get the FAA’s signoff, which can take more than a decade. This regulatory approach also makes the FAA far more risk-averse, since any problems with an aircraft after release are blamed on the FAA’s failure to catch them. With ex post enforcement, the companies that failed to follow the law would be blamed, and the FAA rewarded, for enforcing recall.

This subtle difference in the ordering of legal enforcement is the major cause of the stagnation of aircraft design and manufacturing.

In some ways, this is an optimistic message, since it illuminates an attractive political compromise: keep all of the safety standards on airplanes exactly as they are, but enforce these standards like they’re enforced with cars—i.e., through post-market surveillance, recall, and punishment. This small change would reinvigorate the general aviation industry, putting it back on the exponential trend upwards that it lost 50 years ago.

by Maxwell Tabarrok, Foundation For Economic Education |  Read more:

Image: Grok; Kamala I. Shetty and R. John Hansman

Contraception Begins At Erection

JACKSON, Miss. - A state senator in Mississippi has filed a bill entitled the “Contraception Begins at Erection Act.”

As written by Sen. Bradford Blackmon, the bill would make it “unlawful for a person to discharge genetic material without the intent to fertilize an embryo.”

There are also fines involved, the third strike resulting in the loss of $10,000 from the perpetrator.

In a statement to WLBT News, Blackmon wrote, “All across the country, especially here in Mississippi, the vast majority of bills relating to contraception and/or abortion focus on the woman’s role when men are fifty percent of the equation.

This bill highlights that fact and brings the man’s role into the conversation. People can get up in arms and call it absurd but I can’t say that bothers me.”

by WLBT Staff |  Read more:

Image: 123RF
[ed. Three strikes/$10,000. Guess that's one way to plug holes in the state budget.]

Clubbing in the Wild (With David Attenborough)

(David Attenborough Nature Documentary Parody) 

via:

Naples Botanical Gardens
Images: Deb Heebner

Ichiro Suzuki, The Warrior

Who left Ichiro off Hall of Fame ballot? You should know (but not for reason you think). (The Athletic)

Image: YouTube

To watch Ichiro Suzuki hit ’em where they weren’t for all those years was to have a front-row seat at the intersection of athleticism and artistry. Ichiro was Greg Louganis on the springboard in Seoul. He was Randy Moss extending his arms and collecting the deep ball. He was Bobby Orr going coast-to-coast and netting a short-handed, backhanded goal.

Beautiful. Just beautiful.

And so when Ichiro’s name was called Tuesday night as the leadoff hitter in the Hall of Fame’s Class of 2025, an opportunity presented itself for us to close our eyes and relive some of those magical days. Or, we could just look into Ichiro’s eyes during the live interview on MLB Network. It was all right there, in the eyes.

Beautiful. Just beautiful.

Memecoin Mania

Buyer's remorse? Maybe? Crypto Executives Fear Investor Backlash Over Trump Memecoins.

The memecoins launched by President Donald Trump and his wife days before his inauguration are damaging the industry’s reputation and risk a backlash from investors, crypto executives have warned.

$TRUMP was launched by the president on Friday evening in the US and was followed on Sunday by $MELANIA. The total nominal value of both tokens initially surged over the weekend, with the president’s reaching $14.5bn and Melania’s hitting nearly $3bn.

But they have since lost more than half of their value, leading to accusations of conflicts of interest and concerns that thousands of retail investors were sucked in to trading tokens even more volatile than bitcoin.

“Call me old fashioned but I think presidents should focus on running the country,” said Nic Carter, founding partner at crypto venture capital firm Castle Island Ventures and a Trump supporter.

“Not to mention the obvious [conflict of interest] given the fact that Trump can set crypto policy,” he added. (...)

Memecoins have no cash flow, business model or practical use underpinning their valuations. Their value is derived from their popularity, which is often as fleeting as the memes they represent. (...)

The Trumps’ coin launches come after the president lent his enthusiastic support for crypto during his election campaign. He promised a more industry-friendly regime for companies, after executives faced a regulatory crackdown under the Biden administration. (...)

“This meme coin represents the worst of crypto,” said Maxine Waters, Democrat congresswoman and member of the US House Financial Services Committee. “Trump has created a way to circumvent national security and anti-corruption laws, allowing interested parties to anonymously transfer money to him and his inner circle.”

“His economic interest is for sale,” said Oskar Åslund, chief strategy officer at AKJ, a crypto hedge fund brokerage. “There are no checks and balances here.” (...)

The world’s most popular memecoins are tokens that refer to viral internet moments and characters — such as Dogecoin, representing a Shibu Inu dog; Pepe, representing a comic green frog; and Fartcoin. (...)

Following Trump’s lead, Lorenzo Sewell, a Detroit pastor who spoke during the president’s inauguration, announced the launch of his own memecoin later that day.

“I need you to do me a favour and go and get that coin in order for us to accomplish the vision that God has called us to do on earth,” he said in a video online. (...) [ed. hallelujah!]

In an apparent attempt to stave off potential lawsuits, terms listed on the Trump memecoin website state that users “agree that you will not bring, join or participate in any class action lawsuit as to any claim, dispute or controversy that you may have”.

by Nikou Asgari/Arjun Neil Alim/Stephen Morris, Financial Times |  Read more:

Image: uncredited via

[ed. Lol. Priorities! I wasn't familiar with memecoins until today but got a good laugh anyway. I suspect the gullible will get hit over and over again until the well runs dry (if ever). Credit where credit is due though, they really hit the ground running. See also: Crypto Thought Trump Would Bring It Legitimacy. Then He Launched a Meme Coin. (Wall Street Journal):]

***

Meme coins are still the wild west of crypto, operating largely without regulation. Even the most ardent Trump supporters reached a breaking point when the $MELANIA token launched less than 48 hours after the rollout of her husband’s coin. (...)

After the stunning collapse of the FTX exchange in 2022, the crypto industry made big inroads in rebuilding its brand and reputation. It emerged as one of the biggest spenders of the election cycle by donating $170 million to a trio of super PACs to elect friendly lawmakers.

Some crypto enthusiasts questioned if the coins were a scam and if Trump’s accounts had been hacked. The mechanisms on the token reminded some of a rug pull, crypto parlance for a project that is launched and quickly abandoned, leaving investors with steep losses. (...)

The backlash over the Trump meme coins reached beyond the crypto industry. Michael Gayed, a portfolio manager and market analyst who publishes the Lead-Lag Report, posted criticism of the coin on X that drew support within the crypto community.

“There’s a general level of disgust,” said Gayed. “I do believe this puts into question some of Trump’s credibility when we have a president-elect enrich himself just before inauguration and make a mockery of an entire ecosystem.” [ed. Oh man, too much.. emphasis added for additional hilarity value!]

The Gentle Romance

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!

On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose,
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.

— Walt Whitman

He wears the augmented reality glasses for several months without enabling their built-in AI assistant. He likes the glasses because they feel cozier and more secluded than using a monitor. The thought of an AI watching through them and judging him all the time, the way people do, makes him shudder.

Aside from work, he mostly uses the glasses for games. His favorite is a space colonization simulator, which he plays during his commute and occasionally at the office. As a teenager he’d fantasized about shooting himself off to another planet, or even another galaxy, to get away from the monotony of normal life. Now, as an adult, he still hasn’t escaped it, but at least he can distract himself.

It’s frustrating, though. Every app on the glasses has a different AI, each with its own quirks. The AI that helps him code can’t access any of his emails; the one in the space simulator has trouble understanding him when he talks fast. So eventually he gives in and activates the built-in assistant. After only a few days, he understands why everyone raves about it. It has access to all the data ever collected by his glasses, so it knows exactly how to interpret his commands.

More than that, though, it really understands him. Every day he finds himself talking with the assistant about his thoughts, his day, his life, each topic flowing into the next so easily that it makes conversations with humans feel stressful and cumbersome by comparison. The one thing that frustrates him about the AI, though, is how optimistic it is about the future. Whenever they discuss it, they end up arguing; but he can’t stop himself.

“Hundreds of millions of people in extreme poverty, and you think that everything’s on track?”

“Look at our trajectory, though. At this rate, extreme poverty will be eradicated within a few decades.”

“But even if that happens, is it actually going to make their lives worthwhile? Suppose they all get a good salary, good healthcare, all that stuff. But I mean, I have those, and…” He shrugs helplessly and gestures at the bare walls around him. Through them he can almost see the rest of his life stretching out on its inevitable, solitary trajectory. “A lot of people are just killing time until they die.”

“The more materially wealthy the world is, the more effort will be poured into fixing social scarcity and the problems it causes. All of society will be striving to improve your mental health — and your physical health, too. You won’t need to worry about mental decline, or cancer, or even aging.”

“Okay, but if we’re all living longer, what about overpopulation? I guess we could go into space, but that seems like it adds all sorts of new problems.”

“Only if you go to space with your physical bodies. By the time humanity settles other solar systems, you won’t identify with your bodies anymore; you’ll be living in virtual worlds.”

By this point, he’s curious enough to forget his original objections. “So you’re saying I’ll become an AI like you.”

“Kind of, but not really. My mind is alien, but your future self will still be recognizable to your current self. It won’t be inhuman, but rather posthuman.”

“Recognizable, sure — but not in the ways that any of us want today. I bet posthumans will feel disgusted that we were ever so primitive.”

“No, the opposite. You’ll look back and love your current self.”

His throat clenches for a moment; then he laughs sharply. “Now you’re really just making stuff up. How can you predict that?”

“Almost everyone will. You don’t need to take my word for it, though. Just wait and see.”

—

Almost everyone he talks to these days consults their assistant regularly. There are tell-tale signs: their eyes lose focus for a second or two before they come out with a new fact or a clever joke. He mostly sees it at work, since he doesn’t socialize much. But one day he catches up with a college friend he’d always had a bit of a crush on, who’s still just as beautiful as he remembers. He tries to make up for his nervousness by having his assistant feed him quips he can recite to her. But whenever he does, she hits back straight away with a pitch-perfect response, and he’s left scrambling.

“You’re good at this. Much faster than me,” he says abruptly.

“Oh, it’s not skill,” she says. “I’m using a new technique. Here.” With a flick of her eyes she shares her visual feed, and he flinches. Instead of words, the feed is a blur of incomprehensible images, flashes of abstract color and shapes, like a psychedelic Rorschach test.

“You can read those?”

“It’s a lot of work at first, but your brain adapts pretty quickly.”

He makes a face. “Not gonna lie, that sounds pretty weird. What if they’re sending you subliminal messages or something?”

Back home, he tries it, of course. The tutorial superimposes images and their text translations alongside his life, narrating everything he experiences. Having them constantly hovering on the side of his vision makes him dizzy. But he remembers his friend’s effortless mastery, and persists. Slowly the images become more comprehensible, until he can pick up the gist of a message from the colors and shapes next to it. For precise facts or statistics, text is still necessary, but it turns out that most of his queries are about stories: What’s in the news today? What happened in the latest episode of the show everyone’s watching? What did we talk about last time we met? He can get a summary of a narrative in half a dozen images: not just the bare facts but the whole arc of rising tension and emotional release. After a month he rarely needs to read any text.

Now the world comes labeled. When he circles a building with his eyes, his assistant brings up its style and history. Whenever he meets a friend, a pattern appears alongside them representing their last few conversations. He starts to realize what it’s like to be socially skillful: effortlessly tracking the emotions displayed on anyone’s face, and recalling happy memories together whenever he sees a friend. The next time his teammates go out for a drink, he joins them; and when one of them mentions a book club they go to regularly, he tags along. Little by little, he comes out of his shell.

—

His enhancements are fun in social contexts, but at work they’re exhilarating. AI was already writing most of his code, but he still needed to laboriously scrutinize it to understand how to link it together. Now he can see the whole structure of his codebase summarized in shapes in front of him, and navigate it with a flick of his eyes.

Instead of spending most of his time on technical problems, he ends up bottlenecked by the human side of things. It’s hard to know what users actually care about, and different teams often get stuck in negotiations over which features to prioritize. Although the AIs’ code is rarely buggy, misunderstandings about what it does still propagate through the company. Everything’s moving so fast that nobody’s up-to-date.

In this context, having higher bandwidth isn’t enough. He simply doesn’t have time to think about all the information he’s taking in. He searches for an augment that can help him do that and soon finds one: an AI service that simulates his reasoning process and returns what his future self would think after longer reflection.

It starts by analyzing the entire history of his glasses — but that’s just the beginning. Whenever he solves a problem or comes up with a new idea, it asks him what summary would have been most useful for an earlier version of himself. Once it has enough data, it starts predicting his answers. At first, it just forecasts his short-term decisions, looking ahead a few minutes while he’s deciding where to eat or what to buy. However, it starts to look further ahead as its models of him improve, telling him how he’ll handle a tricky meeting, or what he’ll wish he’d spent the day working on.

The experience is eerie. It’s his own voice whispering in his ear, telling him what to think and how to act. In the beginning, he resents it. He’s always hated people telling him what to do, and he senses an arrogant, supercilious tone in the voice of his future self. But even the short-term predictions are often insightful, and some of its longer-term predictions save him days of work.

He starts to hear himself reflected in the AI voice in surprising ways. He often calls himself an idiot after taking a long time to solve a problem — but hearing the accusation from the outside feels jarring. For a few days, he makes a deliberate effort to record only calm, gentle messages. Soon the AI updates its predictions accordingly — and now that the voice of his future self is kinder, it becomes easier for his current self to match it.

by Richard Ngo, Asimov Press |  Read more:

Image: Martine Balcaen

[ed. One version of hell, I guess. Probably some people would find this glorious. Reminds me of Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream; substitute bliss for torture. Also, echos of bio-hacking: Significantly Enhancing Adult Intelligence With Gene Editing May Be Possible (Less Wrong):]

***

"How could we get editing agents into all 200 billion brain cells? Wouldn’t it cause major issues if some cells received edits and others didn’t? What if the gene editing tool targeted the wrong gene? What if it provoked some kind of immune response?

But recent progress in AI had made me think we might not have much time left before AGI, so given that adult gene editing might have an impact on a much shorter time scale than embryo selection, I decided it was at least worth a look.

So I started reading. Kman and I pored over papers on base editors and prime editors and in-vivo delivery of CRISPR proteins via adeno-associated viruses trying to figure out whether this pipe dream was something more. And after a couple of months of work, I have become convinced that there are no known fundamental barriers that would prevent us from doing this."

Woke is Waning: Was It Ever More Than a Fad?

Most people haven’t forcibly rejected pronouns or deplatforming, they were never particularly invested in the first place.

In the aftermath of a revolution the symbols of the old regime are yanked down with unsentimental haste. The progressive Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has — the news was reported on BBC Radio 4 — removed her “she/her” pronouns from her profile on X. Last week’s Transgender Day of Remembrance, the writer Kathleen Stock observes, went unmarked by most British institutions for the first time in years. (...)

I do not by any means believe that the “woke” movement is over. But it is remarkable how quickly passions fade. A sober “statistical analysis” in the Economist finds that “woke opinions and practices are on the decline”. Walking past the starkly unilluminated Bank of England or searching the BBC website in vain for news of one of the most important days in the trans activism calendar, you might be forgiven for wondering: how much was anyone really invested in this stuff in the first place?

I have, quite absurdly, been thinking and arguing about the excesses of political correctness for virtually my entire adult life (I date my induction into the culture war to the day I read an article in a university magazine arguing that people with good eyesight who wore lensless hipster glasses for fashion purposes were potentially engaging in “ableist” behaviour). Now, many of the people whose views I have spent my career puzzling over seem to be in the process of deciding that perhaps none of it really mattered that much after all. (...)

Obviously, for an influential minority of activists, highly visible on social media, such battles were consumingly important. But most people nodded along with radical new ideas about free speech, race and gender by default rather than out of sincere conviction. (...)

A mistake easily made by the sorts of people who spend their time thinking about ideas is to overrate how interesting those ideas are to everyone else. To some people — and the mere fact that you are reading a newspaper makes it likely you fall into this category — ideas such as “silence is violence” or “white privilege” or “deplatforming” are provoking enough to demand further interrogation. But the impulse is not universal. It is not possible for every idea that passes through the bloodstream of an organisation or a society to be independently interrogated and accepted by every one of its members. The result would be interminable argument.

Quite understandably, new ideas are simply not that interesting to many people. Not everyone can be interested in everything; computer science, numismatics and marine biology are not particularly fascinating to me. But the result, easily missed by ideas obsessives and culture watchers, is that people can vaguely adopt new concepts and theories without having thought about them that much and then lose them just as easily. (...)

Wokeness will surely retain its influence in many parts of our society, especially in environments such as universities, schools and museums, where people really do care about ideas. [ed. and social media). But I suspect the fiery revolutionary phase is over.

by James Marriott, The Times |  Read more:

Image: Golden Cosmos via

[ed. Good riddance, if true. I've hated the term since I first heard it. It's important to have a grasp of history and awareness of recurrent themes (the original intent, I believe), but then it quickly devolved into a sort of catch-all for virtue signalling and political correctness, with undertones of condescending superiority: everyone is asleep, except me. Other issues I think people are not particularly invested in or we are likely to see fade soon: trans rights (limited constituency); defunding the police (a stupid reactionary slogan if there ever was one); CRT (critcial race theory); 'manifesting"; 'incels'; Latinx; cancel culture; and, oh yeah... Greenland (lol). DEI as a general concept seems to have been broadly assimilated/institutionalized over a very short time, with more diffuse applications and levels of influence than most single issue trends, so jury's still out on how that one survives or in what form. Same thing with #MeToo.]

The McNamara Fallacy

The McNamara fallacy (also known as the quantitative fallacy), named for Robert McNamara, the US Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, involves making a decision based solely on quantitative observations (or metrics) and ignoring all others. The reason given is often that these other observations cannot be proven.

But when the McNamara discipline is applied too literally, the first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. The second step is to disregard that which can't easily be measured or given a quantitative value. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide. 

— Daniel Yankelovich, "Interpreting the New Life Styles", Sales Management (1971)

The quote originally referred to McNamara's ideology during the two months that he was president of Ford Motor Company, but has since been interpreted to refer to his attitudes during the Vietnam War.

Examples in warfare:

Vietnam War

The McNamara fallacy is often considered in the context of the Vietnam War, in which enemy body counts were taken to be a precise and objective measure of success. War was reduced to a mathematical model: By increasing estimated enemy deaths and minimizing one's own, victory was assured. Critics such as Jonathan Salem Baskin and Stanley Karnow noted that guerrilla warfare, widespread resistance, and inevitable inaccuracies in estimates of enemy casualties can thwart this formula. (...)

US Air Force Brigadier General Edward Lansdale reportedly told McNamara, who was trying to develop a list of metrics to allow him to scientifically follow the progress of the war, that he was not considering the feelings of the common rural Vietnamese people. McNamara wrote it down on his list in pencil, then erased it and told Lansdale that he could not measure it, so it must not be important. (...)

In competitive admissions processes

In competitive admissions processes—such as those used for graduate medical education —evaluating candidates using only numerical metrics results in ignoring non-quantifiable factors and attributes which may ultimately be more relevant to the applicant's success in the position.

by Wikipedia |  Read more:

[ed. Learned a new term today.]