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In 1902, the Austrian Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl — widely seen as the founding father of the Zionist movement — published a novel titled Altneuland (Old-New Land). The book laid out, in some detail, his idealized vision for what a Jewish state would look like. In Herzl’s utopia, there’s universal suffrage for all residents of the land…
This clip has done the round for years (in a very anodyne edit) on LinkedIn… it is really worth watching in it’s entirity. From: https://boingboing.net/2023/12/12/watch-pharrell-williams-stunned-reaction-to-hearing-maggie-rogers-music-in-a-2106-nyu-critique-session-its-like-when-the-wu-tang-clan-came-out.html
It’s tempting to invoke Berger’s Law, the guideline championed by my Ars colleague which states that if a launch is scheduled for the fourth quarter of a calendar year—and if it is at least six months away—the launch will delay into the next year. Given Blue Origin’s history of New Glenn delays, that’s probably the…
Two days after the closing was announced, their lives upended, the workers shared that they were exploring the possibility of reopening Common Ground as a worker cooperative—a business owned and democratically operated by its workers. They found support from the loyal customer base built by the business in over 25 years as a fixture in the Hampden…
Slouching towards solutions… From 2024 onwards, solar and wind facilities in the US will generate more electricity than the country’s diminishing fleet of coal-fired power plants, according to the department of energy. The world’s largest economy will likely add 23 gigawatts (GW) of new solar in 2023, alongside 9GW of battery storage capacity. It’s on…
It’s amazing to realize that we got into this monopoly quagmire because judges just literally refused to enforce the law. That’s what makes one part of the jury verdict against Google so exciting: the jury found that Google’s insistence that Play Store sellers use its payment processor was an act of illegal tying. Today, “tying”…
I was today years old… As best I can determine, Barrow first floated the scale in his 1998 book Impossibility: The limits of science and the science of limits (Oxford University Press). Inverting Kardashev, Barrow was interested in a civilization’s ability to control smaller and smaller things, relying on the observed fact that as we have explored…
I have two tests to determine how worldly a kiwi (normally business person is). If they do complain about “1” then I know they have never done anything substantive overseas and are parochial fools. If they do complain about “2” they have never noticed the esteem that Māori have gained in the rest of the…
There is that moment in any new relationship where you’re in or you’re out. They fart, pick their nose or treat wait staff badly. At that moment you make a call on whether or not you’re in for the long haul (for the record, treating wait staff badly is the only “hell no” for me).…
The model rocketry hobby is the reason why [Andrew Reilley] developed his own CF tube winding machine called Contraption. A tutorial video (also embedded below) shows how this machine is prepped for a winding run, followed by the winding progress and finalizing before admiring the result.
Nice stuff for me, but not for thee. The Satanic altar at Iowa’s state capitol showcases the same GOP bad faith, but at least with some levity. As atheists and other religious minorities have long argued, the reason Republicans want nativity scenes and other such religious symbols up on government grounds is obvious: To signal…
The exact altitude the X-37B will be flying through is unclear, but hobbyists and amateur sleuths who use open source information to reconstruct trajectories of top-secret military spacecraft suggest the Falcon Heavy will haul the winged vehicle into an orbit that could stretch tens of thousands of miles above the planet. What’s more, the Falcon…
New Horizons is now nearly twice as far from the Sun as Pluto, the outer planets are receding fast, and interstellar space is illuminated by the vast swath of the Milky Way ahead. But the spacecraft’s research is far from over. Its instruments are all functioning and responsive, and the New Horizons team has been…
So I guess OPEC is at the denial stage of grief… Oil-producing countries are apparently succeeding in their attempts to eliminate language from an international climate agreement that calls for countries to phase out the use of fossil fuels. Draft forms of the agreement had included text that called upon the countries that are part…
It’s funny how the anti-nanny state crew are all for getting the state up in your face. Across the Tasman, the conservative Howard government invented electronic income management in 2007, with the original idea being to prevent Aboriginal First Nations Peoples from spending their money on booze, tobacco and pornography. Beneficiaries in certain parts of…
And finally, big tech is not above the law. This loss isn’t just the first antitrust failure for Google, it’s the first antitrust loss for any big tech firm. I hear a lot from skeptics that the fix is in, that the powerful will always win, that justice in our system is a mirage. But…
Hhhhhhholy shit!
An instructive video on what collapse (vs crisis) looks like https://www.theissue.io/video-post-https-www-youtube-com-watch-v-gurc2tpglzg/
From the “just give poor people money” file:
Panic? Maybe… but it does feel like the last throw of the die for the oil producers. I’m getting all those “last days of big tobacco” vibes. DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — The full-scale resistance that oil-exporting countries are mounting against a COP28 deal to end fossil fuel use is a sign of “panic,” said…
Dave5 