Climbing in the Alps is becoming significantly more difficult as temperatures rise and ice becomes less trustworthy. CC-licensed photo by Cristian Bortes http://www.eyeem.com\/bortescristian on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 11 links for you. We regroup. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Not reading the Social Warming Substack? Signup is free. There’s another post today, with another tale from the inevitable madness of social media. Goes live about 45 minutes after this lands in your inbox.

🚨 Instagram walks back its changes • Platformer

Casey Newton got an interview with Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri, who has noticed unrest in the ranks:

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Redesigns often incur the wrath of users who are hostile to change, but in this case the high-profile dissatisfaction was backed up by Instagram’s own internal data, Mosseri said. The trend toward users watching more video is real, and pre-dated the rise of TikTok, he said. But it’s clear that people actually do dislike Instagram’s design changes.

“For the new feed designs, people are frustrated and the usage data isn’t great,” he said. “So there I think that we need to take a big step back, regroup, and figure out how we want to move forward.”

The company also plans to show users fewer recommendations. On Wednesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that recommended posts and accounts in feeds currently account for about 15% of what you see when you browse Facebook, and an even higher percentage on Instagram. By the end of 2023, that figure will be around 30 percent, Zuckerberg said.

But Instagram will temporarily reduce the amount of recommended posts and accounts as it works to improve its personalization tools. (Mosseri wouldn’t say by how much, exactly.)

“When you discover something in your feed that you didn’t follow before, there should be a high bar — it should just be great,” Mosseri said. “You should be delighted to see it. And I don’t think that’s happening enough right now. So I think we need to take a step back, in terms of the percentage of feed that are recommendations, get better at ranking and recommendations, and then — if and when we do — we can start to grow again.” (“I’m confident we will,” he added.)

Mosseri made clear that the retreat Instagram announced today is not permanent. Threats to the company’s dominance continue to mount: TikTok is the most downloaded app in the world, the most popular website, and the most watched video company.

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That didn’t take long, though the threat that it’s not a permanent rollback of the (horrible) change is dispiriting.
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TikTok and the fall of the social media giants • The New Yorker

Cal Newport, on how Facebook, Instagram and Twitter simply can’t do what TikTok does:

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If [Facebook etc] instead move away from their social-graph foundations to concentrate on optimizing in-the-moment engagement, they’ll enter a competitive landscape that pits them directly against the many other existing sources of mobile distraction—not just TikTok but also more bespoke and specialized social networks, such as the Gen-Z sensation BeReal, to say nothing of popular video streamers, podcasts, video games, self-improvement apps, and, for the somewhat older demographic to which I belong, Wordle.

This all points to a possible future in which social-media giants like Facebook may soon be past their long stretch of dominance. They’ll continue to chase new engagement models, leaving behind the protection of their social graphs, and in doing so eventually succumb to the new competitive pressures this introduces. TikTok, of course, is subject to these same pressures, so in this future it, too, will eventually fade. The app’s energetic embrace of shallowness makes it more likely, in the long term, to become the answer to a trivia question than a sustained cultural force. In the wake churned by these sinkings will arise new entertainments and new models for distraction, but also innovative new apps and methods for expression and interaction.

It’s here that I find optimism. The era of social-media monopolies has been unhealthy for our collective digital existence. The Internet at its best should be weird, energetic, and exciting—featuring both homegrown idiosyncrasy and sudden trends that flash supernova-bright before exploding into the novel elements that spur future ideas and generate novel connections. This exuberance was suppressed by the dominance of a small number of social-media networks that consolidated and controlled so much of online culture for so many years. Things will be better once this dominance wanes. In the end, TikTok’s biggest legacy might be less about its current moment of world-conquering success, which will pass, and more about how, by forcing social-media giants like Facebook to chase its model, it will end up liberating the social Internet.

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I was wrong about Facebook • The New York Times

Farhad Manjoo:

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Early in 2009, I offered the world some tech advice that I have regretted pretty much ever since: I told everyone to join Facebook.

Actually, that’s putting it mildly. I didn’t just tell people. I harangued. I mocked. Writing in Slate, I all but reached through the screen, grabbed Facebook skeptics by the lapels and scolded them for being pompous, mirthless Luddites. “There is no longer any good reason to avoid Facebook,” I wrote shortly after the then-five-year-old company announced growing to 150 million users worldwide. “The site has crossed a threshold — it is now so widely trafficked that it’s fast becoming a routine aid to social interaction, like email and antiperspirant.”

I wasn’t just wrong about Facebook; I had the matter exactly backward. Had we all decided to leave Facebook then or at any time since, the internet and perhaps the world might now be a better place. The question of how much better and in what way is a matter of considerable debate. It might be decades before we have any sense of an answer to whether, on balance, Facebook in particular and social networks more generally have improved or ruined society.

Yet whatever the outcome of that larger debate, my 2009 exhortation for people to go all in on Facebook still makes me cringe. My argument suffers from the same flaws I regularly climb up on my mainstream-media soapbox to denounce in tech bros: a failure to seriously consider the implications of an invention as it becomes entrenched in society; a deep trust in networks, in the idea that allowing people to more freely associate would redound mainly to the good of society; and too much affection for the culture of Silicon Valley and the idea that the people who created a certain thing must have some clue about what to do with it.

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This is one of a series in the NYT in which people admit being wrong on something. This one, of course, feels pretty easy to admit in retrospect.
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Stick-on ultrasound patch hailed as revolution in medical imaging • The Guardian

Ian Sample:

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A stick-on patch that can take an ultrasound scan of a person’s insides as they go about their daily life has been hailed as a revolution in medical imaging.

The wearable patch, which is the size of a postage stamp, can image blood vessels, the digestive system and internal organs for up to 48 hours, giving doctors a more detailed picture of a patient’s health than the snapshots provided by routine scans.

In laboratory tests, researchers used the patches to watch people’s hearts change shape during exercise, their stomachs expand and shrink as they drank and passed drinks, and their muscles pick up microdamage when weightlifting.

Prof Xuanhe Zhao at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who led the research team, said the patches could “revolutionise” medical imaging because existing scans are very brief, sometimes lasting only seconds, and usually have to be performed in hospitals.

Ultimately, Zhao envisions people buying boxes of the patches over the counter and using them, with help from smart algorithms on their mobile phones, to monitor their heart, lungs and digestive systems for early signs of disease or infection, or their muscles during rehabilitation or physical training.

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Very promising, and very near to market. Just needs a little extra wireless patch so that it can be linked to a smartphone, and that’s a new frontier in diagnosis. And, once again, the smartphone being the Universal Device which can be turned to any task.
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Climbers and guides adapt to changing climate and landscape in the Alps • UKClimbing

Natalie Berry:

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Over the course of the last century, temperatures in the European Alps have increased by around 2°C, or twice the global average. This summer, heatwaves have led to record-breaking June temperatures across the continent, and – catalysed by a lack of snow and precipitation over winter and spring – are causing glaciers to vanish at a record rate.

On 25 July, MeteoSwiss reported a record-high freezing point (0°C) of 5,184m – far above the highest peaks in Western Europe – beating the previous record set in 1995 by almost 70 metres. 

British Mountain Guide Jon Bracey first visited the Alps in 1998, and moved to the Chamonix valley in 2006 when he qualified as a UIAGM mountain guide. “Over the years I’ve observed very marked changes in the climate, vast glacial retreat and a huge increase in the incidence of rockfall,” he said.

Jon believes that the work of a mountain guide has become far more challenging – and more dangerous – due to climate change. “It’s a delicate balancing act of trying to meet clients’ expectations and goals without taking too much risk,” he said. “I can’t remember the last time this summer that the zero degree isotherm was below 4,000m, and we’ve had temperatures of +10 degrees Celsius at Col Major (4,750m) near the summit of Mont Blanc. Even basic stuff like glacier travel is inherently way more dangerous.”

The traditional July and August summer Alpine season is occurring earlier and extending in length, but also becoming somewhat obsolete as conditions worsen, Jon explained. “In today’s world, the alpinist has to be much more of an opportunist,” he said. “You’ve got to jump on the good conditions, because it might be a long wait until the next chance.” To avoid climbing in the most unstable period in the heat of the afternoon, alpine starts are shifting to ever earlier hours in the morning as temperatures rise.

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Many Alpine routes are essentially held together by ice; if it melts, bad things happen – only rockfall, if you’re lucky. Something much bigger if you’re not.
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Apple expects growth to accelerate despite ‘pockets of softness’ • CNBC

Kif Leswing:

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Apple’s revenue rose 2% during the quarter, compared to 36% growth during the same period last year and over 8% growth in the March quarter. Cook said the results were better than expected and CFO Luca Maestri said it was a “challenging operating environment.” 

Chipmakers and other computer vendors have signaled that there is slowing demand for smartphones and PCs around the world as consumers grapple with recession fears and decades-high inflation. Apple’s soft growth may suggest that the consumer electronics industry — including leaders like Apple — is headed for a period of slow or no growth. 

Cook told CNBC that the company is seeing inflation but will continue to make investments.  

“We do see inflation in our cost structure,” Cook said. “We see it in things like logistics and wages and certain silicon components and we’re still hiring, but we’re doing it on a deliberate basis.” 

Apple’s iPhone sales exceeded Wall Street expectations, suggesting that demand for iPhone 13 models remains strong even in the second half of the product’s annual release cycle. Apple typically releases new iPhones in September and sales fall as customers anticipate new models. 

Cook said Apple had success attracting Android customers to become iPhone owners during the quarter. 

“We had a record level of switchers and saw double digit growth for customers new to iPhone,” Cook said. 

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Now up to 860 million paid subscriptions. Wonder how many of them include Fitness+? Apparently Mac and iPad supply was so choked that Apple never came close to meeting demand; Mac sales fell 10% in revenue year-on-year.
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Kylie Jenner’s 17-minute private jet trip is a climate disaster • The Boston Globe

Dharna Noor:

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It started with an Instagram photo that multimillionaire Kylie Jenner posted from an airport runway. In it, she’s locked in an embrace with her boyfriend, rapper Travis Scott, flanked by two shiny private jets. The caption read: “you wanna take mine or yours?”

Immediately, the comments lit up like a wildfire. “girl what am i recycling for,” one person wrote. “That carbon footprint be wild,” reads another comment.

The picture catalyzed a spate of criticism of celebrities for taking private plane trips despite their well-documented climate implications. One 2021 study found that per passenger, private jets create up to 14 times more greenhouse gas pollution than commercial planes, and a stunning 50 times more than trains. And by one estimate, just two hours of flying private produces 2 metric tons of greenhouse gas pollution — as much as the average person on Earth generates in a year.

The anger ramped up when many saw that CelebJets, an automated account that tracks celebrities’ private plane flights, posted that Jenner’s July 12 private flight from Camarillo to Van Nuys, Calif., lasted only 17 minutes.

Many wondered how Jenner could justify the environmental toll of such a short trip — a journey that could have taken less than an hour by car and resulted in a fraction of the emissions.

…The toll adds up. Private jet trips were responsible for nearly 34 million metric tons of carbon pollution in 2016, according to one 2020 study, which is more than some countries emit in an entire year.

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As the story explains, there’s now a Twitter account (@celebjets) which tracks these flights. (I bet to the celebs, it’s a badge of honour to be listed on the account, because global heating is someone else’s problem.)

Also: “One man’s lonely, lonely fight to ban private jets“.
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How much ice is melted by each carbon dioxide emission? • Ken Caldeira

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According to the USGS, there 24,064,000 km3 of ice and snow in the world.

According to Winkelmann et al. (2015), it would take about 10,000 GtC to melt (nearly) all of this ice.

If we divide 24,064,000 km3  by 10,000 GtC, assume the density of the ice is 1 kg per liter, and do the appropriate unit conversions, we can conclude that each kg of carbon emitted as CO2 will ultimately melt about 2,400 kg of ice. This is a huge number.

Another way of expressing this is that each pound of carbon released to the atmosphere as CO2 is likely to end up melting more than a ton of glacial ice.

…Each American emits on average about 16 tons of CO2 to the atmosphere each year, primarily from the burning of coal, oil and gas, and atmospheric release of the resulting waste CO2.

This works out to about 1.8kg of CO2 per hour per American. This is more than twice the per capita emission rate of Europe and about 20 times the per capita emission rate for sub-Saharan Africa. If I am an average American, the CO2 emissions that I produce each year (by participating in the broader economy) will be responsible for melting about 10,000 tons of Antarctic ice, adding about 10,000 cubic meters of fresh water to the volume of the oceans.

…if the ancient Romans had undergone an industrial revolution similar to ours and fueled a century or two of economic development using fossil-fuels with disposal of the waste CO2 in the atmosphere, sea level today would be rising about 3 cm each year (more than an inch a year) due to the long-term effects of their emissions on the great ice sheets.

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In which case, he points out, we’d have a much more jaundiced view of the sodding Romans.
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A law firm is seeking disgruntled Bored Ape Yacht Club investors for a class action suit alleging Yuga Labs overpromised on returns • Artnet News

Amy Castor:

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The New York law firm Scott and Scott is looking to drum up plaintiffs to file a class action suit against Yuga Labs, alleging that the NFT juggernaut tapped celebrities to talk up the value of their tokens and lure in “unsuspecting investors” with the promise of high returns.  

A slew of stars, including Gwyneth Paltrow, Eminem, and Madonna, acquired Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFTs and promoted them on social media in the past year. In January, when Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton flouted their cartoon apes on national TV, it felt to many like a bad infomercial. Many of the new celebrity Ape collectors are with Creative Artists Agency (CAA), which owns a chunk of OpenSea, a popular marketplace for NFTs. (Madonna’s manager, Guy Oseary, represents Yuga Labs and is also a Yuga Labs investor.)

If it is to be successful, Scott and Scott will need to prove that BAYC NFTs are securities like stocks, bonds, or options. Legally, anyone issuing a security has to register it with the Securities and Exchange Commission to prevent fraud.

NFTs, because they aren’t fungible, typically aren’t thought of as securities, which are. Each NFT is supposed to represent a unique object. But they can be deemed securities if they pass the “Howey Test,” a regulatory standard used to determine if a transaction qualifies as an investment contract.

According to the Howey test, an investment contract exists if there is “an investment of money in a common enterprise with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others.” Yuga Labs, in this instance, would be the actor behind the promotion of the NFTs.

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Seems like a slam-dunk under the Howey test. Now all they need is some people annoyed that the resale value of their token which confirms they once looked at a picture on a computer hasn’t gone up.
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Meta’s AR/VR revenue now growing faster than costs • UploadVR

David Heaney:

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Meta’s Reality Labs revenue grew 48% year-over-year in Q2 2022, while costs grew 19%.

…This is the first quarter since the company began breaking out Reality Labs revenue where quarterly revenue grew more than costs year-over-year. For comparison, in Q1 2022 revenue grew 35% year-over-year but costs grew 55%.

The division brought in $452m revenue in Q2 2022, up from $305m in Q2 2021. But the cost of this division was a whopping $3.3bn, up from $2.7bn in Q2 2021. The result is a loss of $2.8bn, up from a loss of $2.4bn in Q2 2021.

In other words, cost still far outstrips revenue for Meta’s VR and AR division – but critically, revenue has turned a corner and started to grow faster than costs.

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Looking at the graphic, you’d have to say that’s an excellent piece of spin. At this rate revenues would take decades to match costs. In theorry there should be a point where abruptly costs come down, and revenues take off. Zuckerberg needs to stay confident.
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Flood the zone with cheap drones • Lawfare

Nicholas Weaver:

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The continuing footage provided by small drones in the Ukraine area suggests an exploitable problem with Russian electronic warfare capabilities. These small drones are remote controlled, and the Russians seem to be neither effectively jamming nor attacking the drones’ controllers with artillery fire. This suggests a stunning deficiency in Russian military operations, one that the Ukrainian military—with quickly deployed foreign systems—should be able to further exploit.

The US has already begun to supply “low cost” Switchblade drones—small suicide drones with an explosive payload. The payload in these drones is not much, roughly equivalent to a 40 millimeter (mm) grenade. The US military has agreed to deliver 700 Switchblade 300s, which at an estimated $6,000 each, represents an investment of over $4m. The Switchblade itself is fairly sophisticated: It is launched from a portable tube launcher, and, after a target is selected, it flies into the target and explodes just before impact. 

But the key aspect is that a small explosive warhead, a mere 200 grams for a 40 mm grenade (just 33% heavier than a baseball), is remarkably effective when combined with the precision of a drone. Consider a long-ranged howitzer weapon and its crew. An artillery shell with 10 kilograms of explosive that lands 100 meters from the target will do less damage to personnel and equipment compared to a simple grenade delivered by a drone to explode on top of the gun’s breech.

But “low cost” by US military standards is still too expensive for supporting Ukraine in a war where Russia is firing 60,000 artillery shells per day. The Ukrainian military needs systems that are actually low cost, not “low cost” by our standards. It needs suicide drones that cost $500, not $6,000.

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Get it right and Ukraine could have 10 times as many drones as at present, for the same budget. Smart way to wage war.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The price of newsprint has rocketed by 40% in 18 months, putting a fresh squeeze on publishers of newspapers and magazines. CC-licensed photo by Jeff Eaton on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. The blue site is very much back. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook without news would be even worse • The Atlantic

Kaitlyn Tiffany:

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In November, I tried to make a fresh, totally apolitical account with a News Feed that would be devoid of anything that could possibly inspire a partisan opinion. As I wrote at the time, Facebook without news and politics (or, admittedly, any friends or family) amounted to little more than “bad advice, stolen memes, shady businesses, and sophomoric jokes repeated over and over.”

I’m far from the first person to point out that Facebook has been largely overrun with garbage content. Now [University of Quebec journalism professor Jean-Hugues] Roy’s study suggests that, without news links, many users will find almost nothing of value. Sarah Schmalbach, a product director who works in journalism, came to the same conclusion in 2016 after manually removing news from her own Facebook feed and seeing what was left: “mostly personal photos, advertisements and a range of rants.” Like Roy, Schmalbach suggests that companies like Facebook should be sharing revenue with news organizations.

In this context, Facebook’s News Feed—which has never been limited to news reports, per se—has been a site of anxiety for both users and the company itself, which tinkers with the items it promotes there, adjusting for emotional valence, political inflection, and concentration of media content. In April 2021, Product Management Director Aastha Gupta wrote in a company blog post that Facebook had heard its users’ wishes for “more inspiring and uplifting content,” and would be experimenting with moving “more inspirational posts” closer to the top of the News Feed. Six months later, The Washington Post’s Will Oremus argued that the feed had become a “junk-mail folder.”

In an email, a Facebook spokesperson told me that the “inspirational content” test is over, and that news-article links compose a very small part of the Facebook experience, making up only 4% of what users see in their feeds. The company cited the same statistic in February 2021, when it blocked news content for users in Australia.

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It’s dying. It’s a site that is dying, because what people post is so terrible that if it isn’t leavened with professionally produced content, nobody wants to read it. Or watch it. (Don’t ask me to explain why this doesn’t apply to TikTok: they’re teens. So, equivalent to professionals.)
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You don’t want the old Instagram • Lorenz’s Newsletter

Taylor Lorenz, apparently building a side line from the Washington Post – just in case?:

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We don’t want to express ourselves the way we did in 2014. Our notions of social norms, privacy, and what constitutes entertaining content are different now. Reverting Instagram into some old format would make it harder for us to express ourselves and connect in modern ways.

I understand people’s frustration with Instagram. It’s a saturated, messy product that’s clearly suffering an identity crisis. In 2017 I wrote about how the future would bring a fracturing between social (connecting with friends) and media (consuming content/entertainment). For the past 10 years Instagram has been both, and I think we’re finally seeing those tensions come to a head. 

The investor Rex Woodbury put it this way, “There’s a war between people who want Instagram to be more like Snapchat and people who want it to be more TikTok. Right now the former group is larger and louder.”

It’s tempting to think that if Instagram simply reverted to a previous design or reinstated a chronological feed, that would somehow bring us closer to the people we care about. But we don’t forge personal connections by sharing or commenting on highly personal public-facing photos that are permanently displayed on a grid anymore. These days, intimacy is fostered through features like DMs, group chats, or ephemeral posts to Close Friends. 

It’s a testament to Instagram that these viral protests are all centered around pressuring a multi billion dollar tech giant to figure out ways to get us all to spend more time on the app. But I don’t think that the next generation of social products will come from reverting to old features. I hope at least some people unsatisfied with what Instagram is offering try to build something new. 

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I think she’s right that Instagram is being torn in two directions – is it for creation, by us, the users, or consumption, by us, the users? Adam Mosseri, in his video the other day, seemed to suggest it was the creators who he wanted to keep happy. As a user, I don’t like the new Instagram appearance or feel. It used to be a small space of calm where you could contemplate nice photos, and moments from friends and acquaintances. Now, it’s a funfair barker of a place, yelling and recommending and scrolling and moving. I don’t like it. And, just to remind Instagram, there are more users than creators.
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Facebook parent Meta reports first ever revenue drop • WSJ

Salvador Rodriguez:

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“We seem to have entered an economic downturn that will have a broad impact on the digital advertising business,” chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday. “It’s always hard to predict how deep or how long these cycles will be, but I’d say that the situation seems worse than it did a quarter ago,” he said on an earnings call.

Meta is grappling with a digital advertising market in upheaval from soaring inflation and other factors that are causing a slowdown in ad spending. Google parent Alphabet Inc. on Tuesday reported the slowest rate of growth since the second quarter of 2020, when the pandemic crimped demand for advertising in some areas. Rival Snap Inc. reported its weakest-ever quarterly sales growth last week while Twitter reported a decline in revenue.

Meta also disclosed that Facebook’s daily active user base rose to 1.97 billion users. The figure was 1.96 billion three months ago. The increase defied expectations of analysts surveyed by FactSet who thought user numbers would fall.

The company posted a net profit of $6.7bn for the second quarter, the third quarter in a row Meta’s bottom line has fallen. The company hasn’t experienced such a slump since the fourth quarter of 2012.

The weak advertising demand was reflected in Meta’s average price per ad, which fell 14% in the quarter. A year ago, the company reported an increase of 47%, year over year, for its average price per ad.

Chief Financial Officer David Wehner said in a statement that the company, like others, is feeling the pinch from the strong dollar, which is weighing on the top line.

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But it’s also hurting from Apple making a small change in iOS: setting it to ask people if they wanted to be tracked when Facebook and others try to. Turns out, people don’t, and Facebook is paying the price, which is around $10bn. Most expensive modal box ever.
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Facebook considering ending restrictions on Covid misinformation • The Guardian

Alex Hern:

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Facebook is turning to its “supreme court” to decide whether to end restrictions on Covid misinformation, more than two years after the company first started to take special action on posts promoting falsehoods about the disease.

The social network is considering changing the way it deals with such misinformation by, for example, labelling it as false or demoting it in algorithmic ranking, rather than simply removing it from the site. It wants to make the change now, according to head of global affairs, Nick Clegg, “as many, though not all, countries around the world seek to return to more normal life”.

But in order to avoid making the wrong choice when “resolving the inherent tensions between free expression and safety”, Facebook will turn to its oversight board, the arms-length self-regulator set up in May 2020, to decide on what the future moderation policy should be.

…By requesting an opinion, Facebook is not committing to honour the judgment issued by the board, prompting some to question whether the site was simply seeking cover for making a decision likely to be broadly unpopular with a large section of society whatever it chooses.

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A good way to kick the topic into the long grass for three or four months at the minimum. By which time it should be clear whether Covid is still a substantial problem for Facebook’s most valuable users (in North America and Europe).
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FTC sues Meta to block acquisition of VR fitness app maker Within • Financial Times

Dave Lee:

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The US competition regulator is suing to block Meta from acquiring a virtual reality fitness start-up, accusing the social networking giant of “illegally” trying to “buy its way to the top” of the nascent metaverse sector.

The Federal Trade Commission’s case centres on a deal struck last year by Meta, formerly known as Facebook, to acquire Within, the creator of a popular virtual reality fitness game, Supernatural. The app is one of the most popular on Meta’s virtual reality system, Meta Quest. The amount of the transaction was not disclosed.

The FTC, led by Biden appointee and prominent Big Tech critic Lina Khan, has now moved to stop the takeover, accusing Meta of using its power to cement its dominant position in the growing market.

“Instead of competing on the merits, Meta is trying to buy its way to the top,” said John Newman, the competition regulator’s deputy director for competition.

“Meta already owns a best-selling virtual reality fitness app, and it had the capabilities to compete even more closely with Within’s popular Supernatural app. But Meta chose to buy market position instead of earning it on the merits. This is an illegal acquisition, and we will pursue all appropriate relief.”

…Meta said the FTC’s complaint was based on “ideology and speculation, not evidence”.

…“By attacking this deal in a 3-2 vote, the FTC is sending a chilling message to anyone who wishes to innovate in VR. We are confident that our acquisition of Within will be good for people, developers, and the VR space.”

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Not forgetting that Meta is mad keen to do as much VR as it possibly can, so this block – orchestrated by Khan – will be extra galling.
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Newspaper and magazine publishers are freaking out over soaring paper prices • Business Insider

Lara O’Reilly:

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Publishers around the globe are drawing up worst-case scenario plans amid the soaring cost and scarcity of paper that threatens the future of their print newspapers and magazines.

Newsprint in the UK was priced at around 360 pounds ($426) per ton in the first quarter of 2021; now the price has almost doubled to around £710 ($841), said Rick Stunt, group paper director at DMG media, which prints The Daily Mail and dozens of regional titles. It represents a 40% premium on the historic high of £510 per ton, he said.

In the US, the price has risen by a similar percentage, to around $800 a ton, according to Stunt.

“These are big increases. We don’t usually get this over an 18-month period,” said Stunt. “In the past, really big increases were about 20 to 25%.”

As demand for paper declined over the last 20 to 30 years amid the digital revolution, paper mills across the world shut down. Then along came the COVID-19 pandemic and the labour shortages and supply chain snafus that followed. Added to an already tight market, demand for cardboard packages soared amid the ecommerce boom. This year, rising inflation and ballooning energy costs have made an already bad situation worse for paper supply.

“From an industry perspective it’s a disaster because you’ve got no choice but to reduce the amount of pages you print, choose to increase your cover price, or a combination thereof — and that will reduce demand,” said an executive at the UK’s Daily Telegraph who said they were confident they could absorb the cost by passing on the price to subscribers.

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Never rains but it pours for physical papers these days. The ad slowdown is coming too, and that has them very worried as well: a perfect storm to add to the one that has been ongoing for years now.
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Google is bringing back Street View to India • Money Control

Vikas Sn:

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Google announced on July 27 that it is relaunching Street View on Google Maps in India, more than a decade after the service was suspended in the country for failing to secure the requisite security clearances from the government.

This time around, the internet giant is partnering with two local firms – 3D mapping content and geospatial solutions firm Genesys International and IT services firm Tech Mahindra – to offer the service to Indian consumers.

Street View’s India rollout is the first time that Google has tied up with local partners to offer the service to consumers, a model it hopes to scale in other parts of the world as well.

Google said the service will initially be available in 10 cities including Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune, Nashik, Vadodara, Ahmednagar, and Amritsar with plans to expand it to more than 50 cities by the end of 2022.

Users will be able to access this feature by opening the Google Maps app, zooming into a road in any of these cities and tapping the area they want to see. The idea is to provide users with an experience as good as walking down the road on their desktop or mobile phone.

The company claims that it has licensed fresh imagery from its local partners spanning over 150,000 km across these ten cities. It also plans to offer Street View APIs to local developers to help them deliver richer mapping experiences in their services.

…Google, which typically collects street-level imagery for the service by itself through cars and bikes fitted with cameras, had to take the licensing route in India due to the country’s recent geospatial policy which requires that only local entities acquire, collect, store and own the imagery data.

«

Possibly saves it a ton of money not having to do all the scanning, and just licensing it. India’s approach to keeping its data at home is novel.
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Crown court sentencing remarks to be televised for first time • The Guardian

Haroon Siddique:

»

The Old Bailey will be opened up to cameras on Thursday as sentencing remarks from a crown court case in England and Wales are broadcast for the first time.

The move, which comes after a change in the law, is intended to help the public get a better understanding of how sentencing decisions are taken. Previously, proceedings have only been broadcast at the supreme court (since its 2009 inauguration) and the court of appeal (since 2009).

Any crown court sentencing where cameras are allowed will be shown on a dedicated YouTube channel hosted by Sky News, which will have a 10-second delay for live proceedings to avoid any breach of restrictions or errors. Other broadcasters can also apply to broadcast sentencing remarks.

The sentencing at the Old Bailey of Ben Oliver, who pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of his grandfather, David Oliver, in south London, is expected to be the first case shown if the judge agrees.

The lord chancellor, Dominic Raab, said: “Opening up the courtroom to cameras to film the sentencing of some the country’s most serious offenders will improve transparency and reinforce confidence in the justice system. The public will now be able to see justice handed down, helping them understand better the complex decisions judges make.”

«

Certainly novel for this government to be interested in people understanding judges making complex decisions. As a reminder, the business secretary Kwasi Karteng once said “many people” thought judges were biased over Brexit; he wasn’t suggesting those people were wrong, either.
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Monkeypox is in Bay Area wastewater • MIT Technology Review

Hana Kiros:

»

Last month, Stanford’s Sewer Coronavirus Alert Network, or SCAN, added monkeypox to the suite of viruses it checks wastewater for daily. Since then, monkeypox has been detected in 10 of the 11 sewer systems that SCAN tests, including those in Sacramento, Palo Alto, and several other cities in California’s Bay Area.

As of July 21, the US had recorded 2,593 monkeypox cases. Globally, the virus has been detected in 74 countries—68 of which have not historically reported monkeypox. On July 23, the WHO took the step of declaring the outbreak a global health emergency.

SCAN began to monitor California wastewater for Covid-19 in 2020. It’s the only public effort in the US to test if monkeypox is detectable in the shower, sink, and toilet water that is sent to wastewater treatment plants for decontamination. Extracting genetic material from the solids absorbed in raw, unprocessed sewage can provide a community-level look at where a virus or bacteria has spread, and how prevalent an outbreak is. 

Over the past two years, the concentration of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in wastewater has mirrored trends in Covid-19 cases confirmed by testing individuals. In late 2021, wastewater surveillance suggested the omicron variant was prevalent in the US much earlier than clinical testing reported.

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Wastewater testing is an underrated technique, but the UK seems to be planning to scale it down.
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M1 Mac Pro reportedly scrapped as Apple plans M2 push this autumn • MacWorld

Michael Simon:

»

[Bloomberg writer Mark] Gurman said Apple will be updating both the M1 Mac mini and the higher-end Intel version with M2 and M2 Pro chips, respectively, but doesn’t think the machines will have a redesign, as has been rumored. He said it would be “odd” for Apple to introduce a new Mac mini design following the launch of the Mac Studio. 

As for the long-awaited Mac Pro with Apple silicon, Gurman reveals that Apple planned to launch an M1-based Mac Pro “months ago” but “scrapped” it to work on a model with an M2. He doesn’t expect Apple to launch the high-end workstation until next year as a result of production and supply issues.

Finally, Gurman thinks Face ID on the Mac is a long way off. Despite the addition of the notch, he doesn’t expect it to come to the M2 MacBook Pro anytime soon. In fact, he thinks it’ll come to the higher-end iMac models first. That could come with the M3 iMac, since Gurman thinks Apple will skip the M2 chip in the all-in-one machine.

«

An M1-based Mac Pro did seem like an absolute shoo-in for a while, when the new M1 chips (Pro, Max, Ultra) were announced, but the introduction of the M2 made it absolutely obvious that there was no chance. Fairly sure that a specced-out Studio will do the job for most people in the meantime, since it’s far more powerful than anything that’s been out there for ages.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The price of British fish and chips is set to soar, because much of the fish used comes from… Russia? CC-licensed photo by mangocyborgmangocyborg on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. Unsalted. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Mark Zuckerberg braces Meta employees for ‘intense period’ • The Verge

Alex Heath and David Pierce:

»

“Hi there,” the first prerecorded employee question started. “I’m Gary, and I’m located in Chicago.” His question: would Meta Days — extra days off introduced during the pandemic — continue in 2023?

Zuckerberg appeared visibly frustrated. “Um… all right,” he stammered. He’d just explained that he thought the economy was headed for one of the “worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history.” He’d already frozen hiring in many areas. TikTok was eating their lunch, and it would take over a year and a half before they had “line of sight” to overtaking it.

And Gary from Chicago was asking about extra vacation days?

“Given my tone in the rest of the Q&A, you can probably imagine what my reaction to this is,” Zuckerberg said. After this year, Meta Days were canceled.

For Zuckerberg, the company he founded 18 years ago was facing existential threats on multiple fronts. Both Facebook and Instagram were being rearchitected to compete with TikTok. Apple’s iOS privacy settings had disrupted the company’s once-stable ad business, costing it billions in revenue. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg’s bet on the metaverse was a money pit that he didn’t see turning a profit until at least the end of the decade.

But first, Gary from Chicago. As the all-hands escalated, it became clear that Zuckerberg saw that fixing his company’s culture was critical to surviving the tough times ahead. Two years into the pandemic, his company was in a very different, more vulnerable place. It even had a new name.

The days of coddling employees would be over.

“Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” Zuckerberg said on the June 30th call, according to a recording obtained by The Verge. “And part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might just say that this place isn’t for you. And that self-selection is okay with me.”

«

Zuckerberg growing angry with those who tend to his creation? That seems like a first. But things are changing…
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Facebook’s TikTok-like redesign marks the sunset of social networking era • Axios

Scott Rosenberg:

»

Under the social network model, which piggybacked on the rise of smartphones to mold billions of users’ digital experiences, keeping up with your friends’ posts served as the hub for everything you might aim to do online.

Now Facebook wants to shape your online life around the algorithmically-sorted preferences of millions of strangers around the globe.

That’s how TikTok sorts the videos it shows users, and that’s largely how Facebook will now organize its home screen.

The dominant player in social media is transforming itself into a kind of digital mass media, in which the reactions of hordes of anonymous users, processed by machine learning, drive the selection of your content.

Facebook and its rivals call this a “discovery engine” because it reliably spits out recommendations of posts from everywhere that might hold your attention.

But it also looks a lot like a mutant TV with an infinite number of context-free channels that flash in and out of focus at high speed.

That’s what younger users right now seem to prefer, and it’s where Facebook expects the growth of its business to lie, now that new privacy rules from Apple and regulators’ threats around the world have made its existing ad-targeting model precarious.

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Coronavirus jumped to humans at least twice at market in Wuhan, China • EurekAlert!

»

elemental to understanding pandemic origins is pinpointing not just where, but how, a pathogen successfully jumps from a non-human animal host to human, known as a zoonotic event.

“I think there’s been consensus that this virus did in fact come from the Huanan Market, but a strong case for multiple introductions hasn’t been made by anyone else yet,” said Joel Wertheim, senior author of the study that posits the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, jumped from animals to humans at least twice and perhaps as many as two dozen times.

According to researchers, two evolutionary branches of the virus were present early in the pandemic, differentiated only by two differences in nucleotides — the basic building blocks of DNA and RNA.

Lineage B, which included samples from people who worked at and visited the market, became globally dominant. Lineage A spread within China, and included samples from people pinpointed only to the vicinity the market. If the viruses in lineage A evolved from those in lineage B, or vice versa, Wertheim said this would suggest SARS-CoV-2 jumped only once from animals to humans.

But work by Wertheim and collaborators found that the earliest SARS-CoV-2 genomes were inconsistent with a single zoonotic jump into humans. Rather, the first zoonotic transmission likely occurred with lineage B viruses in late-November 2019 while the introduction of lineage A into humans likely occurred within weeks of the first event. Both strains were present at the market simultaneously.

Researchers arrived at this conclusion by deciphering the evolutionary rate of viral genomes to deduce whether or not the two lineages diverged from a single common ancestor in humans. They used a technique called molecular clock analysis and an epidemic simulation tool called FAVITES, invented by Wertheim team member Niema Moshiri, PhD, an assistant professor of computer science at Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego and study co-author.

«

The dual lineage data, which has been known for a long time, had always been a puzzle. Now they seem to have worked it out: two instances where the virus crossed from animals to humans, at almost the same time. This paper looks at the epidemiological spread related to the market; this looks at the genomes. There are also some tweet threads by authors of the papers.

This will put an end to all the claims about lab leaks, right?
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Drought fears after England suffers driest spell since 1976 • The Times

Ali Mitib, Anna Lombardi, Venetia Menzies:

»

England is facing a drought next month as analysis shows that the first six months of this year were the driest since 1976.

The government and water companies will hold an emergency meeting tomorrow to discuss potential hosepipe bans and restrictions on farmers under a drought plan.

The country is not yet in widespread drought but most of England except for the northwest has moved into a state of “prolonged dry weather”, the step before drought is declared, the Environment Agency said.

The last time drought was declared was in 2018.

England and Wales recorded 330.9mm of rain from January to June, the least since the summer of 1976, a Times analysis of Met Office data shows. It was the 12th lowest rainfall in the period since 1900.

The figure is a sharp drop from previous years and comes after a drier than average winter. The forecaster recorded 471.7 mm of rainfall from January to June in 2021 and 455.7 mm in the year before that.

Mark McCarthy, a science manager at the Met Office, said it recorded a succession of drier-than-average months in England and Wales. Only February registered more rain than average.

He said Atlantic rain systems had moved further north this year, hitting Iceland and Scandinavia but missing large parts of the rest of Europe.

«

There’s a graph of rainfall for the first six months of the year, and to be honest it looks like a random walk. But having the hottest-ever days plus the least rain starts to look like part of a pattern.
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Can ring vaccination contain monkeypox in the US? • WIRED

Maryn McKenna:

»

In the last years of the campaign to eradicate smallpox, the health workers fanning out to the disease’s stubborn hot spots developed a strategy: Official reports or gossip relayed by missionaries and village kids would identify someone carrying the disease’s telltale blisters. The health workers would track down the unlucky person, and then launch into quick interviews with them: What did they do everyday? Where did they go? Who were their closest contacts? Then they would find those people, assess whether they were infected, and repeat the process, rapidly constructing a map of an invisible network nestled inside a village’s visible society.

Their final action would be to vaccinate everyone within the network, drawing an immunological barrier around the group and blocking the virus’s transmission to the rest of the village. This ring vaccination strategy, as it came to be called, used fewer vaccine doses and required fewer personnel than the mass vaccination campaigns that preceded it. It closed the loop around the last natural case of smallpox in 1977, and allowed it to be eradicated—the only human disease for which that’s happened—in 1980.

Four decades on, the World Health Organization and major governments, including Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, have said ring vaccination is the preferred strategy for controlling the new pox epidemic: monkeypox. It began spreading in Europe in May and has now caused more than 15,500 cases worldwide, including more than 10,000 in Europe and almost 2,600 in the US. The strategy makes sense, hypothetically: Compared to trying to vaccinate everyone, ring vaccination is a faster, cheaper, more targeted means of getting a pathogen under control. But whether ring vaccination is achievable now for monkeypox is an open question.

«

We can hope, but the CDC didn’t cover itself in glory during Covid – it’s become too politicised, not focused enough on expertise – and seems to have been caught flatfooted by this. (Thanks G for the link.)
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Half of Britain’s fish and chip shops could close due to soaring prices • The Sun

Natasha Clark:

»

Half of Britain’s 10,500 fish and chip shops could close due to rocketing costs.

As many as 5,000 face being battered by crippling tariffs and the soaring prices of ingredients, government figures reveal. The combination means the price of a fish and chip supper could rise from an average £8.50 to £11.50, and hake and other types of white fish could replace traditional cod and haddock shipped in from overseas.

The latest blow came last week when ministers pressed ahead with a 35% tariff on all seafood imported from Russia in a bid to hammer President Vladimir Putin over his invasion of Ukraine. Around a third of all white fish imported to the UK comes from Russia, which controls up to 45% of the global supply.

Lancashire chip shop owner Andrew Crook, of the National Federation of Fish Friers, said his cod supplies have already risen from £8 to £14 a kilo.

He warned: “These extra tariffs will push thousands of shops over the edge.”

The Sun understands the issue split the Cabinet — with Boris Johnson insisting standing with Ukraine was worth the price.

«

Didn’t know that about Russia’s role in fish supply.

The move was postponed in April to “discuss the potential effect” with seafood firms. Wonder what they said? Anyway, here’s what Seafood Source says:

»

The United Kingdom is heavily reliant on imported whitefish to meet demand, sourcing 432,000 metric tons (MT) with a value of almost £800m ($1bn, €952.1m) in 2020. According to U.K. public body Seafish, the United Kingdom imported 48,000 metric tons (MT) of whitefish directly from Russia in 2020. A considerable proportion of Chinese whitefish imports was also of Russian origin.

«

Can’t find a figure for the UK’s total consumption of whitefish, though. Notice in passing the dig at Johnson as not caring about (y)our local chippie.
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Zimbabwe launches gold coins as legal tender to tackle hyperinflation • Sky News

»

Zimbabwe has launched new gold coins to be sold to the public in a bid to tackle chronic hyperinflation.

The gold coins – called Mosi-oa-Tunya – will have “liquid asset status”, meaning they can be converted to cash, traded locally and internationally, and used for transactions, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe said.

People can only trade the coins for cash after holding them for at least 180 days.

Zimbabwean economist Prosper Chitambara said: “The government is trying to moderate the very high demand for the US dollar because this high demand is not being matched by supply.”

According to the International Monetary Fund, inflation in Zimbabwe reached 837% (year on year) in July 2020 and, although tighter fiscal policy helped reduce it to 60.7% by the end of last year, it remains in the high double-digits.

This wipes away the value of people’s savings – many people saw their savings wiped out by the 5 billion% inflation seen in 2008, according to the IMF.

This insecurity affects trust in the local currency, the Zimbabwe dollar – many retailers don’t accept it and many Zimbabweans prefer to use US dollars for savings or daily transactions.

«

Not being able to spend it until you’ve held it for a while is a smart way to reduce the velocity of the money in circulation (a factor in inflation). But six months is a long time to hold on to it in a country where savings have been wiped out. (Also, where are all the people saying “they should have used bitcoin”?)
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Eutelsat boss battles to convince investors of OneWeb deal • Financial Times

Leila Abboud, Jim Pickard, Peggy Hollinger and Harriet Agnew:

»

Eutelsat’s chief executive Eva Berneke was on Tuesday battling to convince shareholders in the French satellite group of the case for combining with UK start-up OneWeb, admitting that the merger marked a “big change” for a company prized for its dividends.

Shares in Paris-listed Eutelsat have tumbled more than 30% since the group revealed on Monday that it was in talks over an all-share deal with OneWeb, a satellite group backed by SoftBank and rescued from bankruptcy in 2020 by the UK government and Indian telecoms billionaire Sunil Bharti Mittal.

Announcing the deal on Tuesday, Eutelsat said it would suspend its dividend for two years to plough investment into OneWeb’s low Earth orbit satellite network. Billed as a merger of equals, the companies cast the tie-up as a step towards creating a European champion better positioned to compete with billionaire space entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

Eutelsat and OneWeb said in a joint statement that the proposed transaction would create a stronger player to offer space connectivity for everything from cruise ships to rural areas by combining Eutelsat’s fleet of 36 geostationary satellites with OneWeb’s constellation of 648 low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites.

«

Shareholders are fleeing this (the fall in share price reflects falling belief in total profit the company will make over its lifetime).

OneWeb really is something of an anchor.
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Why one critical second can wreak havoc on the internet • CNET

Stephen Shankland:

»

Since 1972, the world’s timekeeping authorities have added a leap second 27 times to the global clock known as the International Atomic Time (TAI). Instead of 23:59:59 changing to 0:0:0 at midnight, an extra 23:59:60 is tucked in. That causes a lot of indigestion for computers, which rely on a network of precise timekeeping servers to schedule events and to record the exact sequence of activities like adding data to a database.

The temporal tweak causes more problems – like internet outages – than benefits, they say. And dealing with leap seconds ultimately is futile, the group argues, since the Earth’s rotational speed hasn’t actually changed much historically.

“We are predicting that if we just stick to the TAI without leap second observation, we should be good for at least 2,000 years,” research scientist Ahmad Byagowi of Facebook parent company Meta said via email. “Perhaps at that point we might need to consider a correction.*

The tech giants and two key agencies agree that it’s time to ditch the leap second. Those are the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and its French equivalent, the Bureau International de Poids et Mesures (BIPM).

This governmental support is critical, given that ultimately it is governments and scientists – not technology companies – that are in charge of the world’s global clock system.  

The leap second change triggered a massive Reddit outage in 2012, as well as related problems at Mozilla, LinkedIn, Yelp and airline booking service Amadeus. In 2017, a leap second glitch at Cloudflare knocked a fraction of the network infrastructure company’s customers’ servers offline.

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Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon are all behind this. So we’d stop making our timepieces accord with the Earth’s rotation because it upsets our computers. But.. though the drift wouldn’t be big, it would be there. Does that mean we change the times of dawn?
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How Generation Z became obsessed with subtitles • Daily Telegraph

Guy Kelly:

»

If you ever stray onto social media, it’s likely you’ve seen the memes. Screenshots from Stranger Things, frozen with a wonderfully descriptive sound-effect caption at the bottom of the screen. “Eldritch thrumming,” is one (eldritch being a synonym for “supernatural”). “Desiccated withering” is another, plus “wet writhing” and “sibilant trilling”.

In the spirit of popular “no-context” Twitter accounts (accounts devoted to the posting of random screenshots from films or TV shows), the images are often funniest without explanation – or, in the case of Stranger Things, simply pointing out that each one would make a fine band name.

The novelist Jonathan Coe probably expressed it best. “Whoever writes the Stranger Things subtitles is definitely a frustrated poet,” he tweeted. A frustrated poet, or at least somebody slowly working through the thesaurus entry for “moist” and thoroughly enjoying it.

Plenty is written about the death of reading among Generation Z, but those critics clearly aren’t taking into account the millions of words they consume every year while watching TV and films. A 2021 survey by the captioning charity Stagetext found that in the 18-25 age group, four out of five use subtitles all or part of the time, despite having fewer hearing problems than older generations. By contrast, less than a quarter of those aged between 56 and 75 said they watch with captions on.

Explanations for this sudden surge in read-watching among young people are many and varied. Ranging from US audiences increasingly watching British shows with impenetrable-to-their-ears regional accents, such as Peaky Blinders or Derry Girls, to the frequent complaint that modern dramatic actors – who aim for realism over perfect diction but land squarely at “incoherent murmuring” – are just too mumbly for even perfect ears to follow without assistance.

«

I suspect American viewers had to have Derry Girls on subtitles, and even then probably struggled. (“Catch yourself on!”) But the key point is that bit towards the end: the incoherent murmuring and mumbling. It’s the audio equivalent of Game Of Thrones’s battles carried out at night under poor lighting: bloody hard to figure out what’s going on.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

During last week’s heatwave, a blackout was only averted in London by buying electricity from Belgium at eyewatering prices. CC-licensed photo by Eduardo Zárate on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. How much again? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How London paid a record price to dodge a blackout • Bloomberg via The Washington Post

Javier Blas:

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Last week, unbeknown to many outside the power industry, parts of London came remarkably close to a blackout — even as it was recovering from the hottest day in British history. On July 20, surging electricity demand collided with a bottleneck in the grid, leaving the eastern part of the British capital briefly short of power. Only by paying a record high £9,724.54 (about $11,685) per megawatt hour — more than 5,000% higher than the typical price — did the UK avoid homes and businesses going dark. That was the nosebleed cost to persuade Belgium to crank up ageing electricity plants to send energy across the English Channel.

The crisis, which quietly played out within the control room of the British electricity system, shows the growing vulnerability of energy transportation networks — power grids and gas and oil pipelines — across much of the industrialized world after years of low investment and not-in-my-backyard opposition.

On most days, the bottlenecks mean distorted costs. Sometimes, it results in sky-high prices where energy is in short supply when it is needed. At other occasions, prices can tumble to zero, or go negative, when producers cannot sell their power into a congested transmission system. Increasingly, it puts the whole system at risk. Talk to most industry executives and you quickly get the sense that we are sleepwalking into more blackouts. Discuss the problems with the engineers who manage the system day-in, day-out, and that danger appears even closer.

The £9,724.54 price, settled between noon and 1:00 p.m. on July 20 via the so-called NEMO interconnector that links the UK with Belgium, was the highest Britain has ever paid to import electricity, nearly five times higher than the previous record. The absurdity of that level is apparent when comparing it with the year-to-date average for UK spot electricity: £178 per megawatt hour.

“It was an absolute shock,” says Phil Hewitt, who has been monitoring electricity prices for over two decades and is now executive director of EnAppSys Ltd, a consultancy. “It was the price to keep the lights on. The security of supply was at stake.”

The actual amount of electricity bought at the record price was tiny: enough to supply just eight houses for a year. More power was bought at slightly lower prices. The payments, nonetheless, highlight desperation: buying across the channel was, for 60 minutes or so, the only option to balance the system.

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The supply exists, but there hasn’t been enough investment in the grid. In its way, the same story as Texas. And it’s going to get worse.
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Apple politely explains why iPhone cases are a waste of money • ZDNet

Chris Matyszczyk:

»

Have you ever seen an Apple executive wrap their iPhone in a case? No, you haven’t. But even that example hasn’t been sufficient. So the company has now released an ad, surely intended to help you wean yourself off your unaesthetic, anti-aesthetic behavior.

An iPhone 13 is perched on the edge of a table. It has no case. It begins to ring.

You know what happens when an iPhone that’s lying on a hard surface rings on vibrate, don’t you? It vibrates. It begins to move. Just like a salad spinner if you leave it spinning on your kitchen countertop.

Here, though, you know what’s about to happen. The portentous music helps you along.

Down goes the iPhone.

Do we see what state it’s in once it hits the floor? We don’t. But we do hear it keeps on ringing, so we have to infer nothing untoward has happened.

“iPhone 13 with Ceramic Shield. Tougher than any smartphone glass. Relax, it’s iPhone,” says Apple.

You see? Apple is sending you a message. Take off your cloaks. Be not afraid. Remove your veil and live to the fullest.

If only you could relax enough to add a tiny amount to this world’s beauty. To counteract all its ugliness, you understand.

«

Haven’t used a case for years and years. Have dropped it, and the glass is slightly cracked. So put a protector on the glass. Slightly cracked that. Life goes on.
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A goldmine of flubbing bloopers • The Guardian

Rick Burin on the DVDs that are floating around, samizdat-like, of early film stars fluffing their lines:

»

[Humphrey] Bogart and George Brent seem prickly and short-tempered, while [James] Cagney laughs off his mistakes. Pat O’Brien appears to enjoy slipping up: whether he’s forgetting dialogue, choking on a drink, or pulling off his own hairpiece during a fight. [Bette] Davis, meanwhile, is engaged in a running battle with the wardrobe department. She trips over her costume, complains she can’t move her head without her wig falling off and spoils an otherwise exemplary take by becoming caught on a co-star’s buttonhole. Edward G Robinson, so frequently cast as a pitiless gangster, looks most affable, often grinning widely after a gaffe.

“The Breakdown reels are a very insightful view into the overall spirit of Warner Bros in its formative years,” says Warner’s George Feltenstein. “No other studio could let their hair down and have a little fun at their own expense the way this company did.”

Much of the material is extraordinary. There’s Gary Cooper breaking off from his Oscar-winning performance in Sergeant York to wonder, “That’s sure some accent I’ve got,” and Carole Lombard destroying the delicate artifice of cinema as she sits down to a supposedly sumptuous screen meal. “The food’s too tough to cut,” she says, laughing, “and it’s not warm.”

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Some of these clips are floating around on Twitter: here’s a quick collection, in a tweet..
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Inside the global gig economy of werewolf erotica • Rest of World

Viola Zhou and Meaghan Tobin:

»

Georgina Boyes-Macintosh loves to read. The mother of four from New Zealand recently raced through a steamy romance novel series about love and betrayal among a territorial pack of werewolves in the pine forests of the American West. But she couldn’t just pop into Whitcoulls, the local bookstore chain, to find out what happened to the protagonist’s secret baby with her unfaithful werewolf ex-husband. She could only access the next installment by spending coins earned on the Asia-based social reading app Dreame, where new chapters arrive weekly. “I read as a form of escapism from reality,” Boyes-Macintosh told Rest of World.

The central characters of many of Dreame’s most beloved werewolf novels often inhabit Americanized settings, but the authors don’t typically live in the U.S. Rather, they come from countries like Mexico, the Philippines, Nigeria, and China – and often write novels in their second or third language. One student in Bangladesh, who writes under the pen name Anamika, spends five hours a day, seven days per week writing romance novels. She ends each chapter with a cliffhanger to keep readers hooked. Each book earns her up to $300, along with adoring messages from Western fans. “They are very sweet,” she said. “Their comments are my encouragement.” 

The emerging web novel industry spans the globe, taking a business model from Asia, assembling a global supply chain of authors in lower-income countries, and paying them to churn out thousands of words a day for English-speaking readers in the West. Rest of World spoke to four current and former employees at these platforms, who described how the art of novel writing is broken down into a formula to be followed: take a popular theme like werewolves, sprinkle it with certain tropes like a forbidden romance, and write as many chapters as you can. Some novels have hundreds of chapters, most ending on a cliffhanger to keep readers engaged and eager to read on.

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Very Dickensian – literally: he wrote his books in serialised chapters, often leaving cliffhangers to ensure readers would come back for more. If he’d been smart enough to include a werewolf or two, who knows how widely he might be remembered now.
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TikTok won • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick:

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over the weekend, Meta’s war on TikTok was taken a step further. The Verge reported that public Instagram content will be “remixable” by default. Public photos on the app can be pulled seamlessly into Reels. It’s obvious that this is Meta’s attempt at competing with TikTok’s fairly revolutionary “duet” feature, which allows videos to be pulled into other videos, like you would a quote tweet or a reblog. But the fact that Instagram has set remixes as the default is already causing chaos on the app. Photographers, in particular, are not happy about this, but the feature also seems tailor-made to abuse and harass people. One person told me they’ve already seen the feature being used to populate a catfish account.

Meta seems to have correctly identified what people like about TikTok — short-form videos, remixable video and audio editing tools that works on mobile, and creators that make stuff rather than influence things — but they’re still trying to jam those features into an ecosystem that wasn’t built for them. Namely, Meta doesn’t have an app that anyone makes stuff for anymore. Not in a way that could meaningfully compete with TikTok’s completely democratized and seemingly-infinite army of (unpaid) creators who are ready and willing to jump on whatever’s trending.

In fact, let’s play a little thought experiment. If you wanted to take out your phone and either snap a picture or record a video and have it be seen by as many people as humanly possible, where would you upload it? Depending on how you use the internet, I’m sure there’s a couple of apps that just cycled through your head. But I’m going to guess Facebook was not anywhere near the top of that list. And I’m going to guess that if Instagram was on that list, it’s not nearly as high up on it as it would have been if we had done that experiment three or four years ago.

«

The new Instagram layout is not popular. Kylie Jenner, who in 2018 knocked a $1bn hole in Snapchat’s value by complaining she didn’t like its new design, has complained on Instagram: “Make Instagram Instagram again. Stop trying to be TikTok I just want to see cut photos of my friends, Sincerely Everyone. PLEASEEEEEE”. Ignore her at your peril, Zuckerberg.
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How crypto is evolving the future of books and publishing • Esquire

Elle Griffin:

»

What if you could own a stake in Harry Potter?

What if the book series functioned like a publicly traded company where individuals could “buy stock” in it, and as the franchise grows, those “stocks” become more valuable? If this were the case, someone who purchased just three% of Harry Potter back when there was only one book would be a billionaire now.

Just imagine how that would affect the reading experience. Suddenly a trip to Barnes & Noble becomes an investment opportunity. Early readers could spot “the next big thing” and make a $100 contribution that becomes $10,000 or even $100,000 if the book’s popularity grows. If readers could own a percentage of the franchise, they might then be incentivized to help that book succeed. They could start a TikTok account to promote the book via BookTok, or use their talents as filmmakers to adapt it to the screen. All of this stands to increase the value of their original investment.

“Imagine when all of an author’s readers can suddenly make money as well,” says ​​Margarita Guerrero, head of partner and publishing relations at the publishing startup Readl. “How much more would they be engaged?”

This is the future an emerging number of publishing startups are after—aiming to change the value of a book from a $10 Amazon purchase to a $100 investment opportunity, while creating a market of readers excited to see the books they love succeed.

It might not work—finding readers (and investors) will be a challenge—but if they succeed, their vision could bode very well for the author who, in this scenario, could retain a percentage ownership of these “stocks” and earn value alongside their investors—just like Jeff Bezos retains a percentage of Amazon stock and grows richer as his company’s shares gain value.

«

“Finding readers (and investors) will be a challenge”? In the words of the famous recipe for hare stew, “first, catch your hare“. These pipe dreams for crypto are just barking. If you wrote the next Harry Potter, you wouldn’t want people on your coattails (JK Rowling’s agent excepted, on 15% probably).

It’s just mad. You can already write fan fiction, and ask for donations. Or publish an ebook on Amazon. All simple. Not the hackable madness of “web3”.
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Intel’s turnaround and US chipmaking get a boost with MediaTek deal • CNET

Stephen Shankland:

»

Intel has signed up Taiwanese smartphone chip designer MediaTek as a major ally in its effort to reclaim its chipmaking leadership and ultimately restore the United States’ processor manufacturing prowess.

The partnership, revealed Monday, is important for the establishment of Intel Foundry Services, an effort to dramatically expand and transform Intel’s chipmaking business by making chips for other companies. Intel lost its lead with years of manufacturing problems that stalled it during the ascent of two Asian foundries, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and Samsung.

“MediaTek has been a close partner with TSMC, so it is a pretty big deal,” Tirias Research analyst Kevin Krewell said of Intel’s MediaTek partnership.

The deal comes at an opportune time for Intel. It could help draw attention to the importance of US semiconductor manufacturing, the issue at the heart of the $52bn in CHIPS Act spending that Intel is trying to persuade Congress to pass. Intel has been lobbying for the subsidies, postponing a groundbreaking ceremony for a new Ohio manufacturing site where Intel is investing at least $20bn.

«

Interesting win for Intel. Maybe we should coin a phrase, like “chips are the new oil” or something. Talking of which…
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Computer chip shortage hits Detroit • The Washington Post

Jeanne Whalen:

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Detroit’s experience shows how thoroughly the nearly two-year-old semiconductor shortage has upended manufacturing — and foisted change on one of America’s most beloved consumer markets.

…Gone are the days when buyers could drop in on a dealership and drive home in a cherry-red convertible packed with their favorite features. Buying a car now means placing an order and waiting, sometimes for months, for the vehicle to arrive.

Also gone are the days when buyers could count on finding affordable wheels. The average U.S. list price for a new car has risen by 20% over the past two years, to $45,975, according to data provider Cox Automotive. The average for a used car has soared even more — by 40%, to $28,012.

Those spikes have been a major factor fueling inflation, which hit a 40-year high last month. A new car is increasingly “a luxury product for wealthy people,” said Charlie Chesbrough, senior economist at Cox Automotive. “For a $60,000- or $70,000-a-year household, you can’t afford a new car payment.”

The global auto industry produced 8.2 million fewer vehicles last year than it would have without the chip shortage, according to the consulting firm AlixPartners. And the outlook for 2022 remains bleak, with automakers projected to sell just 14.4 million new cars in the United States, down from roughly 17 million in 2019.

…When an automaker is missing one piece of the puzzle, it can suddenly halt production and force dozens of suppliers to idle their factories, leaving everyone frustrated, said Thomas Kowal, president of Seraph, a global consulting firm with Troy, Mich., offices that have been busy advising carmakers and suppliers how to navigate the shortages.

An automaker might suddenly tell suppliers, “Hey, we don’t need to run production on Friday,” Kowal said. Then on Saturday it might demand that suppliers haul their workers in to churn out parts over the weekend. “It’s like it’s a yo-yo, constantly,” Kowal said.

«

Wonder if that, plus the spike in fuel prices, will hurry the shift to EVs. No indication from anyone interviewed in the story – but Tesla was the only carmaker to sell more this past quarter.
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Eutelsat shares tumble after confirming OneWeb deal talks • Financial Times

Leila Abboud, Peggy Hollinger, Arash Massoudi and Harriet Agnew:

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French satellite operator Eutelsat has confirmed it is in discussions to acquire smaller rival OneWeb in an all-share deal designed to help the groups challenge billionaire space entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

Under the terms being discussed, the OneWeb and Eutelsat tie-up is being branded as a merger of equals with each set of shareholders ending up with 50% of the combined company. OneWeb shareholders would tender their shares to Eutelsat in exchange for Eutelsat shares.

Eutelsat’s share price tumbled more than 17% to close at €8.57 on Monday as investors balked at the prospect of a deal.

If completed, the combination would address Eutelsat’s need for growth to offset a declining satellite video business and OneWeb’s requirement for $2bn to $3bn in investment to complete its network and update its technology, according to people close to the talks.

“The transaction would represent a logical next step in the successful partnership between Eutelsat and OneWeb,” said Eutelsat, which bought a 23% stake in OneWeb in 2021.

But Markus Kaussen, an analyst at Swiss asset manager BWM, which is a top-15 shareholder in Eutelsat, said a deal would “turn the investment case [for Eutelsat] 180 degrees”.

“Right now, it is a boring value stock for income-oriented investors with high free cash flow and high dividends,” he said. “If it were to merge with OneWeb, it would become a growth business hoping that an expensive bet will pay off in the future, rather than an established business with known economics.”

«

Poor OneWeb: nobody loves it, possibly not even its own people. But a 50-50 structure won’t work. I once worked for Business magazine, a joint venture between Conde Nast and the Financial Times, two very different publishers. It was calamitous: any success was bitterly claimed, and any failure blamed on the other side. It failed. There’s a reason analysts shake their heads at the phrase “joint venture”.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

You might think that chess isn’t a game where your opponent could break your finger. But that was before robots got involved. CC-licensed photo by Chris Brooks on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 11 links for you. J’adoube, tu frappes. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Without these chips, we are in big trouble – and Britain has no strategy • Sky News

Ed Conway on the row over the Newport chip foundry, which principally makes power semiconductors (dealing with power switching):

»

before Nexperia took over, NWF was what’s known in the trade as a “foundry” – a fab which could be contracted to make chips for any designer.

Now it’s owned by Nexperia, it is going to be making chips solely for its parent company.

This, says Rockley Photonics’ founder and chief executive Andrew Rickman, is a disappointment. “We obviously had to move on,” he says. “And in the future as we look for additional capacity, if it was available to us to manufacture in the UK, that would be wonderful.

“As you analyse the UK, we have this incredible set of expertise around compound semiconductors, and a whole range of different process technologies associated with it, which do new and wonderful things. These are markets that are expanding very rapidly.

“So compared with traditional semiconductors, where perhaps the US or other parts of Europe are better places to build additional capacity and factories, in the UK, we’ve got this opportunity to actually own this particular area of compound semiconductors.”

This is the main objection among industry insiders to the takeover: it effectively means Newport goes from being a potential pioneer to being a workhorse.

«

The big point being that the UK government struggles with the idea that power semis are important, and doesn’t have a strategy in place to deal with what happens when a company important to other parts of the sector is purchased.
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Exclusive: FBI investigation determined Chinese-made Huawei equipment could disrupt US nuclear arsenal communications • CNN Politics

Katie Bo Lillis:

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On paper, it looked like a fantastic deal. In 2017, the Chinese government was offering to spend $100m to build an ornate Chinese garden at the National Arboretum in Washington DC. Complete with temples, pavilions and a 70-foot white pagoda, the project thrilled local officials, who hoped it would attract thousands of tourists every year.

But when US counterintelligence officials began digging into the details, they found numerous red flags. The pagoda, they noted, would have been strategically placed on one of the highest points in Washington DC, just two miles from the US Capitol, a perfect spot for signals intelligence collection, multiple sources familiar with the episode told CNN.

Also alarming was that Chinese officials wanted to build the pagoda with materials shipped to the US in diplomatic pouches, which US Customs officials are barred from examining, the sources said.
Federal officials quietly killed the project before construction was underway.

The cancelled garden is part of a frenzy of counterintelligence activity by the FBI and other federal agencies focused on what career US security officials say has been a dramatic escalation of Chinese espionage on US soil over the past decade.

Since at least 2017, federal officials have investigated Chinese land purchases near critical infrastructure, shut down a high-profile regional consulate believed by the US government to be a hotbed of Chinese spies and stonewalled what they saw as clear efforts to plant listening devices near sensitive military and government facilities.

«

The diplomatic pouches were a hell of a giveaway.
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Elon Musk’s friendship with Sergey Brin ruptured by alleged affair • WSJ

Kirsten Grind and Emily Glazer:

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Elon Musk engaged in a brief affair last fall with the wife of Sergey Brin, prompting the Google co-founder to file for divorce earlier this year and ending the tech billionaires’ long friendship, according to people familiar with the matter.

Their falling out is one of a string of personal issues Mr. Musk has faced even as he juggles business challenges, including manufacturing disruptions at Tesla and a court fight over his desire to withdraw his $44bn bid for Twitter Inc.

Mr. Musk is the richest person in the world, with an estimated fortune of $240bn, and Mr. Brin ranks eighth world-wide, with $95bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

…Mr. Brin provided Mr. Musk with about $500,000 for Tesla during the 2008 financial crisis, when the company was struggling to increase production. In 2015, Mr. Musk gave Mr. Brin one of Tesla’s first all-electric sport-utility vehicles.

In recent months, there has been growing tension between the two men and their teams, according to the people familiar with the matter. Mr. Brin has ordered his financial advisers to sell his personal investments in Mr. Musk’s companies, some of those people said. It couldn’t be learned how large those investments are, or whether there have been any sales.

Mr. Brin filed for divorce from Nicole Shanahan in January of this year, citing “irreconcilable differences,” according to records filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court. The divorce filing was made several weeks after Mr. Brin learned of the brief affair, those people said.

At the time of the alleged liaison in early December, Mr. Brin and his wife were separated but still living together, according to a person close to Ms. Shanahan. In the divorce filing, Mr. Brin cited Dec. 15, 2021, as the date of the couple’s separation.

«

OK, so this isn’t standard fare. But Brin is no stranger to love triangles: in 2013 there was an almighty row at Google when he (then married to Anne Wojckiki, founder of 23andme) began an affair with Amanda Rosenberg, aged 27 to his 40, who had been seeing Hugo Barra of Google, who then left the company. Larry Page was so furious with Brin he stopped speaking to him for a while.

Musk, meanwhile, is no stranger either to flitting between connections. Maybe it all washes out in the end.
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BBC funding: Lords say tax a better model than advertising or subscriptions • Press Gazette

Bron Maher:

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Baroness Tina Stowell, who chaired the committee, told Press Gazette the most important recommendation in the report is that the BBC must outline a “bold new vision” before it can choose its next funding model.

The report, “Licence to change: BBC future funding”, caps off an inquiry that began in February 2022 and draws together written and oral evidence from sources including Netflix, Andrew Neil, GB News presenter Mercy Muroki and the chairman of Marks and Spencer.

In the face of competition from subscription streaming platforms – and claims the BBC does not cater to the whole country – some have argued the corporation should switch to an opt-in subscription-funded model to fund its £4bn budget.

But the committee said the model would deliver “inadequate revenues and face major technical hurdles”.

It likewise said that proposals to fund the broadcaster through advertising “would provide insufficient income whilst decimating the revenues of other public service broadcasters” – echoing the findings of the Thatcher-era Peacock  committee that the BBC is so big it would pull much of the television advertising spend away from its competitors.

The report laid out three alternatives to the current licence fee, all of which move away from the current model of a flat tax.

“A universal household levy linked to council tax bills is one option which could take greater account of people’s ability to pay,” it said. “A ring-fenced income tax is another. Reforming the existing licence fee to provide discounts for low-income households is a third.”

The report recommended moving away from a funding model linked to the existence of televisions in a home, and warned the BBC faces a challenge from viewers who do not feel represented by the corporation.

Its role, it said, “as a national glue will only become more important, and more complex, in the context of increasing social, cultural and demographic change.”

«

Ah yes, a “bold new vision” is de rigeur these days. When people use this phrase it always conjures up Malcolm Tucker, the acerbic PM’s spokesman in the razor-sharp political satire The Thick Of It, saying of blue-sky thinker “Julius Nicholson” that “If he does stick his baldy head round your door and come up with some stupid idea about policemen’s helmets should be yellow, or let’s set up a department to count the moon, just treat him like someone with Alzheimer’s disease.”

Meanwhile, a levy on council tax sounds to me the most sensible scheme. Progressive and simple to administer.
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Blake Lemoine says he’s been fired from Google • The Register

Katyanna Quach:

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Google has reportedly fired Blake Lemoine, the engineer who was placed on administrative leave after insisting the web giant’s LaMDA chatbot was sentient.

Lemoine didn’t get in trouble for holding his controversial, eyebrow-raising opinion on the model. Instead, he was punished for violating Google’s confidentiality policies. He reportedly invited a lawyer to assess potential legal rights for LaMDA and spoke to a House Rep claiming Google was being unethical.

A Google spokesperson told the Big Technology newsletter it has decided to terminate his employment since Lemoine continued to violate “employment and data security policies” jeopardizing trade secrets.

“If an employee shares concerns about our work, as Blake did, we review them extensively. We found Blake’s claims that LaMDA is sentient to be wholly unfounded and worked to clarify that with him for many months. These discussions were part of the open culture that helps us innovate responsibly,” the spokesperson said.

“So, it’s regrettable that despite lengthy engagement on this topic, Blake still chose to persistently violate clear employment and data security policies that include the need to safeguard product information. We will continue our careful development of language models, and we wish Blake well.”

Many experts at Google and in academia and industry have cast doubt on whether LaMDA or any existing AI chatbot is sentient.

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Useful clarity that it wasn’t having spent too much time in the sun, but breaking confidentiality that was the pretext. Though one suspects that Google’s lawyers were happy to have that one to hand. Otherwise they’d have had to find other work for Lemoine, such as investigating whether emails sent to Google’s support page show signs of intelligent life.
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Securing ongoing funding for the Meta Oversight Board • Meta Oversight Board

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Today the Oversight Board Trust announced that Meta has made a commitment that provides for ongoing financial support for the Oversight Board. As part of that commitment, the company will make a $150m contribution to the Trust.

Under the terms of the Trust, the funds contributed by the company are irrevocable and can only be used to fulfil the Trust’s purpose of funding, managing, and overseeing the operation of the Oversight Board. This $150m contribution to the Trust is in addition to the company’s prior contribution of $130m announced in 2019 when the Trust was first established.

“By making this ongoing financial commitment, Meta has issued a vote of confidence in the work of the Board and its efforts to apply Facebook and Instagram content standards in a manner that protects freedom of expression and pertinent human rights standards,” said Stephen Neal, chairperson of the Oversight Board Trust.

Since its formation, the Board has received more than one million user appeals from users challenging Meta’s content moderation decisions. In response, the Board has applied human rights standards on content issues ranging from hate speech to COVID-19 misinformation to evaluate Meta’s policies and enforcement. Through 25 binding case decisions, 118 policy recommendations, and hundreds of publicly reported questions, the Board is systematically improving Meta’s approach to content policy decisions on its platforms.

«

There are 23 members on the board – all drawn from the Great And Good (including my former editor at The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger). A board that has funding of $280m to do.. what? Deliver a tiny number of decisions and recommendations? If Meta had originally put in, say, $2m and now added another $1m for running costs, one might have thought that was about reasonable. But these numbers are crazy: about $1m per decision/recommendation.

Meanwhile the Real Facebook Oversight Board, a 25-strong properly independent group not funded by Meta, has had its web page taken down over a copyright dispute (guess which well-funded Oversight Board objected!) and struggles to make itself heard.
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Chess robot grabs and breaks finger of seven-year-old opponent • The Guardian

Jon Henley:

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Video of the 19 July incident published by the Baza Telegram channel shows the boy’s finger being pinched by the robotic arm for several seconds before a woman followed by three men rush in, free him and usher him away.

Sergey Smagin, vice-president of the Russian Chess Federation, told Baza the robot appeared to pounce after it took one of the boy’s pieces. Rather than waiting for the machine to complete its move, the boy opted for a quick riposte, he said.

“There are certain safety rules and the child, apparently, violated them. When he made his move, he did not realise he first had to wait,” Smagin said. “This is an extremely rare case, the first I can recall,” he added.

Lazarev had a different account, saying the child had “made a move, and after that we need to give time for the robot to answer, but the boy hurried and the robot grabbed him”. Either way, he said, the robot’s suppliers were “going to have to think again”.

Baza named the boy as Christopher and said he was one of the 30 best chess players in the Russian capital in the under-nines category. “People rushed to help and pulled out the finger of the young player, but the fracture could not be avoided,” it said.

Lazarev told Tass that Christopher, whose finger was put in a plaster cast, did not seem overly traumatised by the attack. “The child played the very next day, finished the tournament, and volunteers helped to record the moves,” he said.

His parents, however, have reportedly contacted the public prosecutor’s office. “We will communicate, figure it out and try to help in any way we can,” he said. Smagin told RIA Novosti the incident was “a coincidence” and the robot was “absolutely safe”.

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Certain amount of victim-blaming going on there. If it had been a human opponent breaking the kid’s finger, would they be saying “well, he shouldn’t have had his finger so near the pieces”?
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South Carolina bill outlaws websites that tell how to get an abortion • The Washington Post

Cat Zakrzewski:

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Shortly after the Supreme Court ruling that overturned the right to abortion in June, South Carolina state senators introduced legislation that would make it illegal to “aid, abet or conspire with someone” to obtain an abortion.

The bill aims to block more than abortion: provisions would outlaw providing information over the internet or phone about how to obtain an abortion. It would also make it illegal to host a website or “[provide] an internet service” with information that is “reasonably likely to be used for an abortion” and directed at pregnant people in the state.

Legal scholars say the proposal is likely a harbinger of other state measures, which may restrict communication and speech as they seek to curtail abortion. The June proposal, S. 1373, is modeled off a blueprint created by the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), an antiabortion group, and designed to be replicated by lawmakers across the country.

As the fall of Roe v. Wade triggers a flood of new legislation, an adjacent battleground is emerging over the future of internet freedoms and privacy in states across the country — one, experts say, that could have a chilling impact on First Amendment-protected speech.

“These are not going to be one-offs,” said Michele Goodwin, the director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy at the University of California at Irvine Law School. “These are going to be laws that spread like wildfire through states that have shown hostility to abortion.”

Goodwin called the South Carolina bill “unconstitutional.” But she warned it’s unclear how courts might respond after “turning a blind eye” to antiabortion laws even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe.

«

This stumps me. This can’t possibly be legal under the 1st Amendment, which (lest we forget) says “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”. It’s clearly abridging freedom of speech; it’s censorship by the state. So drafting this bill means ignoring a fundamental part of the US Constitution that is drummed into Americans.

So what’s left? Virtue signalling. But the idea that any court might nod this through is bizarre.
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Maybe Peloton should worry about Apple Fitness+ after all • Medium

I wrote about how this particular data-driven service yields up its secrets, once you realise they’re in the open:

»

I’m an Apple Fitness+ subscriber: I’ve got a rowing machine (Concept 2, if that means anything to you) and the Fitness+ classes are a far more enjoyable way to spend the time than setting yourself a target (distance, time) and grinding along. In rowing, they come in 10, 20 and 30-minute classes, and I began doing them as they arrived. Personally, I found the 10-minute segments too short, and the 30-minute ones usually too long. So I did the 20-minute ones, working from the earliest available, not repeating.

Recently, I noticed that I was running out of new 20-minute workouts. Was the shortage because one of the rowing coaches, Anya, was pregnant — perhaps on maternity leave? — and unavailable to make them? But they replaced her with someone else. Also, I reflected, if the demand was there, Apple would make sure the supply was there. And then I thought to myself: since Apple knows exactly how many people do each activity, it must produce content in line with that perceived demand.

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What do you think is the most popular activity, based on the number of sessions available, out of Rowing/ Treadmill/ Cycling/ Dance/ Yoga/ Pilates/ Core/ Strength/ High Intensity Interval Training/ Mindful Cooldown? And what do you think is the most popular duration? Turns out the answer is a puzzle – there in front of us, to be discovered. (A mystery is something only one or a handful of people know the answer to, a puzzle is something anyone can solve: think murder v jigsaw.)

There’s also a database of all the Fitness+ sessions, though it’s less accessible than the beautiful graphs in my piece.
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Analysis: UK’s ‘jet-zero’ plan would allow demand for flying to soar 70% • Carbon Brief

Daisy Dunne and Josh Gabbatiss:

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International and domestic aviation only accounts for 3% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions, but flights have an outsized role in some – normally relatively wealthy – people’s carbon footprints. Therefore, this is one of the areas where individual actions can have a considerable impact.

The sector has been repeatedly highlighted by government advisers the Climate Change Committee (CCC) as a gap in the government’s climate strategy, which the “jet zero” plan is supposed to fill.

The strategy, whose “jet zero” tagline states it will “deliver net-zero aviation” by 2050, has gone through a couple of rounds of consultations and drafts.

It plans for flight demand to increase by 70%, which would see aviation emissions rising from 38MtCO2e in 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic, to 52MtCO2e by 2050.

The strategy goes on to suggest that a series of interventions – chiefly based on untested technology – could then reduce the impact of demand growth, bringing the sector’s emissions total down to 19MtCO2e in 2050.

This is shown in the chart below, which highlights that, even in the government’s targeted “high-ambition” scenario, residual emissions from aviation would remain higher in 2050 than they were in 1990 – and a long way from the pledged “net-zero”.

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There seems to be an embedded determination inside Whitehall to just go on with business as usual, and hope, Micawber-like, that something will come along and solve the climate “problem” (in their minds, an inconvenience) so everything continues undisturbed. Melting runways suggest otherwise.
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The perils of audience capture • The Prism

Gurwinder Bhogal:

»

In 2016, 24 year old Nicholas Perry wanted to be big online. He started uploading videos to his YouTube channel in which he pursued his passion—playing the violin—and extolled the virtues of veganism. He went largely unnoticed.

A year later, he abandoned veganism, citing health concerns. Now free to eat whatever he wanted, he began uploading mukbang videos of himself consuming various dishes while talking to the camera, as if having dinner with a friend.

These new videos quickly found a sizable audience, but as the audience grew, so did their demands. The comments sections of the videos soon became filled with people challenging Perry to eat as much as he physically could. Eager to please, he began to set himself torturous eating challenges, each bigger than the last. His audience applauded, but always demanded more. Soon, he was filming himself eating entire menus of fast food restaurants in one sitting.

In some respects, all his eating paid off; Nikocado Avocado, as Perry is now better known, has amassed over six million subscribers across six channels on YouTube. By satisfying the escalating demands of his audience, he got his wish of blowing up and being big online. But the cost was that he blew up and became big in ways he hadn’t anticipated.

Nikocado, moulded by his audience’s desires into a cartoonish extreme, is now a wholly different character from Nicholas Perry, the vegan violinist who first started making videos. Where Perry was mild-mannered and health conscious, Nikocado is loud, abrasive, and spectacularly grotesque. Where Perry was a picky eater, Nikocado devoured everything he could, including finally Perry himself. The rampant appetite for attention caused the person to be subsumed by the persona.

«

The photos accompanying this are truly shocking. Bhogal’s point is that influencers are themselves influenced by their audience, inevitably towards extremes. (See also: Jordan Peterson.) A sort of social warming, if you will. (Via Helen Lewis’s excellent The Bluestocking.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Remember the chip shortage? Apparently it’s turning into a chip glut, and investor sentiment is dipping. CC-licensed photo by Windell Oskay on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. Temperate. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

It’s that time of the week: another Social Warming Substack post is coming down the chute. Goes live 0845 BST. (If you’re reading this in the US, it’s probably already up.) This week: why the biggest users of social networks need the toughest moderation.

Instagram, TikTok and YouTube teenagers’ top three news sources • Ofcom

»

Teenagers in the UK are turning away from traditional news channels and are instead looking to Instagram, TikTok and YouTube to keep up to date, Ofcom has found.

Ofcom’s News consumption in the UK 2021/22 report shows that, for the first time, Instagram is the most popular news source among teenagers used by nearly three in ten in 2022 (29%). TikTok and YouTube follow closely behind, used by 28% of youngsters to follow news.

BBC One and BBC Two – historically the most popular news sources among teens – have been knocked off top spot down to fifth place. Around a quarter of teens (24%) use these channels for news in 2022, compared to nearly half (45%) just five years ago.1

BBC One remains the most used news source among all online adults, although it is one of several major TV news channels to reach fewer people in 2022.2 News viewing to BBC One, BBC Two, BBC News channel, ITV and Sky News is now below pre-pandemic levels, resuming a longer-term decline in traditional TV news viewing.

Conversely, TikTok has seen the largest increase in use of any news source between 2020 and 2022 – from 0.8 million UK adults in 2020 (1%), increasing to 3.9 million UK adults in 2022 (7%).3 This brings it onto a par with Sky News’ website and app.

TikTok’s growth is primarily driven by younger age groups, with half of its news users aged 16 to 24. Users of TikTok for news claim to get more of their news on the platform from ‘other people they follow’ (44%) than ‘news organisations’ (24%).4

«

The original Ofcom press release, here, is the best writeup of the findings. Kudos to the Ofcom press office.
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Semiconductor shares sink as chip stockpiles grow • WSJ

Elaine Yu:

»

The chip industry has long followed a boom-and-bust cycle that investors have grown familiar with. When strong demand pushes up prices, manufacturers increase their capacity to take advantage of the high prices and produce more chips. Eventually, it creates a supply glut. Prices then slide, along with revenues and production levels. The cycle repeats.

Some companies have recently reported higher semiconductor inventories, in some cases chips are sitting in storage for three to four months, which is longer than usual, said Phelix Lee, an equity analyst at Morningstar Inc.

“Naturally, excessive inventories will lead to fears of lower future demand because the customers may have to cut some of their orders” to correct those inventory levels, he said. He expects excess chip inventories to persist through the end of the year before the situation normalizes.

Elizabeth Kwik, an investment director for Asia equities at British money manager Abrdn, said rising interest rates have also led investors to pull money out of growth stocks, a category that chip makers fall into. While some semiconductor stocks bounced off their lows recently, she said there are still signs of weaker demand and there could be more downward earnings revisions. “It may still be some time before things start to turn,” Ms. Kwik added.

How China manages Covid outbreaks in the coming months could also influence when consumer demand might recover, she said. In June, after lockdowns and restrictions began to lift, mobile-phone shipments in China rose 9.2% year-over-year, according to official data. They were down 22% for the first half from the same period in 2021.

«

Chip shortage has turned into chip glut really quickly. Like, about nine months.
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Blockchain-powered carbon offset company Land Life starts huge forest fire in Spain • Web3 is going just great

Molly White:

»

Five villages were evacuated and a rail line was closed as a wildfire has burned 14,000 hectares (~35,000 acres) near Ateca in northwestern Spain. The fire was reportedly sparked by equipment used by a contractor to dig trees for Land Life.

Land Life is a carbon offset company that focuses on reforestation, and speaks about its “autonomous planting, remote monitoring and blockchain verification”. The Dutch company raised €3.5 million in a Series A round in October 2018.

The wildfire is reportedly the second fire in that same location attributed to the company in the last month.

«

Oops. Still, perhaps the fire and destruction have been recorded on the blockchain, in which case, uh, hooray?
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TextExpander, which lets users build shortcuts to speed up business communications, raises $41.4M, its first-ever funding • TechCrunch

Ingrid Lunden:

»

RPA, and companies like UiPath, swooped into on the world of work a few years ago as a catchy way for organizations to help teams automate and speed up repetitive business activities such as processing information on forms. Today, a company called TextExpander — which has identified and built a way to fix a similar gap in another repetitive aspect of business life, communications, by letting users create customized shortcuts to trigger longer text-based actions such as specific phrasing around a topic, calendar events, emails, messages, CRM systems and many other environments — is announcing $41.4m in funding to expand something else: its business.

Alongside the funding, the company is also appointing a new CEO, J.D. Mullin, who is taking over from Philip Goward, who co-founded the company originally with Greg Scown. TextExpander was born out of another developer platform they built called Smile — you can read more about that early history, with an interesting nod to how they originally met at Macworld and how the threat of a clone led them to build for iOS after first launching on Mac, here — and both are keeping seats on the board and remaining involved in aspects of development.

«

This is an astonishing amount of money for such a simple program. Can’t help but think that it’s now going to get a lot more expensive (probably on subscription) to use for those simple shortcuts. Or else will expand to try to become everything – it’s a floorwax! It’s a dessert topping – to everyone, with calamitous effects.
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Google under scrutiny over pledge to protect abortion location data • The Guardian

Stephanie Kirchgaessner:

»

In a report published on Thursday, Tech Transparency Project researchers made two findings following an experiment using two new Android phones. First, that if an Android user (described as a “perpetrator”) could get access to another user’s phone (described as a “victim”) and log into their own account using a Google app on the victim’s device, such as Google Play, the location history of the victim would then be visible to the perpetrator, without the victim being given any clear warning that they could be tracked.

Second, the same experiment showed that the victim’s visit to an abortion clinic, a Washington-based Planned Parenthood, was visible to the perpetrator and was not automatically deleted. In this case, the victim’s location history was turned off, but the perpetrator’s was enabled.

The route and time spent in the Planned Parenthood clinic was also viewable to the perpetrator via the Google Maps app on the perpetrator’s phone. A full week later, the clinic location remained in Google’s location history when viewed on the perpetrator’s phone and in a desktop browser.

TTP said: “It is unclear how Google plans to implement these [abortion-related] policies, and how long sensitive locations will remain on users’ location timelines before the tech giant deletes them.

“When TTP took a phone to an abortion clinic, the clinic’s exact location remained in Google’s location history for more than a week, suggesting that either Google has not yet implemented these changes or the company’s system for detecting and removing sensitive locations is faulty.”

…In a statement to the Guardian, Google called TTP’s experiment an “unlikely scenario” because it would require an unwanted user to access a device, breach someone’s device security, and have the user not realize another account is logged in.

«

Unlikely, but not impossible.
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Very Online • Columbia Journalism Review

Karen Maniraho:

»

Recently I spoke with five reporters, each of whom casts a different gaze, drawing from different areas of expertise and defining their own beat within the beat. Journalism, strained for resources, often fails to reflect the diversity of the world, and certainly the internet; as Rebecca Jennings, a reporter for Vox, told me, “I think there needs to be way more people covering this beat that are not middle-class white women and white men that live in New York or LA.”

To their credit, the journalists I spoke with aim not to be comprehensive—the internet is simply too vast—but to embrace their idiosyncrasies. Jason Parham is fascinated by “how we think about Black ideas and Black creativity and Black brilliance”—subjects that have traditionally been left out of internet reporting. Jennings is focused on pop culture, the creator economy, and how platforms shape behavior. Through his Garbage Day newsletter, Ryan Broderick takes an anthropological approach to the internet, where content is rarely “new,” but mined and repackaged. In his newsletter, Today in Tabs, Rusty Foster bookmarks links that everyone is (or could be) reading. And Taylor Lorenz, who works for the Washington Post, identifies as a tech reporter—“internet culture,” she’s argued, cannot be distinguished from the culture at large.

Though I talked to each person separately, their responses to my questions seemed to be in conversation with one another, as they spoke about their points of access, their limitations, and how they view the world through the internet.

«

Broderick’s takes are always fascinating: his most recent, about “pathologically boring men (and girlbosses)” is exquisite. The different journalists’ working methods, too, are interesting to understand.

What’s notable is how they all see “technology” as too narrow; that the internet makes everything social, and you can only understand it in that context.
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How independent writers are turning to AI • The Verge

Josh Dzieza:

»

ask GPT-3 to write Harry Potter in the style of Ernest Hemingway, as [researcher and writer Gwern] Branwen did, and it might produce profane reviews or a plot summary in Chinese or total nonsense. But write a few lines of Hemingway-esque Potter fanfiction, and the model seems to grasp what you mean by “style” and keep going. It can then go on to write Harry Potter in the style of P.G. Wodehouse, Jane Austen, and so on. It requires a strange degree of sympathy with the machine, thinking about the way it works and how it might respond to your query. Branwen wrote that it’s a bit like trying to teach tricks to a superintelligent cat. 

To create Sudowrite, [Amit] Gupta and [James] Yu collected plot twists from short stories and synopses of novels, presenting them to GPT-3 as examples. For descriptions, they wrote sentences about smells, sounds, and other senses so that GPT-3 would know what’s being asked of it when a writer clicks “describe.” 

And it does generally seem to understand the assignment, though it sometimes takes it in unexpected directions. For instance, Lepp found that the program had a tendency to bestow her characters with swords. Despite there not really being any swords in her version of magical Florida, it would have characters unsheathing blades mid-conversation or fondling hilts as they sat on the porch. 

She figures this is because the model was likely trained on far more examples of high fantasy than the much smaller genre of paranormal cozy mystery, so when it sees her writing about magic, it assumes some sword unsheathing and hilt fondling is going to happen. Or, if it sees a pixie and a vampire talking in a parking lot, Lepp said, it’s going to have someone get bit, despite the fact that Lepp’s vampire is a peaceful patron of blood banks. And one can only imagine the size of the romance dataset because it’s constantly trying to make her characters have sex. “I get a lot of, ‘He grabbed her shoulder and wrapped her in his arms,’” Lepp said. “I write cozies! Nobody’s breathing heavily in my books unless they’re jogging.” 

There were weirder misfires, too.

«

Whoa whoa whoa. I want to know more about this “Harry Potter in the style of P.G. Wodehouse”. But some of the “weirder misfires” are remarkable.
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UK cybersecurity chiefs back plan to scan phones for child abuse images • The Guardian

Alex Hern:

»

Tech companies should move ahead with controversial technology that scans for child abuse imagery on users’ phones, the technical heads of GCHQ and the UK’s National Cybersecurity Centre have said.

So-called “client-side scanning” would involve service providers such as Facebook or Apple building software that monitors communications for suspicious activity without needing to share the contents of messages with a centralised server.

Ian Levy, the NCSC’s technical director, and Crispin Robinson, the technical director of cryptanalysis – codebreaking – at GCHQ, said the technology could protect children and privacy at the same time.

“We’ve found no reason why client-side scanning techniques cannot be implemented safely in many of the situations one will encounter,” they wrote in a discussion paper published on Thursday, which the pair said was “not government policy”.

They argued that opposition to proposals for client-side scanning – most famously a plan from Apple, now paused indefinitely, to scan photos before they are uploaded to the company’s image-sharing service – rested on specific flaws, which were fixable in practice.

They suggested, for instance, requiring the involvement of multiple child protection NGOs, to guard against any individual government using the scanning apparatus to spy on civilians; and using encryption to ensure that the platform never sees any images that are passed to humans for moderation, instead involving only those same NGOs.

«

This is going to put multiple cats among every pigeon available. The client-side scanning proposal was so controversial that Apple paused it after colossal outcry from security experts (remember? Last October?). Alec Muffett, who opposes it, is quoted in the story: he’s no more impressed than before.
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“We’re all trying to find the guy who did this”: the meme that’s more than a meme • Slate

Rebecca Onion, back in August 2020, when Trump was still US president:

»

The sketch, which isn’t on YouTube but you can watch on Netflix, starts after a hot dog–shaped car has crashed into a menswear shop. As the stunned onlookers emerge from the wreckage, they tell each other: “We need to find the driver!” The camera scans the crowd, then reveals [comedian Tim] Robinson—wearing the hot dog suit. “Yeah, come on, whoever did this, just confess! We promise we won’t be mad!” he says. When the bystanders point out that obviously, he’s the culprit, first he feigns indignation: “I don’t have to sit here and be insulted like this! I’m just going to take as many suits as I can grab, get back in that random hot dog car, and drive back to Wiener Hall!” Cops arrive, but Hot Dog Guy is not daunted. He deflects and shifts the blame. Asked what his name is, he bemoans modern society, loading his arms with stolen suits: “We’ve been sitting here talking all day, and you all never bothered to learn my name. We’re so buried in our phones! Instead of giving someone a real smile, we send an emoji!”

A person who habitually realizes, too late, that he did something unpopular and then tries to cover his tracks by lying, Trump is a real-world Hot Dog Guy and the quintessential target for the burgeoning meme. But others are fair game too, both within his administration and outside of it, from Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar declaring on Meet the Press regarding coronavirus cases that “we’ve got to get to the bottom of why we’re seeing these cases surge” to Michael Bloomberg suggesting ways to regulate Wall Street. This is, alas, Hot Dog Guy’s world, and we are all living in it.

«

If, like me, you’ve been puzzled by Hot Dog Guy memes/references (but too ashamed to admit it), here you go. But it seems to me there’s a wider truth here. Laboured climate reference, but yes: we’re trying to find the guy who warmed the atmosphere by dumping carbon dioxide into it. We are all Hot Dog Guy.
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Minecraft bans NFTs, sending one in-game builder’s token spiralling • Coindesk via MSN

Eli Tan:

»

“To ensure that Minecraft players have a safe and inclusive experience, blockchain technologies are not permitted to be integrated inside our client and server applications, nor may Minecraft in-game content such as worlds, skins, persona items, or other mods, be utilized by blockchain technology to create a scarce digital asset,” Minecraft studio Mojang said in a statement.

While Minecraft acknowledged the potential benefits of introducing NFTs to its games – namely providing in-game collectibles and play-to-earn style rewards – it also pointed to drawbacks:

“NFTs are not inclusive of all our community and create a scenario of the haves and the have-nots,” the company said. “The speculative pricing and investment mentality around NFTs takes the focus away from playing the game and encourages profiteering, which we think is inconsistent with the long-term joy and success of our players.”

The biggest loser of Minecraft’s announcement today has been NFT Worlds, a Web3 gaming project focused on third-party blockchain and NFT Minecraft integrations. Prices for the project’s NFTs have plummeted 70% following the announcement, though the project’s developers say they won’t be abandoning the community.

The price of the project’s native WRLD token is also down 65% on news, according to CoinMarketCap.

The announcement comes amid a year-long debate between traditional gamers who oppose NFTs and Web3 believers who champion them. The arguments for and against NFTs in gaming typically boil down to two schools of thought; NFT haters don’t want to over-financialize the sector, while NFT enthusiasts deem the technology as a form of agency against what they see as money-hungry publishers.

«

Surprising, after the Microsoft/Minecraft announcement, that the NFT Worlds prices have only fallen 65%-70%. Given how Minecraft says blockchain technologies (ie NFTs etc) “ARE NOT PERMITTED”, a fall of 100% seems more reasonable.

This is described as (part of?) “the hot button crypto culture wars”. Choose your fighter.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If one person can be said to be truly responsible for our current climate trajectory, it’s Joe Manchin, the not-really Democrat senator for West Virginia, who blocks legislation on it. What’s the solution? CC-licensed photo by Governor Earl Ray Tomblin on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Parched. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Russia released a Ukrainian app for hacking Russia that was actually malware targeting its users • Motherboard

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai:

»

Russian government hackers tried to trick Ukrainian and international volunteers into using a malicious Android app disguised as an app to launch Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against Russian sites, according to new research published by Google on Tuesday. 

Since the beginning of the Russian invasion, Ukraine has resisted not only on the ground, but also online. A loose collective of technologists and hackers has organized under an umbrella quasi-hacktivist organization called the IT Army, and they have launched constant and persistent cyberattacks against Russian websites. 

The Russian government tried to turn this volunteer effort around to unmask Ukrainian hackers, in a smart, but ultimately failed attempt. 

“This is interesting and new, and [Russian government hackers] sort of testing the boundaries again, and trying to explore different things. The Russian groups definitely keep us on our toes,” Shane Huntley, the head of the Google research team Threat Analysis Group, told Motherboard in a phone call. 

…The app actually didn’t DDoS anything, but was designed to map out and figure out who would want to use such an app to attack Russian websites, according to Huntely.

“Now that they have an app that they control, and they see where it came from, they can actually work out what the infrastructure looks like, and work out where the people that are potentially doing these sorts of attacks are,” Huntley said.

Google said the fake app wasn’t hosted on the Play Store, and that the number of installs “was miniscule.”

«

The war, in all its forms, is very definitely not over.
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The new climate dark ages have begun • The Atlantic

Robinson Meyer:

»

Today, I’m finding very little to sugarcoat. When Senator Joe Manchin pulled the plug on President Joe Biden’s legislative climate agenda last week, he locked in a genuine setback for the country and the world, all but ensuring that billions of tons of unnecessary carbon pollution will stream into the atmosphere. The planet’s climate is not doomed. Indeed, the nature of the problem is such that until the Hudson River turns to ash or crocodiles migrate to Greenland, the climate is never truly doomed.

But Manchin’s fickleness really has held back the scale of emissions reductions that will be possible over the next decade. Fixing climate change is like paying down a large debt: By neglecting that work now, we shall only find ourselves in deeper trouble in the future. And to move past that defeat, we should have the courage to look squarely at it. Here are seven ways to think about what just happened and what’s to come:

1. This is a truly irreversible climate defeat.
Here’s the status quo: The United States is slowly reducing its carbon pollution. Last year, even as carbon emissions came surging back from their pandemic collapse, the country’s climate pollution remained 17% below its all-time high. Exorbitant fossil-fuel prices and continued technological improvement will help emissions keep falling through this decade. By 2030, the country’s emissions could be 24% to 35% below their all-time peak, according to a new analysis from the Rhodium Group, a private energy-research firm.

But President Biden aimed to cut emissions 50% by that year (and America has pledged as much under the Paris Agreement). The climate provisions in an earlier draft of Build Back Better would have gotten us nearly there. With no further legislative action, the country is unlikely to meet that goal, meaning that an extra 5bn tons of carbon will flood the atmosphere, trapping additional heat in the Earth system and acidifying the ocean. That carbon will then persist for centuries, triggering essentially permanent sea-level rise.

Most news cycles in American politics are forgotten in a few months or years. This failure could resonate into the fourth millennium.

«

The lack of vitriol directed at Manchin, who is propped up by coal, gas and oil funding, amazes me. It amazes Robert Reich, ex-US Labor secretary, too: he thinks Manchin should be kicked out of the Democratic party. Should have been years ago, surely.
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We’re not going to make it to 2050 • Eudaimonia and Co

umair haque:

»

Because of the killing heat, crops are beginning to fail. What kinds of crops? The better answer is: what isn’t on the list? Harvests for everything from cocoa to coffee to wheat to sugar to mustard are beginning to decline. They’re not going to stop, because neither is the heat. The crops our civilization depends on? They can’t survive the killing heat, either. So what happens as harvests fail?

Prices spike. Shortages break out. Both of those are beginning to happen now. My lovely wife’s back in America — I’m in Europe. She calls me daily to tell me how fast prices are rising. I commiserate, and tell her that Europe’s on fire. This is our daily catch-up chit chat.

What happens as prices spike? Inflation roars. And what happens as a consequence of inflation? People get poorer. What do people who are getting poorer not have the money to do anymore? Invest. They can’t afford to pay the taxes which fund modern social contracts. And so societies simply begin to fall apart. This is the vicious cycle many, many civilizations have fallen into before us, essentially. Poverty breeds an inability to take collective action and make collective investments. All the systems of a golden age? They simply begin to crumble, break down, fail — and now there’s nothing much left over to repair them, because people are just fighting for basics, a little more bitterly every day.

Sound like the path we’re on? It should, because it is.

What’s the brutal truth I’m trying to get to? It goes like this. We’re not going to make it to 2050. Not even close to that far.

By “make it,” I don’t mean…some kind of dumb Marvel Movie. We’re all going to die tomorrow! Nope. I mean “Civilization as we know it.”

«

Unfortunately I find myself agreeing with this. I can’t help thinking that the future is a gradual slide into a cascade of shortages and then outages, of retreat from globalism and into nationalism. (Via John Naughton.)
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Men lose Y chromosomes as they age. It may be harming their hearts • Science

Mitch Leslie:

»

As men get older, they don’t just lose their hair, muscle tone, and knee cartilage. They also start to lose Y chromosomes from their cells. Scientists have linked this vanishing to a long list of diseases and a higher risk of death, but the evidence has been circumstantial. Now, researchers report that when they removed the Y chromosome from male mice, the animals died earlier than their Y-carrying counterparts, likely because their hearts became stiffer.

“This is the best evidence to date” that losing the Y chromosome is detrimental to health, says John Perry, a human geneticist at the University of Cambridge. Perry led one of the biggest studies on the frequency of Y chromosome loss in men, but wasn’t connected to the new research.

Despite its macho reputation, the Y chromosome is a pipsqueak, carrying a mere 71 genes—less than one-tenth as many as the X chromosome. That may be why the chromosome sometimes doesn’t get passed on when a cell divides. Analyzing blood samples is the easiest way to detect loss of Y, and researchers have found the chromosome is missing from at least some white blood cells in about 40% of 70-year-olds and 57% of 93-year-olds. In some older men, more than 80% of the cells can be short a Y chromosome.

Cells can survive and reproduce without a Y, but men lacking the chromosome in some of their cells are more likely to suffer from heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and other ageing-related ailments. Moreover, the condition could be a reason why men die on average about five years earlier than women in the United States, says molecular biologist Kenneth Walsh of the University of Virginia.

«

OK but IN MICE. So many experiments demonstrated in mice haven’t been replicated in humans. Even the most-cited animal studies from scientific journals have only been replicated in humans in 37% of instances. It may be that this is linked, but this is still a leap that might not be justified in fact.
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Tesla earning reports reveal that it sold 75% of its bitcoin, worth $936m • Watcher News

Vignesh Karunanidhi:

»

According to the Tesla Q2 earnings report, Elon Musk’s car company has sold 75% of its bitcoin holdings, worth $936m.

The sale was categorized under the earnings report as “proceeds from the sales of digital assets” as per the report published on Wednesday.

Tesla is a well-known cryptocurrency investor, having put billions into bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. To ride the cryptocurrency market wave, Elon Musk has been investing a large portion of his wealth in cryptocurrencies.

The current bitcoin holdings are currently way down from their previously reported $1.26bn. The 75% sales bring the firm’s current bitcoin holdings to $218m.

The information provided by Bitcointreasuries shows that Tesla previously had 43,200 BTC.

«

Very much depends when Tesla sold: the April-June quarter covers a period when bitcoin’s price varied from $46,000 to $19,000. Molly White calculates that the sale came when the price was around $28,900, having bought at $31-32,000. Oops. That’s 7-10% below the purchase price. Between this and Twitter, are we really thinking Elon’s such an amazing person at every deal? Musk says it was to maximise the cash position, because China (a major market) is still yo-yoing (not his words) in and out of Covid lockdowns.

Of course, even though it happened in the past, this news made bitcoin’s price drop again: it’s as prone to fainting fits as a dowager duchess in an amateur dramatic performance.
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Crypto miners moved over $300m of bitcoin in one day • CNBC

MacKenzie Sigalos:

»

New data from blockchain analytics firm CryptoQuant shows that miners are rapidly exiting their bitcoin positions.

14,000 bitcoin, worth more than $300m at its current price, was transferred out of wallets belonging to miners in a single 24-hour period at the end of last week — and in the last few weeks, miners have offloaded the largest amount of bitcoin since Jan. 2021. The phenomenon is called “miner capitulation,” and it typically indicates that miners are preparing to sell their previously mined coins in order to cover ongoing mining expenses.

Bitcoin is currently trading around $21,600, up about 3% in the last 24 hours. Still, the wider crypto market has been in a slump for months, with bitcoin down nearly 70% from its all-time high of around $69,000 in Nov. 2021.

Meanwhile, inflation is on a tear, and the cost of energy is hitting record highs as the war between Russia and Ukraine rages on.

Lower bitcoin prices and higher energy costs are compressing profit margins for miners, which is part of why some are selling bitcoin at current prices to try to contain exposure to continued volatility in the sector and mitigate against further risk to their bottom line.

“Given rising electricity costs, and bitcoin’s steep price decline, the cost of mining a bitcoin may be higher than its price for some miners,” Citi analyst Joseph Ayoub wrote in a note on July 5.

«

Much as I predicted at the end of June: electricity bills came due, and those aren’t paid in funny money.
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The people you meet at airports: an illustrated encyclopedia • Washington Post

Natalie Compton, illustrations by Anthony Calvert:

»

Getting through the airport these days can feel like an obstacle course. Yes, things were bad before the pandemic, but the recent air-travel hell has upped the ante.

From the moment you arrive at the curb, you’re up against chaos, or at least the potential for it. If you’re still checking a bag these days (don’t do it!), there’s the line at the check-in counter. Next, you’re praying you can get something to eat before your flight.

And the biggest hurdle of all? Other people. You’re jostling through security, crammed together in the food court, shoulder-to-shoulder at the gate and packed onto the plane.

These are the people you’ll meet — or avoid — at the airport.

«

Entertaining. I’ve certainly been at least one of these people. See also: the illustrated encyclopedia of sleeping positions on a plane.
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My son didn’t need a scientific miracle, he just needed an iPad • The Verge

David Perry’s son, aged 15, is autistic with Down syndrome:

»

My son’s most significant needs relate to speech. By the time he was three, it was clear he was not going to predominantly use verbal speech, though he was learning to communicate in a wide variety of ways. His speech therapist at the time quickly sent us to a world-class facility to assess the best way for him to use tech to talk. At the time, Nico’s healthcare and education costs were covered by the “early intervention” programs in Illinois — statewide systems funded by federal, state, and local dollars intended to help children under three years of age meet “developmental milestones.”

We tried a wide variety of devices, but because he had the manual dexterity to operate the simplest one, that’s the one the state would pay for. Within a few weeks after having it prescribed, we had a plastic box where you could literally cut and paste pieces of paper with words and pictures on it, and then use your voice to record sounds that then my son could press to play out loud. It was over a foot long. It cost over $3,000.

There were much better, and much more expensive, dedicated speech devices on the market, many of which are in fact a marvel of engineering, and do not require exhausted parents to do arts and crafts. But what we needed, we thought, was a speech app; they were just becoming available on mobile platforms like iPads. We wanted Proloquo2go, one of a number of programs that can reproduce words or phrases by selecting from an infinitely customizable menu. It cost $250, which we didn’t have, and needed to be on an iPad, which we also couldn’t afford. The price would have been much lower than our state-funded arts and crafts box, but at the time the system wouldn’t pay for medical programs on non-medical devices. We ultimately got both the tablet and the app thanks to a donor.

«

His frustration with the bureaucracy is colossal – and understandable.
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Instagram’s trying to make it easier to find nearby businesses • The Verge

Mitchell Clark:

»

Instagram’s latest update aims to make it easier for users to find local businesses or attractions by adding a searchable map that lets you “discover popular local businesses near you,” according to an Instagram Story from Mark Zuckerberg. The map will show you a list of places nearby and will let you see posts about a certain place or see only certain types of business.

There are a few ways to get to the map — if someone tags a place in a post or story, you can tap on the tag and hit “see location” to get to the location’s page. If you move around on the map, you’ll then be able to search the area to see what’s nearby.

Navigating to the map and searching it from a story sticker.
You can also search for places (including entire cities) in the Explore tab. Tapping on a place search result will take you to it on the map.

«

Could not be less interested in this “update”. But it also shows how every single one of the Meta apps is trying to become everything everywhere all at once: the messaging-maps-business-photos-videos-comments product. Instagram, as the only one that maybe is showing any growth (or at least not dwindling) is bearing the worst of this feature creep brunt.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Hackers are, predictably, lining up to bypass BMW’s scheme to charge a subscription for heated seats in some new models. CC-licensed photo by Michael on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Overheated. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover trial set to start in October • The Verge

Elizabeth Lopatto:

»

a Delaware court ruled that Twitter’s lawsuit against Elon Musk for attempting to back out of his acquisition of the company will be heard in October. This is a win for Twitter, which asked for a shorter timeframe than Musk.

Musk agreed to buy Twitter for $44bn in April but then appeared to get cold feet about the deal. Despite having waived his ability to do “due diligence,” or research on the company he was planning to acquire, he claimed that Twitter had too many bots. He then tried to terminate the agreement. In response, Twitter sued to hold him to the purchase.

During oral arguments before the judge, Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick, Twitter claimed that Musk’s bot arguments were bad-faith attempts to back out of the deal due to an acute case of buyer’s remorse. Twitter originally wanted a date in September; Musk asked for February. The trial will be five days — longer than Twitter asked for but shorter than Musk did. The exact dates haven’t yet been scheduled.

In court, Twitter’s counsel said that Musk’s conduct was “inexcusable.” Musk has held up an employee retention plan, and is engaging in “needless value destruction.” In response, Musk’s lawyers suggested that Twitter was giving Musk the run-around with bot data. Both teams agreed that Musk’s team has run millions of queries on Twitter’s firehose, a real-time feed of Tweets as they are sent. Musk’s lawyers also indicated The New York Times got a copy of Twitter’s lawsuit before they did.

«

Not looking good for Musk, at least on the basis of the pretrial hearing. The sensible move for him would now be to settle in some way, because the way the pretrial judge treated his arguments was pretty brutal.
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Google, Oracle cloud servers suffer outage in UK heatwave • The Register

Katyanna Quach:

»

Cloud services and servers hosted by Google and Oracle in the UK have dropped offline due to cooling issues as the nation experiences a record-breaking heatwave.

When the mercury hit 40.3ºC (104.5ºF) in eastern England, the highest ever registered by a country not used to these conditions, datacenters couldn’t take the heat. Selected machines were powered off to avoid long-term damage, causing some resources, services, and virtual machines to became unavailable, taking down unlucky websites and the like.

Multiple Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources are offline, including networking, storage, and compute provided by its servers in the south of UK. Cooling systems were blamed, and techies switched off equipment in a bid to prevent hardware burning out, according to a status update from Team Oracle.

“As a result of unseasonal temperatures in the region, a subset of cooling infrastructure within the UK South (London) Data Centre has experienced an issue,” Oracle said on Tuesday at 1638 UTC. “As a result some customers may be unable to access or use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources hosted in the region.

…Google acknowledged the downtime at 1615 UTC. This outage has, for one thing, brought down WordPress websites hosted by WP Engine in the UK, which were powered by Google Cloud.

«

Damn, the heatwave’s taking out (bits of) the internet? Is nothing sacred?
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The true costs of inflation in small-town Texas • The New Yorker

Rachel Monroe:

»

When I was in Sabinal, the lunch regulars started coming in around eleven, hanging their hats on a rack by the door with an easy familiarity. The regulars agreed that inflation was killing them, although they seemed to relish the opportunity to complain about the President. One regular, a farmer and feed-lot owner named George, told me that a fertilizer he uses had gone from a $166 a ton in January, 2021, to more than $700. “You either don’t grow a crop or you spend a lot of money to grow a crop,” he said.

Falkenberg, the man who made the horseshoe sculpture, mows lawns and does landscaping for people around town. He said that he lives alone, and used to come in to the restaurant regularly, for the chitchat and the lunch specials. Now, with his customers’ lawns drying up and gas prices what they are, it was hard to justify going out to eat. “Today’s the first day I’ve been here in a while, and I used to come every day,” he said. Another patron, Stephanie Cedillo, told me that she used to visit her sister in San Antonio nearly every weekend. “She wanted me to visit today,” Cedillo said. “But I thought about the gas—going to San Antonio, and then back. I can’t do it. I used to go out. Now I go straight home from work. That’s it.”

In June, one of Rodriguez’s two cooks gave his two weeks’ notice, after five years of working at the restaurant. He didn’t offer a reason, but Rodriguez wondered whether it had to do with gas prices; the cook lived 20 miles away and didn’t drive, so his brother had to drop him off and pick him up every day. “I can only imagine what that was costing,” Rodriguez said. Now R-BBQ was down to one cook. Rodriguez briefly considered quitting his school job to work the griddle himself, but he had 14 years vested in his pension, and he was hoping to get to 20. Instead, he opted to close the restaurant on Tuesdays, too. But this meant that his remaining employees, who were already worried about their paychecks, would lose shifts. “My drive is to keep this going, because my dad sunk his savings into it,” Rodriguez said. “But there are days when I feel like, Why am I doing this?”

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A very effective tale of how spiralling inflation on everything – energy, fuel, food – can wipe out a business. Although Monroe subtly de-emphasises the point that there are also two fast-food chains in the town, which presumably find a way to eat (ha) these costs. And, as a style note, what’s the New Yorker’s rule for when a writer can refer to themselves as “I”, and when they have to use tortured phrases like “On the day that a reporter visited..”
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‘I don’t know how my show is doing’: showrunners’ struggle with streaming services • Vulture

Kathryn VanArendonk and Josef Adalian:

»

For decades, television creators had a pretty good way of finding out if their show was a hit: They could look at the Nielsen ratings, an imperfect, universal system for measuring viewership. Now that question is a lot more difficult to answer because, according to showrunners [who direct the writing and arc of series] and producers, the platforms streaming their work share almost no data with them. Third-party measurement companies are springing up to fill the void, but without input from the platforms, they can’t tell the whole story. This means the people who made a show may have little idea how big its audience is and even less of an idea about whether the streamer is happy — right up until the moment the show is renewed or canceled.

…In a series of anonymous interviews, showrunners opened up about how it feels when your show’s fate is a black box. (The platforms themselves declined to comment on their data-sharing practices.) To some people, it’s liberating: They think tracking viewership isn’t a showrunner’s job anyway, and there was never a time when Hollywood decisions felt anything but arbitrary. But to others, the data void adds an extra dose of anxiety — it’s a lot harder to negotiate without numbers to back it up.

«

I loved this one, from the “showrunner of a concluded Apple TV+ series”:

»

Over the course of my time at Apple+, I was told two things: One is that shows did better when they were released weekly; the other was completion rates. But then it’s like, What does that metric mean to you? You never knew what their goals even were. Are their macro goals to sell iPhones?

You will never be approached with any information. If you choose to expend your social capital in such an ask, you will be politely handled, but you will not be given anything that has any kind of context to it. I’m not going to be the one who demands a Zoom meeting for them to share information that they literally would lose their jobs over if they ever shared. So I went off and developed this whole relationship with one of the people who work for an analytics company that estimates ratings. I paid money for a personal subscription, and I know I’m not the only person doing that. Our audience was pretty big. I found out the show had rabid fan bases in other countries, too.

«

Apple being very, extremely Apple-y.
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Below MSRP and only getting cheaper: the GPU deluge begins • Tom’s Hardware

Jarred Walton:

»

We’ve been watching GPU prices fall since the start of the year, but the past few weeks suggest things could get a lot worse — for the graphics card manufacturers and GPU vendors, that is — in the near future.

GPU prices dropped 15% in May, and we’ve seen similar 10–15% drops each month for the past several months. We saw the best graphics cards come back into stock (at retail) as GPU mining profitability has plummeted — and that was before Bitcoin and Ethereum crashed again, dropping Bitcoin from around $30,000 to the low $20,000s and Ethereum from around $1,900 to about $1,100. In the past week, Bitcoin’s value dropped over 30%, while Ethereum plunged by more than 40%.

This has happened before — back in 2018, when it resulted in a massive oversupply of many GPU lines. AMD’s Polaris GPUs, such as the RX 570 and RX 580, went from being wildly-popular mining GPUs to being cards you could pick up for a song. The low-end RX 560 cost almost as much as the RX 570 4GB, even though the latter offered more than twice the performance. And it’s not just retail prices that will threaten sales — used GPUs will start to flood the market as people abandon cryptocurrency mining.

«

Bitcoin and Ethereum are creeping up again, but not significantly. So pile in if you need a GPU.
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Apple reaches $50m settlement over defective MacBook keyboards • Reuters

Jonathan Stempel:

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Apple Inc agreed to pay $50m to settle a class-action lawsuit by customers who claimed it knew and concealed that the “butterfly” keyboards on its MacBook laptop computers were prone to failure.

The proposed preliminary settlement was filed late Monday night in the federal court in San Jose, California, and requires a judge’s approval.

Customers claimed that MacBook, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro keyboards suffered from sticky and unresponsive keys, and that tiny amounts of dust or debris could make it difficult to type.

They also said Apple’s service program was inadequate because the Cupertino, California-based company often provided replacement keyboards with the same problems.

The settlement covers customers who bought MacBook, MacBook Air and most MacBook Pro models between 2015 and 2019 in seven US states: California, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York and Washington.

Apple denied wrongdoing in agreeing to settle.

…Lawyers for the customers expect maximum payouts of $395 to people who replaced multiple keyboards, $125 to people who replaced one keyboard, and $50 to people who replaced key caps.

«

Seems like Apple was paying to make this go away, since the amount is so comparatively piddling. Even so, the decision feels like vindication for the huge number of people who really, really didn’t like the butterfly keyboards.
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BMW wants to charge for heated seats. These grey market hackers will fix that • Vice

Joseph Cox and Aaron Gordon:

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Last week, the internet dragged BMW for a proposal in which heated seats would become an $18/month subscription service. Now, a community of hackers who have been unlocking features in BMWs for years tell Motherboard they’re prepared to help owners unlock subscription-only features.

These companies say they perform vehicle “coding” to add additional features like Android screen mirroring or remove undesired programs like turning off annoying chimes and can also enable a feature on the European model of BMW’s older electric car that was disabled for regulatory reasons. They advertise their services through various enthusiast forums and popular shopping websites like eBay and Etsy. Long viewed as part of the enthusiast/modding culture, some of these modders say they could unlock subscription-based features too.

“We’re always listening to our customers and finding ways to offer the features they’re looking for. As long as BMW makes it possible to activate heated seats, we can look at offering it. If BMW doesn’t allow it, then the same feature could be added with a hardware retrofit, so in the end the driver is always going to be able to get what they want,” Paul Smith, content marketing specialist at Bimmer Tech, a BMW coding firm, told Motherboard in an email. 

«

What I predicted: “I suspect this is going to be hugely unpopular and that BMW will discover reverse gear, or else people will figure out how to get around the software block. That’ll invalidate something in their guarantee, and then it’ll go to court, and then the European Union will probably rule in favour of consumers”.

We’re on step 2.
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Amazon sues admins from 10,000 Facebook groups over fake reviews • TechCrunch

Taylor Hatmaker:

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If the reviews of the last completely necessary and not at all superfluous thing you bought on Amazon looked like so much copypasta, there’s a good reason: Fake reviews abound and people are getting paid to post them.

Amazon filed a lawsuit Monday against the administrators of more than 10,000 Facebook groups that coordinate cash or goods for buyers willing to post bogus product reviews. The global groups served to recruit would-be fake reviewers and operated in Amazon’s online storefronts in the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, Spain, Japan and Italy.

If 10,000 Facebook groups sounds like a lot, it’s apparently the sum total of groups Amazon has reported to Facebook since 2020. The company notes that past legal action it’s taken has been effective and “shut down multiple major review brokers,” and yet here we are. They’ve been suing people for this stuff since all the way back in 2015.

The company named one group, “Amazon Product Review,” which boasted more than 40,000 members until Facebook removed it earlier in 2022. That one evaded detection through the time-honored, AI-eluding strategy of swapping a few letters around in phrases that would get it busted.

Amazon says that it will leverage the discovery process to “identify bad actors and remove fake reviews commissioned by these fraudsters that haven’t already been detected by Amazon’s advanced technology, expert investigators and continuous monitoring.”

«

Eversolongstanding problem that Amazon has, which has been noted here before. That’s a lot of Facebook groups, though, which suggests the problem is endemic.
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The psychology of Zoom fatigue • The Atlantic

Arthur C. Brooks:

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The balance of evidence to date suggests that some people suffer a lot more from Zoom fatigue than others, but that for millions it likely deteriorates well-being, and for some—especially young people—this can be catastrophic for learning and mental health. For happiness and productivity, virtual interactions are better than nothing. But in-person interactions are better than virtual ones for life satisfaction, work engagement, and creativity.

Like most things, the right amount of virtual interaction is not zero. But for many of us, the amount we’re getting presently is too high. Each of us should think about virtual interaction more or less like nonnutritious food: In a pinch it’s okay, but we shouldn’t rely on it for regular social sustenance, because it will hurt our health.

Accordingly, employers, teachers, and friends should use the technologies as judiciously as possible, keeping virtual meetings, classes, and conversations short and to-the-point. And each of us should practice good Zoom hygiene by insisting on boundaries around our use of the technology. When possible, turn off your camera during meetings; use the old-fashioned phone with friends; agree with colleagues before meetings to an absolute, drop-dead end time, ideally after 30 minutes or less.

Also, pay attention to the creeping effects of Zoom fatigue, such as burnout and depression, and make sure you have regular breaks from the technology, such as no-Zoom weekends and a complete moratorium during your summer vacation, if you take one. Finally, on your Zoomiest days, program in some time with at least one real live human.

«

Or just head into the office! Just kidding.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Rising fuel prices in the US have prompted some people to hack the pumps to fill up for free. The cause? Defaults and easy hacks. CC-licensed photo by Robert Geiger on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Unventilated. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Donald Trump tweets incited Capitol violence, Twitter employee tells January 6th Committee • The Verge

Makena Kelly:

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In testimony, the [anonymous former] Twitter employee [who worked on platform and content moderation] explained that platform was wary of the former president’s presence on the platform as early as September 2020 when Trump urged members of the violent far-right extremist group, the Proud Boys, to “stand back and stand by” during a presidential debate.

“My concern was that the former president, for seemingly the first time, was speaking directly to extremist organizations and giving them directives,” the employee said of the September debate statement. “We had not seen that sort of direct communication before, and that concerned me.”

Despite the concerns, the employee said that Twitter refused to ban Trump in response to the statements. “If former President Donald Trump were any other user on Twitter, he would have been permanently suspended a very long time ago,” the employee told investigators.

Asked to explain the reluctant moderation approach, the employee described a symbiotic relationship between the platform and President Trump. “I believe that Twitter relished in the knowledge that they were also the favourite and most used service of the former president,” the employee said, “and enjoyed having that sort of power within the social media ecosystem.”

Trump was banned from Twitter two days after the storming of the Capitol, a decision that remains both contested and controversial. In a policy statement announcing the ban, Twitter said the action was necessary “due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” citing two tweets posted in the days following the event.

Responding to Tuesday’s testimony, Twitter spokesperson Trenton Kennedy told The Verge “We are clear-eyed about our role in the broader information ecosystem in regards to the January 6th attack on the US Capitol.”

«

So if you ever wondered even for just a minute whether Trump got kid glove treatment: yes, he did. And it continues: Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of the nuttiest members of the US Congress, has tweeted a number of things which are being left on the platform “because of her position”. This is a terrible way to run a platform, where the rules shift all the time and favour the most prominent. Derek Powazek, who used to run online community systems, has an excellent thread about it, especially this: “The core mistake Twitter is making is they think that newsworthy figures shouldn’t have to follow the rules you and I follow, but they’re wrong. In fact, it’s the opposite. Famous (or infamous) people should be held to a HIGHER standard because their use will be mirrored.”

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Hack the pump: rising prices lead to more reports of gas theft • NBC News

Kevin Collier:

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Len Denton, a fuel industry veteran and the founder of Guardian Payment Solutions Corp., a startup that makes security products for gas stations, said that gas station owners and law enforcement officials have told him of a rush of theft complaints from station owners and police since March. [US fuel stations require people to pay, or insert a credit card, before the pump will work.]

Most American gas stations use pumps from one of two manufacturers: Wayne Fueling Systems or Gilbarco Veeder-Root. Besides thieves simply arriving in off hours and stealing gas in bulk from underground storage tanks, gas hackers primarily steal using one of two methods, one for each of the two companies, Denton said. Neither company responded to a request for comment.

The first exploits the fact that many Wayne fuel dispensers have a remote control option to allow station owners and fuel inspectors to easily access them. Those remotes are not regulated, though, and NBC News found many of them for sale online on places including eBay. Ebay did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

While Wayne’s gas dispensers require remote users to enter a key code to access its controls, many station owners never change it from the default setting, Denton said.

John Clark, a police officer at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department North Division in North Carolina, said a suspect he arrested in March used a remote control to access a Wayne pump at a Charlotte gas station then sold the gas. The suspect, who is still awaiting trial, put the pump into a setting designed for technicians to test gas, which allows them to dispense fuel without payment, Clark said.

“You can just pump as much as you want. The easy solution to prevent this from happening is to change that code when pumps are installed, but for whatever reason, whether apathy or lack of knowledge, some of these owners aren’t.”

«

In Britain it’s a lot simpler: people fill their tanks and drive off. But then their numberplate goes on to a national system shared between huge numbers of fuel stations, and they’ll never be able to fill up at a mainstream fuel station again.
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Ignore the chaos. Britain’s system is working • The Atlantic

Tom McTague:

»

whenever Britain emerges from one of its political upheavals, calls emerge for the country to codify its constitution in a single, intelligible document like the United States’. Britain may have escaped this time, the argument goes, but it is still far too reliant on the “good chap” theory of politics—that in the end, good chaps in power do the right thing.

Over and over, Britain finds itself in this mess. Even today, Britain’s constitution seems entirely absent when it comes to the matter of who will replace [Boris] Johnson as prime minister. Over the summer, 160,000 or so Conservative Party members will choose their next leader, and therefore the country’s prime minister, based on rules drawn up by something called the 1922 Committee, a Conservative grouping in Parliament that has no constitutional basis at all.

But here’s the thing: Britain does not escape its various political crises despite its constitution. Britain escapes these crises because of it.

Britain did not need a set of written instructions to get rid of Johnson. Even though he won the biggest Conservative majority since 1987, he lost power within three years because a majority in Parliament decided he was no longer fit for office. America’s written constitution failed to get rid of Donald Trump despite the fact that he tried to blackmail Ukraine and then incited an attempted insurrection to steal an election. In France, a written constitution did not stop Charles de Gaulle from essentially taking power in a coup in 1958.

…which system has actually shown itself to be more adaptable: the British or the American? Today, the U.S. Constitution is worshipped almost as a sacral text, as if people have forgotten it was a messy and at times deeply immoral political compromise between a bunch of 18th-century British radicals, slave holders, and secessionists. It took a civil war to introduce the Thirteenth Amendment, banning slavery. And today, despite yet another wave of violent gun attacks, the Second Amendment appears unreformable. Over this same period, the British monarchy has essentially lost all its power.

«

For a Briton, reading this is refreshing: a reminder that the reason our constitution works so well is because it isn’t written down. Trump’s reign (the word’s appropriate) was laced with moments of “that breaks a law, doesn’t it?” which then demonstrated that the laws being broken carried no effective penalties.
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Why we can’t have an air source heat pump • Terence Eden’s Blog

The ecological Mr Eden:

»

As part of our quest to make our house more efficient, we’ve installed solar panels, a battery, insulation, and all the other stuff you’re supposed to do. The next step is working out if we can reduce our dependency on gas.

Octopus Energy (join and we both get £50!) offered to send an engineer around for free to assess our property for suitability for an Air Source Heat Pump (ASHP).

The engineer was friendly, knowledgeable, professional, thorough, and just full of bad news!

Here’s a short summary of the issues they found:

• Siting of the ASHP. It can’t be in view of the road, so it needed to be in our back garden.

«

There are quite a few others, but this one infuriates me. Why can’t it be in view of the road? “Planning regulations”. Do they stop gas flues or chimneys being visible from the road? No. The planet’s on fire, but look, at least when the aliens come along and excavate our civilisation they’ll be impressed by how pretty our buildings are. At least when viewed from the road.
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Bloomberg says US has hit electric car tipping point • CleanTechnica

Steve Hanley:

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In the tech world, people like to talk about the S Curve, a graphical (and somewhat mythical) symbol that purports to predict when new technology will go mainstream. In theory, once a new, new thing hits 5% market penetration, the rate of acceptance goes up exponentially before tailing off at the end. Think of the smartphone. At first, people thought it was a fad, then everyone had to have one. Today, there are a few holdouts who are rocking flip phones, but they are by far the minority.

CBS News reports that the United States is the most recent addition to a growing list of nations where fully electric cars make up 5% of new vehicle sales, a threshold that opens the gate to mass adoption, based on the latest findings from Bloomberg. During the last 6 months, the US moved past that tipping point, following 18 other countries. If prior trends continue, a quarter of new car sales could be electric by the end of 2025, Bloomberg predicts.

When it comes to electric cars, 5% seems to be the magic number at which the early adopters are joined by most of the rest of a country’s population. Bloomberg found the scenario had played out in Norway after its first 5% quarter in 2013, with China following suit in 2018 and then South Korea last year. Canada, Australia, and Spain are among the other major car markets nearing the tipping point this year.

Every country that has crossed the mark has a program of federal incentives and pollution rules in place. That goes for the US too, with the White House last year calling for EVs to make up half of new cars by 2030, including hybrids. The US should hit that target several years ahead of schedule, Bloomberg says.

«

The S curve, aka the “diffusion curve“, isn’t mythical. It’s been demonstrated again and again. The curves tend not to be tidy, sure, but it’s a very useful approximation.
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Analysis: record low price for UK offshore wind is a quarter the price of gas • Carbon Brief

Simon Evans:

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A UK government auction has secured a record 11 gigawatts (GW) of new renewable energy capacity that will generate electricity four times more cheaply than current gas prices.

The projects are all due to start operating within the next five years up to 2026/27 and have agreed to generate electricity for an average price of £48 per megawatt hour (MWh) in today’s money. This is less than a quarter of the price of the £196/MWh current cost of running gas-fired power stations.

Most of the new capacity – some 7GW – will be offshore wind. Notably, for the first time, these projects were cheaper than the 1.5GW of onshore wind or 2.2GW of solar.

Once the pre-approved projects are built, Carbon Brief estimates they will generate 42 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity per year, enough to meet around 13% of current UK demand.

«

This is the price delta you really need. When it’s that much cheaper to build wind (and solar), there’s no reason not to. Total UK generating capacity is a little over 100GW, though the concern is that this new capacity won’t be replacing fossil fuel (CCGT, ie gas) generators, but instead nuclear plants reaching the end of their life.
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Tesla turns to California to build “world’s largest virtual power plant” • One Step Off The Grid

Joshua Hill:

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Californian utility Pacific Gas and Electric Company and Tesla invited roughly 25,000 PG&E customers with Powerwall home batteries to join a virtual power plant (VPP) pilot in the state, offering compensation for the energy they discharge to the grid.

The companies said this week that more than 3,000 customers had responded to the initial offer, while more than 1,500 customers officially entered the program within the first two weeks.

…The collaboration in California will see Tesla participate in PG&E’s Emergency Load Reduction Program (ELRP) pilot by enrolling and combining residential Powerwall home battery systems into a virtual power plant to discharge power back to the grid in California during times of high electricity demand.

In California, Tesla and PG&E hope to accelerate customer adoption of distributed energy resource technologies by helping to expand access to new customer programs and participation opportunities.

“VPPs are a valuable resource for supporting grid reliability and an essential part of California’s clean energy future,” said Aaron August, PG&E’s vice president for business development & customer engagement.

“Our customers’ home batteries offer a unique resource that can positively contribute to our state’s electric grid and will become more significant as our customers continue to adopt clean energy technology.

…The PG&E and Tesla VPP will see PG&E direct load managements events for participating customers which will direct their battery to discharge when there is high demand for electricity between 4pm to 9pm, specifically through May to October (the Northern Hemisphere’s warmer months).

Customers participating in the VPP will receive $2 for every incremental kilowatt-hour of electricity that their Powerwall discharges back into the grid during a load management event.

«

Those kWh prices are impressive when you consider that PG&E charges $0.51 at peak for domestic users in the summer (if I’ve got the right tariff, which I might not.)
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Fake IPL in Gujarat village dupes Russian punters • Times of India

Ashish Chauhan:

»

It’s not cricket, but a Gujarat village almost pulled off an elaborate con with a fake IPL [Indian Premier League of cricket] – complete with farm labourers masquerading as players, a Harsha Bhogle mimic and even an “official” Telegram channel to take punts – for a remote audience of Russian punters addicted to betting on the thrills and spills of T20 [the 20-overs-per-side, one-day cricket format].

The charade playing out in a remote farm at Molipur village of Mehsana district reached the “knockout quarterfinal” stage before the organisers of the “Indian premier cricket league” were caught out by the cops.

The gang of cons who set up “IPL” matches at a farm in a Gujarat village accepted bets from punters in Russian cities of Tver, Voronezh and Moscow. The cricket matches were broadcast live over a YouTube channel labelled “IPL” for over a fortnight.

What made the grand fraud even more audacious was that the fake matches started three weeks after the real IPL concluded.

All it took for the real-life con caper to be executed were 21 farm labourers and unemployed youths from the village, who took turns wearing jerseys of the Chennai Super Kings, Mumbai Indians and Gujarat Titans. They even did umpiring, flaunting a few walkie-talkies in front of five HD cameras. Crowd-noise sound effects downloaded from the internet made the ambience appear authentic to the audience sitting in Russia.

«

Wicked clever. Reminds me of the terrible setup for the film The Grand Seduction, in which the Canadian doctor who is the plot’s lynchpin is fanatical about cricket, of all things, in a Newfoundland fisheries town.
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Low-background steel • Wikipedia

»

Low-background steel is any steel produced prior to the detonation of the first nuclear bombs in the 1940s and 1950s. Typically sourced from shipwrecks and other steel artefacts of this era, it is often used for modern particle detectors because more modern steel is contaminated with traces of nuclear fallout.

Since the cessation of atmospheric nuclear testing, background radiation has decreased to very near natural levels, making special low-background steel no longer necessary for most radiation-sensitive applications, as brand-new steel now has a low enough radioactive signature that it can generally be used in such applications. However, some demand remains for the most radiation-sensitive applications, such as Geiger counters and sensing equipment aboard spacecraft, and World War II-era shipwrecks near in the Java Sea and western South China Sea are often illegally scavenged for low-background steel.

«

Random but fascinating. Airborne background radiation hit 0.11 milliSieverts per year over natural background in 1963 (the year the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty came into force). Since then it’s fallen to 0.005 mSv/yr above background, a factor of 22 less.

Ideal, as it turns out, for neutrino experiments. But it’s not always entirely legitimately acquired.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The James Webb Space Telescope is a marvel of engineering – and also of communication reliability, with 57GB of daily data to store and send. CC-licensed photo by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. How many fingers am I holding up? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

A million-word novel got censored before it was even shared. Now Chinese users want answers • MIT Technology Review

Zeyi Yang:

»

Imagine you are working on your novel on your home computer. It’s nearly finished; you have already written approximately one million words. All of a sudden, the online word processing software tells you that you can no longer open the draft because it contains illegal information. Within an instant, all your words are lost.

This is what happened in June to a Chinese novelist writing under the alias Mitu. She had been working with WPS, a domestic version of cloud-based word processing software such as Google Docs or Microsoft Office 365. In the Chinese literature forum Lkong on June 25, Mitu accused WPS of “spying on and locking my draft,” citing the presence of illegal content. 

The news blew up on social media on July 11 after a few prominent influencer accounts belatedly picked it up. It became the top trending topic on Weibo that day, with users questioning whether WPS is infringing on their privacy. Since then, The Economic Observer, a Chinese publication, has reported that several other online novelists have had their drafts locked for unclear reasons in the past. 

Mitu’s complaint triggered a social media discussion in China about censorship and tech platform responsibility. It has also highlighted the tension between Chinese users’ increasing awareness of privacy and tech companies’ obligation to censor on behalf of the government. “This is a case where perhaps we are seeing that these two things indeed might collide,” says Tom Nunlist, an analyst on China’s cyber and data policy at the Beijing-based research group Trivium China 

While Mitu’s document has been saved online and was previously shared with an editor in 2021, she says she had been the only person editing it this year, when it was suddenly locked. “The content is all clean and can even be published on a [literature] website, but WPS decided it should be locked. Who gave it the right to look into users’ private documents and decide what to do with them arbitrarily?” she wrote.

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Appalling, awful, bad Chinese censors, etc. Also: precisely the same thing happens for Google Docs users, though for different reasons. People have found access to their documents blocked, with no reason given. Of course you could get it reversed by contacting Google customer service. Hahahaa.

Cloud documents: good in some ways, terrible in others. (Related, obliquely: have you noticed how rare it now is for authors to come onto Twitter in a panic saying they’ve lost their novel because of a disk crash? Disks are better. And possibly people are backing up more, or writing in the cloud. As here.)
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The Webb Space Telescope’s profound data challenges • IEEE Spectrum

Michael Koziol on the James Webb Space Telescope, which can generate 57GB of data per day, compared to Hubble which generates 1-2GB daily, but which is also too far away for any sort of maintenance mission:

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Any scientific data the JWST collects during its lifetime will need to be stored on board, because the spacecraft doesn’t maintain round-the-clock contact with Earth. Data gathered from its scientific instruments, once collected, is stored within the spacecraft’s 68GB solid-state drive (3% is reserved for engineering and telemetry data). Alex Hunter, also a flight systems engineer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, says that by the end of JWST’s 10-year mission life, they expect to be down to about 60 GB because of deep-space radiation and wear and tear.

The onboard storage is enough to collect data for about 24 hours before it runs out of room. Well before that becomes an issue, JWST will have scheduled opportunities to beam that invaluable data to Earth.

JWST will stay connected via the Deep Space Network (DSN)—a resource it shares with the Parker Solar Probe, Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, the Voyager probes, and the entire ensemble of Mars rovers and orbiters, to name just a few of the other heavyweights. The DSN consists of three antenna complexes: Canberra, Australia; Madrid, Spain; and Barstow, Calif. JWST needs to share finite antenna time with plenty of other deep-space missions, each with unique communications needs and schedules.

Sandy Kwan, a DSN systems engineer, says that contact windows with spacecraft are scheduled 12 to 20 weeks in advance. JWST had a greater number of scheduled contact windows during its commissioning phase, as instruments were brought on line, checked, and calibrated. Most of that process required real-time communication with Earth.

All of the communications channels use the Reed-Solomonerror-correction protocol—the same error-correction standard as used in DVDs and Blu-ray discs as well as QR codes. The lower data-rate S-band channels use binary phase-shift key modulation—involving phase shifting of a signal’s carrier wave. The K-band channel, however, uses a quadrature phase-shift key modulation. Quadrature phase-shift keying can double a channel’s data rate, at the cost of more complicated transmitters and receivers.

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If you find this both awe-inspiring and mind-numbing, you’re not alone. The amazing technical challenges of the JWST are set out in a series of posts. They’ve already benefited earthbound life by making far more precise medical procedures possible. And it’s the culmination of a 20-year project. Sometimes, humans are pretty good at things: the JWST is a cause for optimism in itself.
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A migrant smuggling clan is broken up in Germany: “The hydra is alive” • DER SPIEGEL

Hannes Schrader, Roman Lehberger, Hubert Gude and Jürgen Dahlkamp:

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“With this blow, we have broken up one of the most powerful migrant smuggling groups that Europe has ever seen,” says Helgo Martens, head of operations for the German Federal Police. The ring is thought to have funneled up to 10,000 migrants through the dangerous route to England since the beginning of 2021. At an estimated profit of at least 15 million euros, though officers involved say the true sum is likely twice that amount.

The shots fired in Osnabrück [when a gang member was shot six times, and subsequently informed police] and the raids provided a pathway into the secretive world of the traffickers. A world in which a new life in Britain can be had for between €1,500 and €8,000 – if the money is accompanied by a bit of luck and the refugees in the rubber rafts are actually successful in crossing the English Channel. If not, their money buys them a ticket to death. Like in November 2021, when 27 people, including a pregnant woman and three children, drowned when their boat foundered.

The international raid, the primary focus of which was in the German state of Lower Saxony, clearly demonstrates that Germany plays a decisive role in one of the greatest human dramas currently playing out on the European stage. Virtually unnoticed by the public, human smuggling groups based largely in Germany have developed, pursuing an unholy business in which they apparently don’t care if their freight ends up in England or in the afterworld.

And its not just the migrants themselves who make stopovers in Germany on their way to the Atlantic coast. The country is also considered to be the most important hub for small boats, primarily inflatable rafts, that are delivered on demand to the seaside, where they are then filled with migrants. Some 80% of the boats and the motors, French investigators estimate, come through Germany.

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Detailed look at precisely what the smuggling chain actually looks like, for which the UK government’s answer seems to be to try to empty the bath with a thimble by sending asylum seekers arriving by those boats to Rwanda (and accepting Rwandan asylum seekers in return 🤷‍♂️). The obvious solution is to follow it back up to the source, as this article explains.

In 2021, just over 28,000 people arrived in the UK by the small boats/Channel route. (The number in the article from the French interior ministry says more than 36,000 were “intercepted at the English Channel”, which suggests about 8,000 were stopped on the French side.)

So taking out a group sending 10,000 is significant. Even more effective would be offering locations outside the UK where people could apply for asylum.
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Why Celsius Network’s depositors won’t get their money back • Coppola Comment

Frances Coppola dives into the bankruptcy filing from the “asset manager” which, as she points out, was actually a “shadow bank” – a bank in everything but name and, oh, asset guarantees:

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The crypto lender Celsius has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. This should come as a surprise to absolutely no-one, though the grief and pain on Twitter and Reddit suggests that quite a few “Celsians” didn’t want to believe what was staring them in the face. Celsius suspended withdrawals nearly a month ago. So far, every crypto lender that has suspended withdrawals has turned out to be insolvent. There was no reason to suppose that Celsius would be different.  

Celsius’s bankruptcy filing says the company has assets of $1bn – $10bn and a similar quantity of liabilities.

This doesn’t tell us much about the extent of the company’s insolvency. But rumours have been circulating of a $2bn hole in its balance sheet. In May, according to Coindesk, the company said it had $12bn of what Celsius calls “customer assets” and Coindesk calls “assets under management”, and $8bn lent out to clients. So “assets under management” seem to have fallen by $2bn. Could this be the missing $2bn?

No, it couldn’t. It’s the wrong side of the balance sheet. What Celsius calls “customer assets” are its own liabilities.

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Quite the category error there. And her recommendations:

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Inevitably, there are calls for tougher regulation of crypto shadow banks like Celsius. To some extent, I agree. At the very least, misleading marketing should be stamped on: no way was Celsius ever a safer alternative to a traditional bank. And crypto lenders should be held to the same standards of disclosure as other financial institutions. It should not be possible for a crypto lender to produce no accounts for over two years and scrub all mention of its current financial position from its website.

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Cryptomining capacity in US rivals energy use of Houston, findings show • The New York Times

Hiroko Tabuchi:

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Seven of the largest bitcoin mining companies in the United States are set up to use nearly as much electricity as the homes in Houston, according to data disclosed Friday as part of an investigation by congressional Democrats who say miners should be required to report their energy use.

The United States has seen an influx of cryptocurrency miners, who use powerful, energy-intensive computers to create and track the virtual currencies, after China cracked down on the practice last year. Democrats led by Senator Elizabeth Warren are also calling for the companies to report their emissions of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that is the main driver of climate change.

“This limited data alone reveals that cryptominers are large energy users that account for a significant — and rapidly growing — amount of carbon emissions,” Sen. Warren and five other members of Congress wrote in a letter to the heads of the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy. “But little is known about the full scope of cryptomining activity,” they wrote.

Research has shown that a surge in cryptomining is also significantly raising energy costs for local residents and small businesses, and has added to the strain on the power grid in states like Texas, the letter noted.

…That data showed that the seven companies alone had set up to tap as much as 1,045 megawatts of power, or enough electricity to power all the residences in a city the size of Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city with 2.3 million residents. The companies also said that they plan to expand their capacity at an eye-popping rate.

One of the largest cryptomining companies in the United States, Marathon Digital Holdings, told the probe that it operated almost 33,000 highly specialized, power-intensive computers, known as “mining rigs,” as of February, up from just over 2,000 at the start of 2021. By early next year, it intends to get that number up to 199,000 rigs, an almost hundredfold increase in two years, it said.

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Tricky one for politicians: are they going to legislate how people should use power? Crypto is absolutely a waste of energy, yet is it moreso than a million people playing games on PCs using a kilowatt per hour? Obviously you’d charge more for electricity provided to commercial users, and that should include bitcoin miners.
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Elon Musk opposes Twitter’s request for expedited trial over stalled deal • WSJ

Sarah E. Needleman and Erin Mulvaney:

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Elon Musk filed a motion Friday opposing Twitter’s request to expedite a trial over his intention to terminate his $44bn takeover.

Lawyers for Mr. Musk filed papers with the Delaware Chancery Court, their first public response to the lawsuit filed earlier this week by the social-media company seeking to enforce the terms of their merger agreement. The court should reject Twitter’s “unjustifiable request to rush this,” they said in their filing.

Twitter has asked the court to expedite the proceedings, citing risks from the recent economic downturn and being held in limbo by a buyer. The company requested a trial by mid-September “to protect Twitter and its stockholders from the continuing market risk and operational harm resulting from Musk’s attempt to bully his way out of an airtight merger agreement.”

…In Friday’s filing, Mr. Musk’s lawyers said: “The core dispute over false and spam accounts is fundamental to Twitter’s value. It is also extremely fact and expert intensive, requiring substantial time for discovery.”

Mr. Musk’s lawyers argued that “it is unnecessary to resolve these weighty considerations on a breakneck schedule” and asked for a trial date on or after Feb. 13 of next year, adding that the debt financing was valid until April 25, 2023.

…“With the sense of humor of a bot, Twitter claims that Musk is damaging the company with tweets like a Chuck Norris meme and a poop emoji. Twitter ignores that Musk is its second largest shareholder with a far greater economic stake than the entire Twitter board,” the filing states.

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February 2023? We might all die of excitement, or boredom. Meanwhile, that shareholding is going to be a leaden weight in his pocket.
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Facebook advertisers are starting to shift spending for the first time • Business Insider

Claire Atkinson, Lucia Moses, and Lara O’Reilly:

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Digital ad sellers are having a bad year. But for Facebook parent Meta Platforms, the problem is worse — and it may be one it doesn’t recover from.

Already, analysts expect the social giant to record zero growth in the second quarter, in a first for the company. Mark Zuckerberg himself called the situation “one of the worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history,” according to Reuters. The rest of the digital ad sector, made up of Google, Twitter, Snap and others, is also facing a slowdown in growth.

What’s different is that Meta is in a perfect storm. As a result, more advertisers are not just increasingly willing to diversify away from Meta, but doing so for the first time. It’s a big shift for a company that historically could always count on their dollars, scandal after scandal, as long as their ads performed.

One top exec at a major holding company agency said the economic downturn would affect everyone in the second half but that significantly, Meta would lose share of client spending as well, saying, “This is a first.”

The major ad forecasters have cut their overall ad spending outlooks for the year, and other agency execs say Meta, long considered a “must-buy,” is now at the top of clients’ lists of places to cut.

Analysts, too, say Meta is coming down to Earth after years of explosive growth. Needham analyst Laura Martin on Monday downgraded Meta’s stock from “hold” to “underperform,” given its guidance for slower revenue growth and huge investment in its vision for the metaverse.

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How Joe Manchin doomed the Democrats’ climate plan • The New York Times

Coral Davenport and Lisa Friedman:

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First, he killed a plan that would have forced power plants to clean up their climate-warming pollution. Then, he shattered an effort to help consumers pay for electric vehicles. And, finally, he said he could not support government incentives for solar and wind companies or any of the other provisions that the rest of his party and his president say are vital to ensure a livable planet.

Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, who took more campaign cash from the oil and gas industry than any other senator, and who became a millionaire from his family coal business, independently blew up the Democratic Party’s legislative plans to fight climate change. The swing Democratic vote in an evenly divided Senate, Mr. Manchin led his party through months of tortured negotiations that collapsed on Thursday night, a yearlong wild goose chase that produced nothing as the Earth warms to dangerous levels.

“It seems odd that Manchin would choose as his legacy to be the one man who single-handedly doomed humanity,” said John Podesta, a former senior counselor to President Barack Obama and founder of the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank.

Privately, Senate Democratic staff members seethed and sobbed on Thursday night, after more than a year of working nights and weekends to scale back, water down, trim and tailor the climate legislation to Mr. Manchin’s exact specifications, only to have it rejected inches from the finish line.

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You are requested to start building a time machine and to go back and persuade Manchin, as a teenager, not to bother with that politics nonsense.

More seriously: the US’s flawed approach to democratic representation has taken 200 years to show its real failure, but we’ll all have to suffer for it. Well, perhaps not all. Manchin is 74 years old.
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Deadly heatwaves show why India needs to get serious on climate adaptation • Climate Change News

Skand Agarwal:

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This March was India’s hottest since records began 122 years ago. The temperature hit 49C in several states of India by the end of May.

The increasing frequency of heatwaves and their early arrival have had enormous economic and health impacts, especially on agricultural communities and daily wage labourers. People employed in the informal sectors such as rickshaw pullers, domestic helpers and daily contractors risked heat stroke if they worked during the hottest hours and lost critical income if they rested instead.

Sporadic and prolonged summers are making monsoon season unpredictable, forcing farmers to adapt their production cycle every season. This year’s harsh summer has resulted in sudden pressure on power demand and coal shortages, pushing the country into a severe electricity crisis.

As if unprecedented heat was not enough to deal with, the northeastern state of Assam has witnessed torrential pre-monsoon rainfall causing floods all over the state. The overflowing of Brahmaputra River, one of the major rivers passing through India, has overrun close to 1,500 villages and affected nearly 500,000 people.

While the National Disaster Management Authority of India (NDMA) has started to rehabilitate the affected people, a sudden migration to nearby cities has put pressure on the local administrations.

All this shows why adapting to the impacts of climate change deserves equal attention to cutting emissions.

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In the UK, everyone is falling about at the prospect of a 40ºC (104ºF) day, which will almost surely be record-breaking. 49ºF is 120ºF.
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Ev Williams gives up • Platformer

Casey Newton:

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[Blogger, Twitter and then Medium founder Ev] Williams went back and forth on whether Medium should host its own publications or serve as a platform for others to build on. And while he dithered, Medium got caught in the middle.

On the high end, well funded digital publishers from BuzzFeed to Vice to the Atlantic excelled at publishing high-quality journalism. And on the low end, Substack emerged to let solo creators develop thriving, sustainable careers by offering individual subscriptions. (See my ethics disclosure about Substack.) In such a world, Medium had no obvious advantage. With its owned and operated publications gone, it became a general-interest web magazine staffed by freelancers and dependent on Google.

Another former employee noted that, for all the pivots over the years, Williams always seemed a step behind.

“I’d say you could describe the Ev era of Medium as a series of digital publishing experiments that often felt of the zeitgeist without ever defining it,” the employee said. “A lot of the work Medium did over the years genuinely had an impact, but it often felt, for whatever reason, like Ev made it a point not to lean into this work. he meandered and never seemed satisfied. And eventually Twitter evolved to support more of the kind of publishing that had originally been native to Medium, and Substack came along and ate the platform’s lunch.”

“He’s a little bit of a mystery to me,” the employee aded. “I hope a leadership shakeup is good for the company and the people who work there.”

A third former employee told me my assessment of Williams — essentially, a callous dilettante — was unfair.

“I think he was trying to solve a really hard problem, it kept not working, and he screwed a lot of people over to varying degrees by continually changing his approach,” the employee said. “But he really did try a lot of things, and it wasn’t necessarily obvious that they’d fail until somebody with a ton of money tried it.”

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In short: Williams has left Medium. Doubtless this means the paywall will get harder and charges will be higher (or ads will invade). Between Substack and actual publications, it’s hard to see where Medium fits.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified