The humble-seeming telephone number has a deep ability to connect absolutely everyone. CC-licensed photo by Hades2kHades2k on Flickr.

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A selection of 9 links for you. Voicemail? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

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‘We used to check every day, now it’s every minute’: how we got addicted to weather apps • The Guardian

Hannah Marriott:

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The temperature in Austin has been in the 110s Fahrenheit (40s Celsius) for weeks; [Matt Rickett] will keep checking the apps, even when he knows no change is likely. Or else he looks at the weather in other places, where it is less hot, and he has family, and will think: “Oh, maybe I can just go there for a little bit.”

It’s behavior that Jess Green, who lives in Liverpool, England, might relate to. During last summer’s unprecedented heatwave in the UK, she says, “there was a lot of talk of: ‘will we make it to 40C?’ I kept checking in the hope that we wouldn’t.” She would watch the numbers rise on her app, with trepidation, and would then feel relieved to see them peak, thinking: “We’re on our way down; and things haven’t burst into flames.” She would check different locations. “I would think: so it’s not a record temperature in Liverpool today. That’s great. But what about London?”

She has three weather apps on her smartphone, but recently a widget has started popping up, unbidden, on Microsoft Edge on her computer. “It asks: ‘do you want to know about record temperatures today?’” Then a quiz appears, asking whether the day’s temperature is above or below average, historically. “That has made my obsession quite a lot worse,” she says. In many ways, she points out, it would be odd not to feel anxious, given the climate emergency. “But it’s a bit like the pandemic. It’s unprecedented, so it’s hard to tell if your anxiety is proportional to the threat you’re feeling.”

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The weather! Everyone talks about it, nobody does anything about it.
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Microsoft puts a steep price on Copilot, its AI-powered future of Office documents • The Verge

Tom Warren:

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Microsoft is putting a price on the AI-powered future of Office documents, and it’s a steep one for businesses looking to adopt Microsoft’s latest technology. Microsoft 365 Copilot will be available for $30 per user per month for Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium customers.

That’s a big premium over the cost of the existing Microsoft 365 plans right now. Microsoft charges businesses $36 per user per month for Microsoft 365 E3, which includes access to Office apps, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, and many other productivity features. A $30 premium for access to Microsoft 365 Copilot will nearly double the cost for businesses subscribed to E3 that want these AI-powered features. For Microsoft 365 Business Standard, that’s almost three times the cost, given that it’s $12.50 per user per month.

…Around 600 enterprise customers have been testing Microsoft 365 Copilot during a paid early access program over the past several months. Companies like KPMG, Lumen, and Emirates NBD have all had access. “We’re learning that the more customers use Copilot, the more their enthusiasm for Copilot grows,” says Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s head of consumer marketing, in a blog post today. “Soon, no one will want to work without it.”

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Is that really a lot? I think a lot of companies would feel happy if they think they’ll get $30 (or more) of extra productivity from their staff. At lunch yesterday I heard from a business consultant who used ChatGPT for the first time in his professional capacity in order to save a little time, and was both delighted and horrified by how succinctly it did his work for him. The chatbots are coming, folks.
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Phone numbers are a perfect technology • The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel:

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even the 10-digit system—one of the technological constants of my life—has an expiration date. At some point, the numbers will run out, a realization that caused me to wonder who, if anyone, is keeping tabs on our numbers. Thankfully, the North American Numbering Plan Administrator, the delightfully bureaucratic organization that manages and assigns phone numbers and area codes in 20 countries, is on the case. Say a whole bunch of people move to Montana or Maine and request new numbers—NANPA’s team works with carriers and state commissions to roll out a new area code, a process that takes at least three years, Florence Weber, NANPA’s senior director, told me.

“We continue to see an uptick in terms of requests for numbers—that’s not going away,” Weber said. But nothing lasts forever. NANPA has been closely monitoring and preparing for the day that we run out of three-digit area codes or have to move beyond the 10-digit number. Weber told me that, according to NANPA’s proprietary prediction system, which takes into account forecasted demands and assignment rates, the “projected exhaustion date” is sometime in 2051.

I shudder to think what will happen on that day. The dawn of longer phone numbers is one possibility; surrendering to online services is another. The phone number feels a bit like a relic in the age of Zoom meetings, one-tap FaceTiming, WhatsApp, Signal, Viber, DMs, Discord—you name it. Phone numbers were originally conceived as a way to route connections via location, and technically speaking, the internet now does this just as well either via IP addresses or by using the Voice over Internet Protocol. The nerds suggest that we could ditch the numbering system and use a decentralized calling system that works a bit like web addresses do—you get a unique address and purchase a domain, so people can contact you without having to punch in a long string of numbers.

Still, it’s worth considering what we lose if our area codes, prefixes, and line numbers are slowly washed away by the sands of time.

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With the 10-digit system, you do actually have enough numbers for everyone on earth to have one; in theory there are 10 billion. But, as with so much, we haven’t managed to distribute them equally.
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Threadzilla • No Mercy / No Malice

Scott Galloway on Twitter’s demise:

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We’re not only witnessing the unraveling of a firm, but a person. I have written about mens’ need for guardrails. These can take several forms — an office, a girlfriend, regulation, a board. The erosion of Musk’s guardrails as money and sycophants melt whatever better judgment or grace he had has resulted in a reputation experiencing the same trajectory as Twitter’s revenue. If Elon had never downloaded the micro-blogging app he’d be much wealthier and universally revered for his formidable accomplishments. Instead, he’s set a land speed record for hero to villain.

To be clear, Twitter will not go away. Elon remains the wealthiest man in the world and can fund Twitter’s operations, and the interest on its debt, for years if not decades. There’s ample Elon stans and a sizable cohort who don’t care about any of this and have communities or identities on Twitter that work for them. Meanwhile, Threads faces many of the same challenges as Twitter: How do you balance openness and diversity of views with standards of decency while generating sustainable cash flow? It’s a riddle few, if any, firms have solved. LinkedIn? Reddit?

History says the nose of this jet will be difficult to pull up. In 2008, MySpace was one of the most trafficked websites in the U.S., with 115 million active users, generating $800 million in revenue in a year. Then Facebook surpassed its user count and the business was sold for $35 million to Justin Timberlake. Friendster also had 115 million users at its peak in 2008. There’s a learning here: Social media apps do well until Mark Zuckerberg kills them.

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As Galloway points out, consider if we’d never heard from Musk; if, like the extremely rich people of the recent past, he’d had no easy way to transmit his laziest thoughts to billions of people. Or, as a contrast, what if Andrew Carnegie had had Twitter – would he have been the same incredible philanthropist? (It has worked for Bill Gates, so not all hope is lost.)
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The case of the 500-mile email • iBiblio

Trey Harris, in a (true) story that he first wrote up in 2002, but happened some time between 1994 and 1997:

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I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department.

“We’re having a problem sending email out of the department.”

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

“We can’t send mail more than 500 miles,” the chairman explained.

I choked on my latte. “Come again?”

“We can’t send mail farther than 500 miles from here,” he repeated. “A little bit more, actually. Call it 520 miles. But no farther.”

“Um… Email really doesn’t work that way, generally,” I said, trying to keep panic out of my voice. One doesn’t display panic when speaking to a department chairman, even of a relatively impoverished department like statistics. “What makes you think you can’t send mail more than 500 miles?”

“It’s not what I *think*,” the chairman replied testily. “You see, when we first noticed this happening, a few days ago–”

“You waited a few DAYS?” I interrupted, a tremor tinging my voice. “And you couldn’t send email this whole time?”

“We could send email. Just not more than–”

“–500 miles, yes,” I finished for him, “I got that. But why didn’t you call earlier?”

“Well, we hadn’t collected enough data to be sure of what was going on until just now.” Right. This is the chairman of *statistics*. “Anyway, I asked one of the geostatisticians to look into it–”

“Geostatisticians…”

“–yes, and she’s produced a map showing the radius within which we can send email to be slightly more than 500 miles. There are a number of destinations within that radius that we can’t reach, either, or reach sporadically, but we can never email farther than this radius.”

“I see,” I said, and put my head in my hands. “When did this start? A few days ago, you said, but did anything change in your systems at that time?”

“Well, the consultant came in and patched our server and rebooted it. But I called him, and he said he didn’t touch the mail system.”

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See if you can figure out why. (The precise distance was 558 miles.)
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Bay Area startups face ‘mass extinction event,’ experts predict • SF Chronicle

Carolyn Said:

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A Darwinian day of reckoning is on the horizon for startups. Soaring interest rates and economic jitters have created an inhospitable climate for raising capital. Venture-backed companies are now belt-tightening to conserve their cash, but experts say, ultimately, many will not survive.

“PREDICTION: There’s a mass extinction event coming for early & mid-stage companies. Late ’23 & ’24 will make the ’08 financial crisis look quaint for startups,” tweeted venture capitalist Tom Loverro early this year, in a thread that continues to get big traction.

The reason, as he and others explain it: In 2021 and early 2022, the market was flush with cash and startups easily raised money at high valuations. Typically, each VC round lasts 18 to 24 months, so many will need to return to the market for cash infusions starting in the second half of this year.

But times have changed.

“Venture capital has become a lot harder to come by, especially compared to 2021 and beginning of 2022 where there was a wave of capital exuberance,” said Kaidi Gao, associate analyst for venture capital at PitchBook, a research firm and financial data provider. “A lot of companies took advantage of that time and really loaded up their balance sheets.”

With interest rate hikes, tumbling values on Wall Street and fears of a recession, those same companies now are confronting a stark reality.

“Capital is a lot harder to come by,” Gao said. “Companies are cutting back and really trying to stretch out their runway. But you can only stretch it so far, there comes a time when you run out of capital and have to return to the market.”

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“Down rounds” which value companies lower than their previous funding round are becoming common. Unlike 2008, it’s going to be rising interest rates that kill these ones.
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This millionaire is selling his private jet — out of concern for the environment • CNN

Jacopo Prisco:

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The global private jet fleet has more than doubled in the last two decades and the market is on fire, with new industry records set for transaction and dollar volume in 2021 and 2022, according to a new report by the US Institute for Policy Studies.

Private jets emit at least 10 times more pollutants than commercial planes per passenger, disproportionately contributing to the aviation sector’s climate impact, according to the report, which was published in May 2023.

What’s more, while approximately one out of every six flights handled by the Federal Aviation Administration is private, the sector only contributes 2% of the taxes that primarily fund the agency.

Amid these concerns, one private jet owner has decided to scale back. Stephen Prince, vice-chair of the Patriotic Millionaires – a group of wealthy Americans pushing for higher taxes which also contributed to the report – is giving up his Cessna 650 Citation III.

He decided to ditch the plane – a mid-size, long range corporate jet with room for up to nine passengers – after he learned how much more carbon-intensive flying private is compared to commercial.

“I was gobsmacked by the fact that by being so in love with private air travel, I was willing to ignore what a horrible travesty I was perpetrating on the environment and on future generations,” he tells CNN. “I’ve got to change. I just can’t continue to do this.”

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Which means he’s going to save about $300k per year, and slum it in first class. Except.. if you read on, you’ll discover he hasn’t entirely given up private plane travel.

Deep sigh.
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Making EVs work in Britain • Notes On Growth

Sam Dumitriu on the many, many challenges to EV charging:

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If you happen to have somewhere to park your car off-street, acquiring planning permission to install a chargepoint is relatively straightforward. There’s a Permitted Development (PD) right for installing one, so as long as you meet certain standards (i.e. it’s not too tall, too chunky, or too close to a public highway) you do not need to apply for planning permission.

This is not the case for public chargepoints. If a business wants to install new chargepoints so people can charge while they park on the street, then they need explicit permission from the council.

In theory, this shouldn’t be a big issue. New housing generates opposition because existing residents typically lose out in some way (e.g. more congestion, lower house prices, loss of light), but chargepoints are literally a new benefit for local residents.

Yet, there have been a number of recent objections against chargepoints being installed on public roads. In Norwich, where plans to install 46 chargers on city streets were under consultation, a local branch of the pedestrian campaign group called Living Street described the proposal as “a new threat to our public space with more clutter on the pavements.” Living Streets, along with charities representing the blind or partially sighted, have lodged similar objections to a Scottish consultation which suggested creating a PD right for on-street charging.

Living Streets want on-street charging points to be placed in the road to ensure no pavement is lost (Cambridge already does this). Yet, a compromise clearly could be struck. On narrow streets, more clutter is undesirable, but on wider streets where ample space for pedestrians remains – permissions should be streamlined and become permitted development where possible.

Another way to avoid pavement clutter would be to create a permitted development right to install special gutters for EV charging cables. Companies like Kerbo Charge will install small removable gutters running from your house to a parking spot. That’s handy if you have a regular on-street parking spot in front of your house. At the moment, this scheme is only being trialled in Milton Keynes, but there’s no obvious reason why it couldn’t be rolled out nationwide.

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Charging! It’s complicated! (You’re welcome, John. Happy belated birthday.)
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Chart: going round in circles? The countries that prefer roundabouts • Statista

Katharina Buchholz:

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Roundabouts make waiting at traffic lights obsolete, yet for some drivers who are unfamiliar with them, they might mean an additional stress factor. Depending on their design, they can be harder for cyclists and pedestrians to cross. For the driver, however, roundabouts have been proven to be a faster and safer way to pass through an intersection. Additional benefits of going round in circles include saving space (because there is no need for multiple lanes leading up to a stop light) and lower costs (because of easier maintenance).

Some countries in Europe have made the roundabout their go-to intersection – notably France and Spain. France has 967 traffic circles per million inhabitants, according to an evaluation by the blog erdavis.com. In Spain the number is somewhat lower at 591 per one million people, but still high compared to elsewhere. Other countries, like the U.S. and Germany, still shy away from using the infrastructure, often citing fears that drivers who are not used to roundabouts might have trouble with the concept of yielding upon entering the circle.

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“Might have trouble with the concept of yielding upon entering the circle”? What nonsense is this? You look on the roundabout before you enter and give way to traffic already on it. Like joining any road ever anywhere, except you don’t have to look in the other direction because there won’t (pray) be anything coming from there.

I’d like to see this chart (which puts France, Spain and the UK at the top) redone per mile of road. I suspect the US would be even further down. (Thanks G for the link.)
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• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified