Petrol leaf blowers are really noisy and polluting – so their electric siblings are increasingly popular. CC-licensed photo by Dean Hochman on Flickr.
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A selection of 11 links for you. Pardon? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Ozempic is obviously good for business • Very Serious
Josh Barro has been taking Ozempic for three weeks, and has already lost 2kg:
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Back in June, I tweeted that “10 years from now, it’ll be obvious GLP-1 drugs were a way bigger deal than AI.” Some people wrote to me asking me to elaborate on that, but I didn’t really want to say more until I had actually gone on one of the drugs — and at the time, I was still working on the frustrating process of obtaining them.
But my basic view is that more than half the population ought to be on these drugs and probably will be within a decade or two. Those people will generally lose 15% or more of their body weight — probably more, given that similar drugs in development appear to be even more effective than the ones already on the market — and will keep it off so long as they stay on the drugs, which may well need to be indefinitely.
All that weight loss will improve health outcomes in obvious ways, like reducing cardiovascular disease and diabetes, and in less obvious ways like fewer people needing knee replacements or kidney dialysis. Lower disease burden will mean fewer sick days and higher labor productivity. And there will be huge gains in personal happiness: well over a hundred million Americans who have been struggling all their lives to control their weight will be finally succeeding at it, and in a way that does not involve a great deal of mental effort or perceived sacrifice. People will gain self-esteem, they’ll be relieved of negative feelings about their weight, and they’ll be able to redirect (often substantial) energy they once devoted to dieting to other endeavors.
And that’s just considering the drugs’ intended effects on weight (and diabetes). There’s also the matter of other improvements in impulse control — how these drugs seem to have the positive side effect of helping at least some people control substance use, gambling, compulsive shopping, and other problem behaviors. We may have stumbled upon a drug class that broadly improves people’s judgment and decision-making. Isn’t that amazing?
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I’m inclined to agree with him. Obesity is a huge problem in the US, and increasingly in the UK and elsewhere. The idea of taking a pill forever might not be attractive at first, but it’s effectively a health supplement.
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The great cash-for-carbon hustle • The New Yorker
Heidi Blake:
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To register the Kariba project with Verra, South Pole had to predict how much of the forest would be lost without any intervention, and thus determine how much carbon the scheme would conserve over a thirty-year life span. Credits would be issued every year against that total, and the prediction would be checked once a decade, by comparing Kariba with an unguarded reference area nearby.
South Pole’s data analysts initially estimated that the program could save around fifty-two million tons of carbon. But Verra required them to rerun these calculations using one of its approved methodologies. The scientists used one named VM9, which generated a startlingly different projection: if the Kariba site was left undefended, deforestation would explode, resulting in the eventual loss of 96% of the forest. On that basis, the project would be eligible for almost two hundred million credits—four times the initial estimate.
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This is not a short article, but it’s stuffed full of insight into the scams around carbon offsets, which is an insane business. The précis is written by financial seer Matt Levine, whose daily newsletter on this one is absolutely spot on: “you can’t sell trees no one cuts down“. You have to subscribe to the newsletter (free!), or Bloomberg, to read it. Though I think this paragraph of his sums it up well:
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If you came to carbon credits as a financial engineer, and you find out that you are getting paid for some pure accounting abstraction rather than for saving the world, you will be like “yes, exactly.”
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Which is why I’m dubious about Apple’s claims of carbon neutrality based on offsets.
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Strange form of ice found that only melts at extremely hot temperatures • ScienceAlert
Clare Watson:
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From our earthly surrounds, you’d be forgiven for thinking water is a simple, elbow-shaped molecule made up of one oxygen atom linked to two hydrogens that settle into a fixed position when water freezes.
Superionic ice is strangely different, and yet it may be among the most abundant forms of water in the Universe – presumed to fill not only the interiors of Uranus, Neptune, but also similar exoplanets.
These planets have extreme pressures of 2 million times the Earth’s atmosphere, and interiors as hot as the surface of the Sun – which is where water gets weird.
Scientists confirmed in 2019 what physicists had predicted back in 1988: a structure where the oxygen atoms in superionic ice are locked in a solid cubic lattice, while the ionized hydrogen atoms are let loose, flowing through that lattice like electrons through metals.
This gives superionic ice its conductive properties. It also raises its melting point such that the frozen water remains solid at blistering temperatures.
In this latest study, physicist Arianna Gleason of Stanford University and colleagues bombarded thin slivers of water, sandwiched between two diamond layers, with some ridiculously powerful lasers.
Successive shockwaves raised the pressure to 200 GPa (2 million atmospheres) and temperatures up to about 5,000 K (8,500 °F) – hotter than the temperatures of the 2019 experiments, but at lower pressures.
“Recent discoveries of water-rich Neptune-like exoplanets require a more detailed understanding of the phase diagram of [water] at pressure–temperature conditions relevant to their planetary interiors,” Gleason and colleagues explain in their paper, from January 2022.
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I know, you’re thinking: ice-nine. But not really, fortunately.
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Here’s why electric lawn mowers are cutting down the petrol-fuelled competition • Canary Media
Alison Takemura:
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Several local governments are pushing a transition to electric tools, in pursuit of cleaner air and quieter neighborhoods. California has set a zero-emissions (i.e., electric) standard for manufacturers of leaf blowers, lawn mowers and other machines with small off-road engines, which goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2024. And Denver, New Jersey and Pennsylvania are all considering their own bans on gas landscaping equipment.
…Even Home Depot is encouraging the uptake of electric lawn equipment. In June, the big-box retailer announced a goal to have battery-powered products drive more than 85% of its outdoor lawn equipment sales by 2028.
Gas-powered landscaping equipment spews smelly, black fumes that dump colossal amounts of pollutants into the local environment. The tools lack catalytic converters, so they perform much worse than most vehicles.
In just one hour, a commercial lawn mower emits as much smog-forming pollution as a car driving for four hours — equivalent to a trip from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, or about 300 miles, according to the California Air Resources Board. A backpack leaf blower is even worse; running one for an hour emits as much pollution as a 1,100-mile journey.
As you’ve likely experienced firsthand, these machines are also obnoxiously loud. Many people who worked from home during the pandemic found it was a sound they couldn’t escape. For operators, a leaf blower’s roar can cause hearing damage in just a couple of hours.
And gas-powered machines aren’t performing as well as electric ones, according to professional reviewers. Electric yard tools have knocked gas models out of the top spots in many of the “best-of” lists that consider both — including Wirecutter, The Spruce and USA Today.
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The issue is always the upfront cost. Nobody ever factors in fuel costs (or pollution, and its externalities.)
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These houses are at risk of falling into the sea. The US government bought them • The Washington Post
Brady Dennis:
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The two houses at the end of East Beacon Road in Rodanthe, N.C., sit precariously at the edge of the pounding surf.
Fierce storms and rising tides have clawed away the sand beneath them, pummeled nearby dunes and undermined septic systems. The pair of homes seem destined to one day topple into the Atlantic Ocean, the way a growing number have in recent years along this stretch of the Outer Banks, where the rates of erosion and sea level rise are among the most rapid on the East Coast.
Given that reality, it might seem surprising that 23298 E. Beacon Rd. and 23292 E. Beacon Rd. sold on the same day recently. Perhaps even more surprising was the buyer: the National Park Service.
After spending more than $700,000 for the salt-sprayed vacation homes, the federal government plans to promptly tear them down and turn the area into a public beach access.
The move marks a unique and possibly groundbreaking chapter in the deepening dilemma of what to do with imperiled coastal homes, which are becoming only more vulnerable amid rising seas, more intense storms and unceasing erosion.
Often, states and localities have little money for buyouts of such places and little political will to pursue the controversial topic of retreating from threatened shorelines. Homeowners face unenviable options of letting their homes become inundated or spending large sums to try to move them, both of which have happened in Rodanthe.
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Well, I guess that makes Ben Shapiro’s suggestion correct.
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People are using Quest 3’s passthrough in daily life • UploadVR
David Heaney:
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Some people are already using Quest 3’s passthrough in some surprising ways, and posting recordings on social media.
Quest 3 isn’t the first headset to ship with color real world passthrough. But unlike Quest Pro the camera resolution is good enough to see details, and unlike Pico 4 and Vive XR Elite it’s depth-correct so won’t make you feel queasy.
While we criticized the issues with Quest 3’s passthrough in our review, it nonetheless is still arguably the first passthrough you’d want to spend more than a few minutes in. For a few people it even seems to have crossed the threshold where they now want to use it in their daily lives, while others are already using it for attention-grabbing stunts.
Developer Tassilo von Gerlach cooked chicken soup in Quest 3 passthrough. He used an iPad and ChatGPT’s new image analysis features to get a custom recipe based on the ingredients he had, and then kept that recipe open in a Quest virtual browser window while watching a YouTube video in another.
Puzzling Places technical artist Shahriar Shahrabi used the passthrough to simply watch YouTube videos in the browser while vacuuming, doing the dishes, and dusting.
Having a YouTube video follow you around while doing chores seems like an ideal use case for XR, and may even become a mainstream activity as mixed reality headsets get better and cheaper.
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Correction: slightly odd people are using it in daily life. I can just about imagine doing this around the house, if you really have to have visual stimulation while doing routine stuff.
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Why ending childhood lead poisoning is a top-tier global development challenge • Center For Global Development
Rory Todd and Rachel Silverman Bonnifield:
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The scale of harm from lead exposure is extraordinarily large and wide-ranging. Through its impact on childhood cognitive development, our recent paper found that lead exposure is responsible for over a fifth of the learning gap between high-income countries and LMICs [low- and middle-income countries].
As a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, it is estimated to be responsible for between 1.6 and 5.5 million deaths globally each year. Accounting for both of these effects, the World Bank estimates the burden from lead exposure to be worth US$5 trillion annually, equivalent to 6.9% of global GDP.
Those are the largest and most robustly established effects, but they’re not the only ones: lead also has a likely role in encouraging antisocial behaviour, and in turn a possible role in aggressive and criminal behaviour; it is a risk factor for kidney disease and a range of other conditions; it may contribute to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, and antimicrobial resistance; and it can pose a major threat to wildlife and ecosystems, with particularly nasty impacts on birds, mammals, and reptiles.
So to summarise, lead has a larger mortality burden than HIV/AIDS and malaria; a (negative) education impact roughly equivalent to our best available (positive) school-based interventions; and an economic impact equivalent to several GDP points, plus a whole lot more.
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They estimate it could almost be removed for $350m by 2040. Incredibly cheap!
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Stack Overflow lays off over 100 people as the AI coding boom continues • The Verge
Wes Davis:
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Coding help forum Stack Overflow is laying off 28% of its staff as it struggles toward profitability. CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar announced today that the company is “significantly reducing the size of our go-to-market organization,” as well as “supporting teams” and other groups.
After the team doubled its employee base last year, Chandrasekar told The Verge’s Nilay Patel in an interview that about 45% of those hires were for its go-to-market sales team, which he said was “obviously the largest team.” We’ve reached out to Stack Overflow to find out what other teams may have been affected.
Word of the layoffs comes over a year after the company made a big hiring push, doubling its size to over 500 people. Stack Overflow did not elaborate on the reasons for the layoff, but its hiring push began near the start of a generative AI boom that has stuffed chatbots into every corner of the tech industry, including coding. That presents clear challenges for a personal coding help forum, as developers get comfortable with AI coding assistance and the very tools that do that are blended into products they use.
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Certainly looks like a poor decision to have doubled the workforce with AI coming up the motorway. Also “Stack Overflow was acquired in June 2021 by Prosus, a big company that also owns a large stake in the huge Chinese company Tencent.” Podcast/transcript of interview with the SO CEO from a year ago.
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Nancy by Olivia Jaimes for October 17, 2023 • GoComics
This one is the perfect four-panel comic for the computer age. In the words of Truffaut, about films: they should have a beginning, middle and end, but not necessarily in that order.
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InDrive wanted to make ride-hailing fairer. Drivers say it has made them poorer • Rest of World
Zuha Siddiqui:
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In September, when Lahore-based bike-taxi driver Muhammad Zain started his day, his first booking request on the inDrive app was for a drop-off around 11 kilometers away. He made a quick mental calculation and estimated a rate of 300 Pakistani rupees ($1). But inDrive, which works on a bid-based model that allows drivers and passengers to negotiate fares, restricted him from putting in the bid. It nudged him to offer half the price, which was “close to what the customer was offering.” Zain eventually got the ride for 165 rupees (around 50 cents).
This has been an everyday drill for Zain since he switched to inDrive from Careem in late 2022. He spends several minutes per ride bidding for the lowest price he can possibly afford. It has “made things worse for us riders because we have to do the additional work of bidding for rides,” Zain told Rest of World.
A comparison between three-ride hailing apps in Pakistan shows inDrive (left) with the cheapest fare of 1,194 rupees, followed by Uber (center), and then Careem (right) with the highest estimate of 1,416 rupees.
InDrive launched in Pakistan in early 2021 and quickly became the most downloaded ride-hailing app in the country, thanks to its bid-based model. But Pakistani gig drivers told Rest of World that for the most part, they only began using the app because their customers switched to it, and that they were overworked and underpaid. Though the inDrive model — with its absence of surge pricing — has been widely praised, workers who previously drove for apps like Uber and Careem said they now make less money.InDrive workers also said they experience increased anxiety as they have to constantly look at their phones to engage in bidding wars — only to end up with the lowest possible fare for every ride. “It is stressful and exhausting,” Sarmad Zaran, a Lahore-based inDrive worker, told Rest of World.
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Isn’t the next step an app for taxi drivers which ups the bidding for them? Seems like the InDrive algorithm really isn’t interested (to anthropomorphise) in the marginal benefit to taxi drivers, only in moving lots of people around. The flawed assumption behind that is that there’s a limitless supply of drivers to replace those forced out by low prices which make driving uneconomic.
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Twexit.nl
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Blue Sky Statistics
Registered Bluesky Accounts: 1,586,321
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Interesting little site which simply exists to register the growth of Bluesky. There’s a pretty steady growth, with a jump in mid-September (no doubt due to something dim Elon Musk did). What’s equally interesting here is the statistic showing “daily posting accounts”, which is presently about 150,000, ie 10% of the total registrations. You can also see how US-centric it is by following the number of posting accounts through the day. My rough guess is that one-third of posting accounts are on the US west coast.
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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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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 