Cocoa, the key to making chocolate, just broke through an all-time high price – so expect smaller cakes, bars and sprinkles. CC-licensed photo by generalising on Flickr.

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A selection of 9 links for you. Swap it for a gold bar. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

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Apple to allow iOS app downloads direct from websites in the EU • The Verge

Tom Warren:

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Apple is planning to make further changes in EU countries to allow some developers to distribute their iOS apps directly from a website. The new web distribution feature will be available with a software update “later this spring,” according to Apple, providing developers with a key new way to distribute iOS apps in EU markets without the need for a separate app store — as long as they’re willing to adhere to Apple’s strict rules.

While Apple is opening up iOS to more third-party apps here, these are still some key security protections around how apps are distributed via websites — namely, you’ll still have to work within the strict Apple app development ecosystem. “Apps offered through Web Distribution must meet Notarization requirements to protect platform integrity, like all iOS apps, and can only be installed from a website domain that the developer has registered in App Store Connect,” explains Apple.

It’s also not going to be a simple process to install these apps on an iPhone in the EU. “To install apps from a developer’s website, users will first need to approve the developer to install apps in Settings on their iPhone,” says Apple. “When installing an app, a system sheet will display information that developers have submitted to Apple for review, like the app name, developer name, app description, screenshots, and system age rating.”

So this isn’t going to be an open and free way for developers to distribute apps over the web to iOS devices in EU markets.

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Unsurprising. But Apple’s fear of the EU’S DMA (potential fine much bigger than EU revenues) seems to be moving it towards a much more, um, compliant stance. Apple’s never going to call it “sideloading” except in a disparaging way, of course.
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The meltdown in chocolate is coming • Bloomberg via The Economic Times

Javier Blas:

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because millions of West African farmers saw cocoa as their only way to escape abject poverty, the world had plentiful supply and low prices. As a result, you and I have been enjoying the pleasures of chocolate on the cheap for decades.

Unlike most other agricultural commodities, cocoa hasn’t developed into a plantation business. At the prevailing prices of the 1990s and 2000s, it simply didn’t make commercial sense. The money was made around trading the beans, and processing them into chocolate — not planting, growing and harvesting cocoa trees.

Today, the crop is still grown overwhelmingly by poor smallholders. Just making enough to subsist, most lack the means to re-invest in their plots. And finally, the decades of underinvestment have caught up with growing chocolate demand. For the third consecutive crop season, global consumption in 2023-24 will meaningfully surpass production – something unseen since the early 1960s.

We are all now confronting the inevitable chocolate crisis.

In the world of commodities, price records have fallen everywhere on the back of the industrialization of China. At the end of 2023, cocoa was one of only a four major commodities that still traded below their price peaks set in the 1970s, the previous commodity boom.

But the 46-year-old record finally fell [in February], when the cost of cocoa jumped in New York to more than $5,500 per metric ton. The industry is now abuzz with hyperbole, including predictions of prices doubling again to $10,000 a ton. I don’t think it will get to that. It’s worth remembering that the cocoa beans traded a year ago for $2,500, and that in 2000 they changed hands at just $650.

What’s happening in West Africa will soon be felt in supermarkets around the world. In a conference call with investors on Feb. 8, the day that cocoa prices blew past their previous record, Michele Buck, chief executive officer of The Hershey Co., warned about what’s coming: “We will be using every tool in our toolbox, including pricing, as a way to manage the business.”

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This piece appeared in late February; on Tuesday the cocoa price passed $7,000 per metric tonne.
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Online opt-in polls can produce misleading results about young adults’, Hispanics’ views • Pew Research Center

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Online opt-in polls have become increasingly popular. And for some purposes, such as election polling, they can perform similarly to more traditional survey approaches.

There is evidence, however, that the online environment in which they operate is somewhat unstable.

In particular, several recent studies have documented large errors in online opt-in surveys due to the presence of so-called “bogus respondents.” These respondents do not answer questions sincerely; instead, they attempt to complete surveys with as little effort as possible to earn money or other rewards.

Studies have shown that bogus respondents can cause opt-in surveys to overestimate rare attitudes and behaviors, such as ingesting bleach to protect against COVID-19, belief in conspiracies like Pizzagate or support for political violence.

At Pew Research Center, we’ve found that this type of overreporting tends to be especially concentrated in estimates for adults under 30, as well as Hispanic adults. Bogus respondents may be identifying this way in order to bypass screening questions that might otherwise prevent them from receiving a reward, though the precise reasons are difficult to pin down. Whatever the underlying cause, the result can be unreliable estimates for those groups.

For example, in a February 2022 survey experiment, we asked opt-in respondents if they were licensed to operate a class SSGN (nuclear) submarine. In the opt-in survey, 12% of adults under 30 claimed this qualification, significantly higher than the share among older respondents. In reality, the share of Americans with this type of submarine license rounds to 0%.

The problem was even worse for Hispanic estimates. About a quarter (24%) of opt-in cases claiming to be Hispanic said they were licensed to operate a nuclear sub, versus 2% of non-Hispanics.

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Pew is doing this in the context of a ridiculous poll which suggested that 20% of American adults under 30 agree with the statement “The Holocaust is a myth”. Pew tried it with a more robust panel: found the figure is 3% across all age ranges.

The only puzzle is why anyone, anywhere, would use an online opt-in poll with financial rewards and expect it not to be gamed to hell and back.
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Why everyone Is a Kate Middleton truther now • The Atlantic

Helen Lewis:

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We have become so used to smartphone surveillance, oversharing on social media, and the commercial harvesting of life events for content that the prospect of remaining uninformed about the state of a stranger’s intestines now seems like a personal affront. On March 4, a grainy photograph of Kate traveling in the passenger seat of a car with her mother, Carole, began to circulate, but it did not stop the speculation. Did her face look weird if you zoomed in to 20 times magnification? (Yes, but then so would anyone’s.) Where was Prince William? (Maybe with their kids?) Was the photo staged, as in Weekend at Bernie’s? (Come on.) Just to add fuel to the fire, that picture was not widely circulated in Britain. Again: What aren’t we being told? Why are they hiding the truth from us?

Over the weekend, the frenzy intensified when Kensington Palace released a photograph, supposedly taken by Prince William last week, of Catherine with her three children. Within hours, TikTok was full of momfluencers earnestly discussing the clumsy signs of editing on Prince Louis’s patterned sweater. Someone on X (formerly Twitter) put the photo in an online tool that deemed it AI-generated. Someone else claimed, in a post that went viral, that the photo had been taken in November, based on the family involved wearing the same clothes that they did on a trip to a food bank—edited to be different colors, for some reason. Another person jumped in to say that the shrub behind them was suspiciously green for early spring in England. And—oh, look—she didn’t appear to be wearing her wedding ring.

These assertions sounded plausible, and the sheer volume of them was self-reinforcing. But when I stopped to think, my brain somehow rewired itself. Why did I instantly believe in such a thing as an online tool that can precisely calculate the probability of a photograph being AI-generated? Why would Kensington Palace cunningly edit a white sweater to be navy—and then leave telltale signs of fakery, such as Princess Charlotte’s impossible sleeve? When I read a suggestion that Kate’s face had been lifted from her Vogue cover portrait, the spell broke. Maybe the faces looked the same … because they belonged to the same person?

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The same person?? That’s crazy talk! Though the fun in this piece is also about the scramble in loyal newsrooms which had trumpeted the photo as proof that Everything Is Totally Fine (which I think it is) and then had to reverse ferret to say that its nixing by photo agencies Raised Questions.
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Colorado’s star DNA analyst intentionally manipulated data, investigation finds • WSJ

Dan Frosch:

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Colorado’s star DNA scientist intentionally manipulated evidence for years, calling into question all of the criminal cases she worked on in her nearly three-decade career, according to a preliminary investigation released by officials Friday.

Yvonne “Missy” Woods, who helped solve some of the state’s most notorious crimes, abruptly left her post last November after the Colorado Bureau of Investigation discovered anomalies in her work and initiated a criminal probe. The internal inquiry released Friday asserts that Woods, long one of the bureau’s most respected analysts, purposefully altered DNA testing results.

The report said her manipulation affected at least 652 cases she handled between 2008 and 2023. The total could end up being higher, as investigators are still reviewing Woods’s cases dating back to the beginning of her career in 1994.

“Our actions in rectifying this unprecedented breach of trust will be thorough and transparent,” said CBI Director Chris Schaefer. 

The review didn’t find that Woods falsified DNA matches or fabricated DNA profiles. Instead, it said she omitted material facts in records, tampered with DNA testing results, and violated a variety of lab policies including quality-control measures.

State officials previously said they would need to retest and review a total of about 3,000 DNA samples handled by Woods.

Her lawyer, Ryan Brackley, said Woods never created or falsely reported any exculpatory DNA evidence or gave false testimony resulting in someone being wrongfully convicted or imprisoned. 

“To the extent that the findings of the internal investigation will call her good work into question, Ms. Woods will continue to cooperate to preserve the integrity of her work,” he said.

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There’s an episode of Elementary (the excellent Sherlock-Holmes-transplanted-to-modern-day-New-York series starring Jonny Lee Miller) in which the police, and Holmes, think they’ve got their man. Except it turns out that he works in the DNA analysis division and was very sloppy.

That doesn’t seem to be the case here, though. What a mess.
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Trump just rug-pulled the China hawks on TikTok • Noahpinion

Noah Smith:

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Why are both TikTok’s current management and CCP [Chinese Communist Party] mouthpieces so desperate to prevent a sale [of the US part of TikTok to a US-owned company]? After all, TikTok would still exist, and [current owners] ByteDance would get tens of billions of dollars in cash. There’s only one answer that makes sense: Chinese authorities believe that TikTok is an important tool for influencing public opinion in the United States.

There are two reasons usually given for forcing a TikTok sale. First, people complain that the app spies on Americans for the CCP. This is true. The company has repeatedly been caught doing any number of bad things with its American users’ data — tracking journalists who criticize the company, forwarding private data to the Chinese parent company (where the law stipulates that the CCP then owns the information), and so on. Efforts to police the app to prevent these misuses of data have been helpless, hapless, and ultimately hopeless.

But the bigger concern about TikTok isn’t spying — it’s propaganda. About a third of young Americans, and a seventh of Americans in general, now regularly get their news from the app.

The problem here isn’t that the news young Americans get on TikTok is bad — much of it certainly is bad, but that’s more of a problem with news consumers than with the app. The problem is that the news is subtly and invisibly controlled by a foreign adversary government.

…every single topic that the CCP doesn’t want people to talk about is getting suppressed on TikTok.

Again, pay close attention to what this study says. The point is not that topics like Tiananmen Square are less popular on TikTok than on Instagram. The point is that the difference between the two platforms is much, much greater for topics like Tiananmen Square than for other politically sensitive topics that the CCP doesn’t care about.

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“TikTok is propaganda” has moved from “flat-out conspiracy theory” to “accepted wisdom” in just a couple of years.
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Solar panels spread across America’s heartland as farmers chase stable returns • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Ilena Peng, Michael Hirtzer and Will Wade:

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For Stuart Woolf, who grows wine grapes, almonds and other specialty crops in California, solar power is a necessary compromise as farming gets more challenging.

Woolf, who has 1,200 acres of panels on his farm in the state’s Central Valley, says individual growers like him are turning to solar to survive. He began leasing land to solar developers about a decade ago, an arrangement that provides him with a much-needed new profit stream.

“We would prefer not to have any solar, but if we don’t have it, we won’t have the ability to keep this farm going,” he said.

Farmers are increasingly embracing solar as a buffer against volatile crop prices and rising expenses. Their incomes are heading for a 26% slide this year, the biggest drop since 2006, as cash receipts for corn, soy and sugar cane are expected to drop by double-digit percentages.

The shift is a big part of the renewables push in the US: The American Farmland Trust estimates that 83% of expected future solar development will take place on agricultural soil.

“Solar developers are looking for larger parcels of flatter land, and agricultural land often features those characteristics,” said Sean Gallagher, senior vice president of policy for Washington, DC-based trade group Solar Energy Industries Association. In return, farmers get more stable revenue over the long term — and it can be above what they earn from crops, he said.

…Solar panels are “covering up so much of the most fertile, productive farmland in the world,” said Ben Riensche, an Iowa corn and soybean farmer. “Someday, people will have electricity to run their Tesla, but no food.”

Others don’t see it as a food-versus-fuel debate. “There’s plenty of acres and record supplies. I don’t think we need those corn acres,” Dan French, executive producer of Solar Farm Summit, said at a conference held outside of Chicago. Solar so far makes up a small share of overall US farmland. Having solar account for as much as 40% of US electricity would require about 5.7 million acres, the Department of Energy estimates. That is less than 1% of America’s some 880 million acres of farmland.

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The money is in all the wrong places • Defector

Kelsey McKinney:

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The shadow of our destiny is racing towards us—a promise that meritocracy was a lie, and that we all live in and with the stagnant reality of that. There is a dread building, a bleakness that is already casting a shadow on the future. Maybe you feel it, too.

“They don’t pay actors like they used to, and with streamers, you no longer get residuals,” [actress Sydney] Sweeney told The Hollywood Reporter. She cannot do what Jennifer Aniston did a generation ago—be on a network television hit that gets replayed and replayed so frequently for so long that her life would unfold like a 300-thread-count sheet before her. Sweeney could have an entire career of choosing only hits, of never taking a break, and still not reach the kind of money the generation before her made more or less passively once their work was done. That passive income, which is the real American dream, is no longer something that the actual artists—not just actors but writers and directors and everyone else who ever made a dime off of residuals—involved in the entertainment business get to enjoy.

The same situation is happening in media, too. Writers are paid less now than they were 50 years ago, for the same work. Ernest Hemingway was paid $1 a word in 1936. That’s more than $21 per word in today’s dollars. The maximum I was ever paid to write for a glossy magazine in print was $2/word, in 2021. No one (and I really mean no one) in media makes $21/word. That compensation just doesn’t exist. You could be the most popular novelist in the world and not make $21/word to report. You could argue that no writer today is as good or popular as Hemingway was at his peak, but no writer today is even making half or a quarter of what he made, and writers only ever get so famous. If someone were paid $5/word in 2022—which is something I have never heard of happening and is a full $2 more than than anyone I know has ever been paid per word—that would be a quarter of what Hemingway was paid. That writer would be able to pay their rent and health insurance premiums and tuck some money away in savings off a standard-issue story per month, but again, that lucky writer does not exist.

What this means is that the door a writer could step through to make a career 50 or even 20 years ago, the one opening onto a life where someone who works hard and does well could buy a house on the strength of that work alone, has been slammed shut.

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McKinney’s simple, but scary point: the rich are just getting richer.
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Satellites are burning up in the upper atmosphere – and we still don’t know what impact this will have on the Earth’s climate • The Conversation

Fionagh Thomson is a senior research fellow (visual ethnographer) at Durham University:

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ozone loss is caused by human-made industrial gases, which combine with natural and very high altitude polar stratospheric clouds or mother of pearl clouds. The surfaces of these ethereal clouds act as catalysts, turning benign chemicals into more active forms that can rapidly destroy ozone.

Dan Cziczo is an atmospheric scientist at Purdue University in the US, and a co-author of the recent study that found ozone depleting substances in the stratosphere. He explains to me that the question is whether the new particles from spacecraft will help the formation of these clouds and lead to ozone loss at a time when the Earth’s atmosphere is just beginning to recover.

Of more concern to atmospheric scientists such as Cziczo is that only a few new particles could create more of these types of polar clouds – not only at the upper atmosphere, but also in the lower atmosphere, where cirrus clouds form. Cirrus clouds are the thin, wispy ice clouds you might spot high in the sky, above six kilometres. They tend to let heat from the sun pass through but then trap it on the way out, so in theory more cirrus clouds could add extra global warming on top of what we are already seeing from greenhouse gases. But this is uncertain and still being studied.

Cziczo also explains that from anecdotal evidence we know that the high-altitude clouds above the poles are changing – but we don’t know yet what is causing this change. Is it natural particles such as meteoroids or volcanic debris, or unnatural particles from spacecrafts? This is what we need to know.

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And, guess what, what we don’t know – at a time when burning spacecraft is being treated as the simple way to dispose of them.
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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