The introduction since 2011 in the UK of a charge for plastic shopping bags has cut the number washed up on beaches by 80%. CC-licensed photo by Ged Carroll on Flickr.
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It’s Friday, but there’s no post at the Social Warming Substack: I went to see Nadine Shah at a gig instead. But there are lots of articles there!
The Overspill is going on a two-week break. It’s August, and nothing happens (trust me!). Enjoy whatever the weather does. Back on Monday 19th, if spared.
Mike Lynch: I only got justice because I’m rich • BBC News
Tom Gerken & Tom Singleton:
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The British businessman Mike Lynch, who this June was acquitted in the US of a multi-billion pound fraud, has said he believes he was only able to clear his name because of his huge wealth.
Mr Lynch, 59, was facing two decades in jail if had been convicted of the 17 charges he faced, relating to the sale of his tech company, Autonomy, to US firm Hewlett-Packard.
He told the the PM programme, on BBC Radio 4, that though convinced of his innocence throughout, he was only able to prove it in a US court because he was rich enough to pay the enormous legal fees involved.
“You shouldn’t need to have funds to protect yourself as a British citizen”, he said. “The reason I’m sitting here, let’s be honest, is not only because I was innocent… but because I had enough money not to be swept away by a process that’s set up to sweep you away.”
He said most people, even they sold all their assets, would run out of funds in a matter of months, a situation that he said “has to change.”
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Lynch was charged in 2018 by the US, eventually extradited in 2022, and then acquitted this year. The imbalance in the extradition treaty between the US and UK has been a longrunning source of resentment – try getting a US citizen to face the music in the UK – and probably needs revision. But who’s going to tell the US?
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Antarctic temperatures rise 10ºC above average in near record heatwave • The Guardian
Damien Gayle and Dharna Noor:
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Ground temperatures across great swathes of the ice sheets of Antarctica have soared an average of 10ºC above normal over the past month, in what has been described as a near record heatwave.
While temperatures remain below zero on the polar land mass, which is shrouded in darkness at this time of year, the depths of southern hemisphere winter, temperatures have reportedly reached 28ºC above expectations on some days.
The globe has experienced 12 months of record warmth, with temperatures consistently exceeding the 1.5ºC rise above preindustrial levels that has been touted as the limit to avoiding the worst of climate breakdown.
Michael Dukes, the director of forecasting at MetDesk, said that while individual daily high temperatures were surprising, far more significant was the average rise over the month.
Climate scientists’ models have long predicted that the most significant effects of anthropogenic climate change would be on polar regions, “and this is a great example of that”, he said.
“Usually you can’t just look at one month for a climate trend but it is right in line with what models predict,” Dukes added. “In Antarctica generally that kind of warming in the winter and continuing in to summer months can lead to collapsing of the ice sheets.”
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Perhaps the rising oceans will get us before the bird flu (later!).
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Microsoft and Reddit are fighting about why Bing’s crawler is blocked on Reddit • 404 Media
Emanuel Maiberg:
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Microsoft and Reddit are offering conflicting explanations for why Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, is currently blocked from crawling Reddit and offering links from the site in its search results.
Reddit, which now demands payment from anyone crawling the site and using its data to train AI products, claims that Bing’s crawler is being used to power AI products. Microsoft claims it has made it easy for any site to block its crawler that’s used for AI products, while still allowing a crawler that is only used for search results, and that Reddit’s decision to block Bing is “impacting competition” in the search engine space.
The conflicting reasonings behind the block are further proof that the massive, indiscriminate scraping of the internet to create AI training data in a way that violates long-respected norms about how to access information on the web are eroding trust, making the internet less open, and causing tech companies to beef about this issue in public.
The beef between Microsoft and Reddit came to light after I published a story revealing that Reddit is currently blocking every crawler from every search engine except Google, which earlier this year agreed to pay Reddit $60m a year to scrap the site for its generative AI products. Reddit told me last week that this $60m deal “is not at all related” to it blocking other search engines. At the same time, as Reddit explains on its site and as it explained to me, any search engine that wants to crawl Reddit for search results must guarantee that it will not use Reddit data to power any AI products.
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I’ve read through the story, and it really seems like Microsoft and Reddit have completely conflicting explanations of this. I thought the Google deal was about getting “fresh” results, but it seems not. So is Google getting to feed its AI systems? That’s the big question.
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AI’s future in grave danger from Nvidia’s chokehold on chips, groups warn • Ars Technica
Ashley Belanger:
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Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has joined progressive groups—including Demand Progress, Open Markets Institute, and the Tech Oversight Project—pressuring the US Department of Justice to investigate Nvidia’s dominance in the AI chip market due to alleged antitrust concerns, Reuters reported.
In a letter to the DOJ’s chief antitrust enforcer, Jonathan Kanter, groups demanding more Big Tech oversight raised alarms that Nvidia’s top rivals apparently “are struggling to gain traction” because “Nvidia’s near-absolute dominance of the market is difficult to counter” and “funders are wary of backing its rivals.”
Nvidia is currently “the world’s most valuable public company,” their letter said, worth more than $3 trillion after taking near-total control of the high-performance AI chip market. Particularly “astonishing,” the letter said, was Nvidia’s dominance in the market for GPU accelerator chips, which are at the heart of today’s leading AI. Groups urged Kanter to probe Nvidia’s business practices to ensure that rivals aren’t permanently blocked from competing.
According to the advocacy groups that strongly oppose Big Tech monopolies, Nvidia “now holds an 80% overall global market share in GPU chips and a 98% share in the data center market.” This “puts it in a position to crowd out competitors and set global pricing and the terms of trade,” the letter warned.
Earlier this year, inside sources reported that the DOJ and the Federal Trade Commission reached a deal where the DOJ would probe Nvidia’s alleged anti-competitive behavior in the booming AI industry, and the FTC would probe OpenAI and Microsoft. But there has been no official Nvidia probe announced, prompting progressive groups to push harder for the DOJ to recognize what they view as a “dire danger to the open market” that “well deserves DOJ scrutiny.”
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The argument is that Nvidia “sells chips, networking, and programming software as a package”, which ties companies to them, and blocks customers doing business with rivals. The latter is surely an antitrust error, and the former seems ripe for examination.
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Intel to cut jobs, suspend dividend in cost-saving push • WSJ
Asa Fitch:
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Intel plans to lay off thousands of employees this year and pause dividend payments in the fourth quarter as part of a broad cost-saving drive more than three years into Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger’s turnaround effort.
Gelsinger laid out the plan to reduce costs by more than $10bn next year as the chip maker reported second-quarter sales of $12.8bn, down 1% and below analysts’ forecasts in a FactSet survey. Reaching that cost-reduction goal will require cutting jobs and lowering capital expenditures, among other moves, the company said.
The company’s stock fell more than 14% in after-hours trading.
Intel has struggled to gain a foothold in the market for artificial-intelligence chips that have driven the sales and valuations of Nvidia and some other rival chip makers. The heavy spending on those AI-focused chips to build out big data centers also has cut into demand for the non-AI processors for data centers that have long been central to Intel’s business.
“Clearly market conditions, some were good and some not so good, and you have to adjust the financial envelope appropriately,” Gelsinger said in an interview. “The AI surge was much more acute than I expected, and you have to adjust to those things.”
Intel will lay off about 15,000 people, most of them by the end of this year, Gelsinger said in the interview. The company reported about 116,500 employees in its core business at the end of June.
Intel reported a loss of $1.6bn for the second quarter, compared with a $1.5bn profit a year earlier. It said it expected sales of roughly $13bn in the third quarter, below analyst forecasts.
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Intel is in deep trouble. The “AI surge” is Nvidia, and GPUs, where Intel isn’t strong; but that’s where the data centre spending is going. The only way back is through ARM chips, surely, but that means competing with TSMC.
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What’s genuinely weird about the online right • The Atlantic
Helen Lewis:
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Last week, I struck up a conversation with the guy cutting my hair, who was a Frenchman living in London. When I told him that my job was writing about politics, he gave a passable impression of being interested.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Did I hear something about Donald Trump getting shot?”
I stared back at him with the awestruck bafflement of a soon-to-be-dead missionary contemplating the Sentinelese: How wondrous to meet someone so untouched by modern life! But, of course, by poring over swing-state polls, consuming coconut memes, and developing strong opinions about Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, I have become the weird one. Most Americans follow political news sporadically and sketchily. About 73 million people watched at least some of the first debate between Trump and Joe Biden in 2020, but a month before the 2016 election, 40% of Americans could not name the vice-presidential candidate from either party. They simply allocated no space in their brain for the existence of Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s running mate—and in retrospect, who could say that was the wrong decision?
One of the dangers of following politics too closely is that you assume too much knowledge, and interest, among regular voters. You overinterpret every event—this speech will definitely move the race!—and you assume that niche opinions are widely held. You end up talking with your peers rather than the public. You become, to use the word of the moment, weird.
…Also, when trying to rebut the charge that you and your allies are weird, you should not—as the right-wing influencer Dave Rubin recently did—circulate a supercut of people calling you weird and claim that the allegation is being spread by “NPCs.” If you know what NPCs are, you are very weird.
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Typically enjoyable article. I confess to being weird, on this metric.
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Delta CEO blames Microsoft and CrowdStrike for a $500m outage • The Verge
Richard Lawler:
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Asked about a continuing relationship with Microsoft after the crash, [Delta Air Lines CEO Ed] Bastian said he regards it as “probably the most fragile platform” and asked the question, “When was the last time you heard of a big outage at Apple?” He placed some blame on the valuations of big tech companies, which lately have been lifted by generative AI hype, saying, “…they’re building the future, and they have to make sure they fortify the current.”
Apparently, the only thing offered to Delta so far from the two companies was free consulting advice, so it seems their IT department wasn’t on the list for one of CrowdStrike’s $10 UberEats cards. CNBC previously reported Delta has hired attorney David Boies to seek damages.
Delta isn’t alone — CrowdStrike shareholders filed a proposed class action lawsuit this week, reports Reuters. The suit cites CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz’s comments on a March 5th call that its software was “validated, tested, and certified.” The shareholders now regard those claims as false and misleading since CrowdStrike wasn’t performing the same level of testing on Rapid Response Content updates as it does on other updates, and its Content Validator checks didn’t catch the bug that caused the global IT crash.
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If Delta switches over to Apple.. I’ll be very, very surprised.
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I’ve been driving an EV for a year. I have only one regret • WSJ
Joanna Stern:
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My electric vehicle and I are about to celebrate our first anniversary. Please send a 150-kilowatt cake and your finest bottle of car wax.
Yes, last summer I tested five EVs under $60,000. I ended up leasing a Ford Mustang Mach-E, and have continued documenting my ad-EV-ntures.
While you hear a lot about electric vehicles these days—They aren’t selling! They’re dragging down profits! They’re destroying our country!—life has been pretty great for my EV and me.
Like any couple in the honeymoon phase, we often stare longingly at each other, wondering what all the worry is about. Range anxiety? Not a thing—definitely not when it’s warm out. Missing the rumble of an internal combustion engine? Nope. Regrets about skipping the Tesla? Not since March, when I was able to start charging at Tesla stations.
“Have any of these people driven these vehicles before they say they love them or hate them?” Ford chief executive Jim Farley told me in a recent interview. “Here I am, this petrol person who just loves getting in his electric truck.”
Farley would say that. He’s got some EVs to sell. I don’t. I’m also not pushing personal politics or macroeconomic theories. I’m just a tech fan, here to tell you there’s a lot to love about these battery-powered, cutting-edge cars.
There are also some things to not love.
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• Public charging isn’t really a thing; people charge at home
• Not needing maintenance is great
• The software matters
• Winter is bad
• Leasing is good.
There you go.
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Number of plastic bags found on UK beaches down 80% since charge introduced • The Guardian
Karen McVeigh:
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The number of plastic bags washed up on UK beaches has fallen by 80% over a decade, since a mandatory fee was imposed on shoppers who opt to pick up single-use carrier bags at the checkout.
According to the Marine Conservation Society’s (MCS) annual litter survey, volunteers found an average of one plastic bag every 100 metres of coastline surveyed last year, compared to an average of five carrier bags every 100 metres in 2014.
The charity, which has monitored beach litter for the past three decades, said the drop was undoubtedly due to the introduction of mandatory charges, which can range from 5p to 25p, for single-use plastic bags.
Lizzie Price, Beachwatch programme manager at MCS, said: “It is brilliant to see policies on single-use plastics such as carrier bags working.”
Large retailers in Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland and England have been required to charge for single-use plastic bags by laws introduced in 2011, 2013, 2014 and 2015, respectively. The charge was increased from 5p to 10p in 2021 for England and Scotland and is 25p in Northern Ireland. Wales, where the minimum charge remains 5p, has said it will ban the bags altogether by 2026.
Price urged the devolved UK governments to push forward with their policies to charge for, ban or reduce more single-use items, and take action such as speeding up the proposed deposit scheme for plastic bottles, cans and glass. All four UK nations have been working together to try to agree a joint approach to the scheme, which has now been delayed until 2027.
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Putting a non-trivial price on something makes people hold on to it! Astonishing finding which will surely get economists buzzing.
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Bird flu cases among farm workers may be going undetected, study suggests • NPR Health News
Amy Maxmen:
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A new study lends weight to fears that more livestock workers have gotten the bird flu than has been reported.
“I am very confident there are more people being infected than we know about,” said Gregory Gray, the infectious disease researcher at the University of Texas Medical Branch who led the study, posted online Wednesday and under review to be published in a leading infectious disease journal. “Largely, that’s because our surveillance has been so poor.”
As bird flu cases go underreported, health officials risk being slow to notice if the virus were to become more contagious. A large surge of infections outside of farmworker communities would trigger the government’s flu surveillance system, but by then it might be too late to contain.
“We need to figure out what we can do to stop this thing,” Gray said. “It is not just going away.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention bases decisions on its surveillance. For example, the agency has bird flu vaccines on hand but has decided against offering them to farmworkers, citing a low number of cases.
But testing for bird flu among farmworkers remains rare, which is why Gray’s research stands out as the first to look for signs of prior, undiagnosed infections in people who had been exposed to sick dairy cattle – and who had become ill and recovered.
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Not happy with this “not going away”. Watching brief. Just a watching brief.
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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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