Sparks from power lines are suspected of causing many of the fires that have devastated Los Angeles. CC-licensed photo by woodleywonderworks on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Welcome back! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
The Anti-Social Century • The Atlantic
Derek Thompson:
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The flip side of less dining out is more eating alone. The share of U.S. adults having dinner or drinks with friends on any given night has declined by more than 30% in the past 20 years. “There’s an isolationist dynamic that’s taking place in the restaurant business,” the Washington, D.C., restaurateur Steve Salis told me. “I think people feel uncomfortable in the world today. They’ve decided that their home is their sanctuary. It’s not easy to get them to leave.”
Even when Americans eat at restaurants, they are much more likely to do so by themselves. According to data gathered by the online reservations platform OpenTable, solo dining has increased by 29% in just the past two years. The No. 1 reason is the need for more “me time.”
The evolution of restaurants is retracing the trajectory of another American industry: Hollywood. In the 1930s, video entertainment existed only in theaters, and the typical American went to the movies several times a month. Film was a necessarily collective experience, something enjoyed with friends and in the company of strangers. But technology has turned film into a home delivery system. Today, the typical American adult buys about three movie tickets a year—and watches almost 19 hours of television, the equivalent of roughly eight movies, on a weekly basis. In entertainment, as in dining, modernity has transformed a ritual of togetherness into an experience of homebound reclusion and even solitude.
The privatization of American leisure is one part of a much bigger story. Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other period for which we have trustworthy data, going back to 1965. Between that year and the end of the 20th century, in-person socializing slowly declined. From 2003 to 2023, it plunged by more than 20 percent, according to the American Time Use Survey, an annual study conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Among unmarried men and people younger than 25, the decline was more than 35 percent. Alone time predictably spiked during the pandemic. But the trend had started long before most people had ever heard of a novel coronavirus and continued after the pandemic was declared over. According to Enghin Atalay, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Americans spent even more time alone in 2023 than they did in 2021. (He categorized a person as “alone,” as I will throughout this article, if they are “the only person in the room, even if they are on the phone” or in front of a computer.)
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This is very reminiscent of “Bowling Alone”, which came out in 2000, and described how American communities (such as bowling leagues) had evaporated since 1950. This seems to find the same thread.
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Massive VW data leak exposed 800,000 EV owners’ movements, from homes to brothels • Carscoops
Thanos Pappas:
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Many people worry about hackers stealing their personal data, but sometimes, the worst breaches come not from shadowy cybercriminals but straight from the companies we trust. According to a new report from Germany, the VW Group stored sensitive information for 800,000 electric vehicles from various brands on a poorly secured and misconfigured Amazon cloud storage system—essentially leaving the digital door wide open for anyone to waltz in. And not just briefly, but for months on end.
The breach impacts fully electric models across Audi, VW, Seat, and Skoda brands, affecting vehicles not just in Germany but throughout Europe and other parts of the world. Among the treasure trove of exposed data were GPS coordinates, battery charge levels, and other key details about vehicle status, like whether it was switched on or off. That’s right, someone with the right know-how could casually snoop on your car’s whereabouts and habits.
It gets worse. A more tech-savvy user could reportedly connect vehicles to their owners’ personal credentials, thanks to additional data accessible through VW Group’s online services
Crucially, in 466,000 of the 800,000 cases, the location data was so precise that anyone with access could create a detailed profile of each owner’s daily habits. As reported by Spiegel, the massive list of affected owners isn’t just a who’s-who of regular folks. It includes German politicians, entrepreneurs, Hamburg police officers (the entire EV fleet, no less), and even suspected intelligence service employees. Yes, even spies may have been caught up in this digital debacle.
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H5N1: much more than you wanted to know • Astral Codex Ten
Scott Alexander with a long post about the origins of flu:
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It’s not uncommon for humans to catch an animal disease. This doesn’t mean the disease has “crossed over” to humans. If the virus isn’t suited to human-to-human transmission, it simply dies off (either before or after killing its human host). Thus, chicken farmers have been reporting scattered H5N1 cases since 1997; now that the virus has spread to cattle, cow farmers have started reporting the same.
A Metaculus comment on this topic introduced me to the phrase “biocomputational surface”. Every viral replication that takes place in a human gives the virus one more chance to develop the set of mutations that makes it human-transmissible and start the next pandemic.
Or, more likely, every viral replication that takes place in a human who has both the H5N1 bird flu and a normal human flu – or in a pig which has both viruses – gives the virus one extra chance to reassort in a way that produces a bird-antigen-fortified human-adapted flu virus.
This doesn’t mean H5N1 will definitely become human-transmissible soon. Many viruses hang out on the borders of transmissibility for decades. Some, for unclear reasons, never cross over at all. But all of this is compatible with the virus becoming transmissible soon.
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He then goes on to look at the likelihood of a pandemic – and whether the betting markets agree. Read this and be much wiser.
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Number of power grid faults in three areas spiked before fires began • Los Angeles Times
Noah Goldberg and Salvador Hernandez:
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The number of faults on the power grid near three of the major Los Angeles County fires skyrocketed in the hours before the blazes began, according to a company that monitors electrical activity.
Bob Marshall, the chief executive of Whisker Labs, said in an interview with The Times that the areas near the Eaton, Palisades and Hurst fires all saw massive increases in faults in the hours leading up to the fires. Faults on the power grid are caused by tree limbs hitting electrical wires or wires hitting one another, among other causes. Each fault causes a spark.
The fires together have destroyed or damaged more than 9,000 structures. Power equipment has caused destructive wind-driven California wildfires in the past, but L.A. city and county fire officials say their investigators have not determined what sparked any of the fires.
“What I cannot say is one of these faults sparked the fire. I don’t know that,” Marshall said in an interview. “But it just takes one to start the fire.”
Data shared with The Times, but not yet released publicly, showed the increase in faults.
In the area of the Palisades fire, in the hour before the fire started, there were 25 faults on the grid. In the hour that the fire started, there were 18 faults, according to Whisker Labs’ data.
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Inexplicably, the original headline on this article was “Southern California Edison preserving equipment near Eaton fire starting point”. Which doesn’t bear any relation to the top of the story in the above extract. It barely gets mentioned in the story total. When will American papers learn to write headlines, I wonder?
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Just how many ads are there on ad-supported streaming apps, really? • Sherwood News
Jon Keegan:
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It’s getting harder to avoid ads on streaming video. For cord-cutters, after years of living in ad-free bliss, the trend is heading toward ads — a lot of ads.
The big streaming platforms are all boosting the price of their ad-free subscriptions, trying to get as many people over to an ad-supported tier, which has a greater potential revenue per user despite the lower monthly fees.
After suffering through what seemed to be an absurd number of ads recently while watching a show on my ad-supported Paramount+ plan, I decided to gather some data and see exactly how many ads are being crammed into the typical program, and how much time they’re taking up during the viewing session.
I signed up for new ad-supported accounts on Netflix, Peacock, Disney+, Max, Paramount+, and Hulu and watched all the ads on 12 popular shows — two on each platform — so you didn’t have to. You’re welcome.
The first thing I wanted to quantify was exactly how much of my viewing went to ads versus the program itself.
Let’s take a look at what we learned from each platform’s shows.
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The ad load varies – on his perhaps limited investigation – from 3% (Netflix) to 16% (Disney+). Though they all have three or four ad breaks, which I think is the most frustrating thing about ads. It’s the interruption that’s annoying, and the uncertainty about how long the interruption will go on. Also, they didn’t look at Amazon, which has an ad-supported version of Prime.
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‘A time bomb’: fears for children being poisoned by lead paint in UK homes • Financial Times
Laura Hughes:
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For six months this year, Xena Buckle quarantined her family into the one room in her council house in south London that she knew would not poison her six-year-old son.
Tests had just revealed that the toxic metal lead was present in Rhegon’s blood at almost twice the UK’s medical intervention level of 5 microgrammes per decilitre. Flaking lead paint in the property was to blame.
The UK is home to some of the oldest housing in the world, and many homes still have lead paint, which as it flakes and rubs off walls, windows and door frames creates a poisonous dust that can be harmful to humans if ingested.
Before it was banned in 1992, lead paint in the UK may have contained up to 50% lead by weight, “which is potentially capable of causing lead poisoning in a small child if they eat just a single flake”, according to government guidance published in October.
The well-established health risks associated with exposure to the metal — which has a harmful impact on almost every organ in the human body — have led to a ban on its use in petrol, domestic paint and pipes in the UK.
But experts said a lack of routine testing meant hundreds of thousands of children would be silently suffering from the effects of lead poisoning.
“This is a time bomb and it’s not going to go away,” said Alan Emond, emeritus professor of child health at Bristol Medical School. “By not facing up to it now, we are going to expose another generation to lead.”
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It took Hughes months to get the info together for this story. And here’s the other fun part: how do you get rid of the paint? If you chip or sand it off, you release it into the atmosphere.
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What happened to the live London Underground / bus maps? TfL happened • Traintimes
Matthew Somerville set up the live Tube trains map in June 2010, and it had been happily running since then using the official TfL API. But:
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on 7th January 2025, I received two emails out of the blue; a vaguely personal one from someone at TfL telling me to remove the schematic Tube map, and my hosting provider received a very impersonal one from the “Trademark Enforcement team”. (That second one says “We informed the registrant of our complaint, but were unable to resolve this issue.” but presumably they can’t mean the first email sent about an hour earlier? This is the first I’ve ever heard from them.)
This is of course perfectly within their right so to do, though I would have hoped for a different approach. Sure, I could have made some changes and kept the maps up, although as above they have been fine with it for many years. But I believe it is possible to both “protect” your trademark (or whatever you think this is) and not treat people like this. And rewarding this heavy-handed approach (by continuing to provide a useful addition to their service with no contact bar this) to me feels wrong.
The internet isn’t what it was 15 years ago, and I can’t be bothered dealing with large organisations removing any semblance of joy from it. I’m sure they won’t care, but I am just too tired.
So sorry, the maps are all gone.
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Utterly stupid on TfL’s part. Why have an API that’s not actually usable because you can’t put the trains on a map? Maybe this is the lesson of the internet: in time, all the good things die.
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Here are some of the weirdest gadgets we spotted at CES 2025 • The Register
Brandon Vigliarolo:
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As the gadget-filled spectacle that CES draws to a close, there’s much to anticipate and just as much that leaves us completely baffled.
We’ve already talked about the worst finds in the repairability and sustainability categories in our the worst of CES 2025. Now we turn an eye toward all the weird stuff that occupies the nooks and crannies of the Vegas show floor and has us wondering who decided to dedicate an engineering team’s time and salary toward such projects.
There’s plenty of weirdness to pick through at CES every year, and we’ve whittled it down to these six items.
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So glad not to be there. And to be honest, the “worst” list isn’t that much different from the weird ones. Read both and feel happy you didn’t go there too.
Anyway, that’s it done for another year, and dealt with in one link! Phew.
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One less thing to worry about in 2025: Yellowstone probably won’t go boom • Ars Technica
John Timmer:
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It’s difficult to comprehend what 1,000 cubic kilometers of rock would look like. It’s even more difficult to imagine it being violently flung into the air. Yet the Yellowstone volcanic system blasted more than twice that amount of rock into the sky about 2 million years ago, and it has generated a number of massive (if somewhat smaller) eruptions since, and there have been even larger eruptions deeper in the past.
All of which might be enough to keep someone nervously watching the seismometers scattered throughout the area. But a new study suggests that there’s nothing to worry about in the near future: There’s not enough molten material pooled in one place to trigger the sort of violent eruptions that have caused massive disruptions in the past. The study also suggests that the primary focus of activity may be shifting outside of the caldera formed by past eruptions.
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See? Good news does exist.
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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 