They parlay their audience’s understandable distaste for “wokeness” and censoriousness into support for a fundamentally reactionary ideology—one that frames existing social inequalities not as a result of contingent historical developments that could be undone at a later stage of history, but as part of an unchanging natural order. Via The Daily Beast

Really interesting post. I really appreciate the work that Dennis put into pulling these things apart and doing the investigation to find the original OEMs. He confirmed what I’ve suspected for a while – that all the USB C hubs are utter crap. I learned that the hard way after multiple crapped out on me in various ways. It’s a shame to read that Anker is also just white labeling their products. I’ve had good luck with them and it sounds like “luck” was probably the only factor :) ...

Without greater vaccination, living with COVID could mean enduring a yearly death toll that is an order of magnitude higher than the one from flu. And yet this, too, might come to feel like its own sort of ending. Endemic tobacco use causes hundreds of thousands of casualties, year after year after year, while fierce public-health efforts to reduce its toll continue in the background. Yet tobacco doesn’t really feel like a catastrophe for the average person. Noymer, of UC Irvine, said that the effects of endemic COVID, even in the context of persistent gaps in vaccination, would hardly be noticeable. Losing a year or two from average life expectancy only bumps us back to where we were in … 2000. ...

Squirrels are what Keith Tarvin, a biologist at Oberlin College and Conservatory in Ohio who led the study, calls “public information exploiters,” meaning they often take cues from other prey animals nearby. They’re not the only ones that do this. Early animal behavior studies have shown that birds, mammals, and even fish and lizards can recognize the alarm signals of other species that share similar geographic locations and predators. Within the bird family, a nuthatch may tune into the high-pitched call of a chick-a-dee, which might also be paying attention to the panicked tweet of a tufted titmice. ...

WeWork’s business, essentially, aims to capture the spread between long-term and short-term rental costs. Landlords want stability and guaranteed cash flows, so they’re willing to lease office space at lower rates if a tenant is willing to make a long-term commitment, as WeWork does. Companies, on the other hand, want the flexibility of short-term leases that allow them to quickly grow, shrink, or move their office space in response to personnel needs. As a result, they’re willing to pay higher rents for this flexibility. ...

In 1994, Cesare Marchetti, an Italian physicist, described an idea that has come to be known as the Marchetti Constant. In general, he declared, people have always been willing to commute for about a half-hour, one way, from their homes each day. This principle has profound implications for urban life. The value of land is governed by its accessibility—which is to say, by the reasonable speed of transport to reach it. ...

The email was clearly meant to reassure riders, some of whom might be absorbing negative press about Uber and wondering if it cares about them at all. But not everyone follows Uber as closely as industry watchers in Silicon Valley, and either way, what the email mostly accomplishes is to remind customers that riding in an Uber involves life-and-death risk.

< p style=“max-width:100%;color:rgb(27,27,27);font-family:-apple-system-font;font-size:19px;font-style:normal;font-variant-caps:normal;font-weight:normal;letter-spacing:normal;orphans:auto;text-align:start;text-indent:0;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;widows:auto;word-spacing:0;-webkit-text-size-adjust:none;text-decoration:none;"> Savage points in particular to a vulnerability Santamarta highlighted in a version of the embedded operating system VxWorks, in this case customized for Boeing by Honeywell. Santamarta found that when an application asks to write to the underlying computer’s memory, the tailored operating system doesn’t properly check that it’s not instead over­writing the kernel, the most sensitive core of the operating system. Combined with several application-level bugs Santamarta found, that so-called parameter-check privilege escalation vulnerability represents a serious flaw, Savage argues, made more serious by the notion that VxWorks likely runs in many other components on the plane that might have the same bug. ...

“Early on, we designed some glassware, but then we were having trouble seeing what the glass looked like because everything is so transparent,” Pascual says. “We needed [to] up the poly count on it to even be able to see the type of material, or the type of rendering or shading we had.” “Yeah,” Krankel says, “it’s one of those things where we started and you spend all this time having, like, a fluid simulation in a goblet that’s flying around, and you’re like, ‘This looks so badass’ totally out of context. And then you look at it in the game, you’re like, ‘A, I don’t see any of this, B, our performance is taking a giant hit. What’s a better, more effective way to do it?’” ...

Lame title but interesting article. In sociological storytelling, the characters have personal stories and agency, of course, but those are also greatly shaped by institutions and events around them. The incentives for characters’ behavior come noticeably from these external forces, too, and even strongly influence their inner life. People then fit their internal narrative to align with their incentives, justifying and rationalizing their behavior along the way. (Thus the famous Upton Sinclair quip: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”) ...