You’re totally right—that was actually part of the point of the article. We need to wake up to how we got here before we can change. But you’re also right that we need more actionable steps we can control.

First, education is power—once you start seeing through food marketing, you’ll never look at ads or labels the same way. And second, consumer demand does matter—food companies have super-thin margins, and when we stop buying toxic “foods,” they will start to listen.

Some other steps to take today:

-- Take 5 minutes to scan your pantry—set aside anything with seed oils, added sugar, or ingredients you can’t pronounce.

-- At the grocery store, spend 5 extra minutes reading labels and comparing alternatives.

-- Educate yourself on how Food is Medicine, literally.

-- Check out ewg.org for food safety rankings and advocacy efforts.

-- Cook one extra meal at home this week instead of eating out.

-- Stock up on less processed snacks like beef jerky, organic popcorn, or simple whole foods.

-- For policy change -- Support organizations pushing for better food regulations (like Nutrition Coalition), and contact your reps about banning harmful additives and improving school lunches.

Change starts small, but it snowballs. Curious - what else do you think would make a big impact?

You want good news? let's talk about this fuckin' meme

But first let's talk about this

So eight weeks ago my (inch and a half) water main pinholed under my dining room. Because the dining room used to be a patio, and because it was raining, we assumed it was water in gutters or a french drain (I have fourteen gutters and six french drains). It wasn't until five days later that enough circumstances stacked (such as, enough water had accumulated that scrap wood was bumping against the joists in the current like driftwood at the wharf) that it became clear there was a biblical leak and that the water shutoff didn't shut off all the water.

Subsequent archaeology and OSINT determined that this water main had cut loose in 1986 and 2014. It's worth noting that the house has four crawl spaces, two of which are quite comfy, but the water main bursts about every ten years under the now-dining-room, which is utterly inaccessible. Fortunately this inaccessible area is surrounded on all sides by concrete footings which means any leak is shored up from affecting the rest of the house... at least until the flood travels 45 feet underground to find freedom in the shop. Nonetheless, we're not doing this shit again.

230 sqft of floor and subfloor have been destroyed. Roughly 100sqft of discarded, soaked carpet has been removed, along with assorted other detritus (a 1986 Coca Cola Classic can, for example), not to mention roughly 10 gallons of mixed nut shells and rat shit (and three mummified rats). The pipe had been clearly man-handled with channel locks, which is a good sign that it will cut loose again. The floor cannot easily be made accessible, besides which we're now talking about architectural modifications to support future failures. Instead I ran a fish tape down the pipe and located it in a dead-nuts straight line to the former-bar, future Bond-Villain-Fishtank room (yes there is a Bond Villain Fishtank room). From there it clearly elbows at 20 feet. From there it's 12 feet to a patch of dirt in a crawlspace I can access (albeit with an 18" ceiling), then it's under 25 feet of concrete (half of which is outside), then it's under a legit giant sequoia, then it's under stairs, then it's under driveway, and then 65 feet southwest and 15 feet down it hits the street shutoff. In other words, there's a 4' x 8' patch of dirt that probably contains a water pipe, is under shelter, is accessible, and can be re-routed through a mechanical chase into the mudroom closet (once the mudroom is built, and once it has a closet) such that the water shut-off is in a reasonable place, all plumbing from that point forth is accessible and never again will floors need to be destroyed to remedy broken plumbing.

I needed luck here. I needed the goodwill of the spirits. So I finished emptying my service pit. With no water, by the way, we've been without water since before Thanksgiving. But I emptied out my pit. It's got a drain! Six fuckin' feet under the garage and it's got a drain. And I reinterred Bandit. Yeah I found the jawbone and pelvis of a dog in there. I also scanned four rolls of photos. So I'm pretty sure this is Bandit.

Anyway. I had a little ceremony out by the Hoggson sign and a put Bandit out where he could spiritually bark at everyone walking by and keep the house safe. And I put some daffodils on top of him. And then I asked for all the luck the spirits of the house could give me and went digging.

With a mattock. Prone. On my chest. In the dirt. For five hours. Making a trench 18" deep (pipe should be between 6" and 12" according to code and best practices in 1970) by four feet wide. And failed to find the fucking pipe.

So now we're going to be for realsies and call in a locating service. They're going to run a snake down my pipe and radio waves are going to say exactly where it is. This will cost $400. They locate the pipe, exactly where I thought it was, and say it's between a foot and three feet down. They also determine that the plumber's former worker severed my landscape lights with a backhoe but that's a problem for another day - the plan now is to open up the subfloor, excavate where the elbow is and see where it's going. Because the obvious thing for it to do is head towards the street... but five of those gutters simply go at least six feet straight down and disappear off the earth. So the pipe might just go DOWN fifteen feet and then wing over. We have no idea. Apparently my electrical meter hookup is six feet underground because at some point in the '80s they raised the fucking STREET So it's entirely possible the pipe doesn't get within twelve feet of where I was digging.

So the subfloor is opened and the elbow is under a fucking abandoned patio. The good news is that at "1 to 3 feet down" with the grade two feet under the subfloor that means it's gotta be right at the surface, right? Bust the concrete and away we go?

No. Bust the concrete, dig two feet in any direction, dig two feet down, no fucking pipe.

At this point, my plumber, who is the best plumber I've ever met, is out of fucking ideas. He does not know what to do next. I say "well, at least this isn't the most fucked up house you've ever worked on, right?" To which he says, 'no actually this is far and away the most fucked up job I've ever worked on and granted I've only been doing this for fifteen years so there may be something more fucked up out there, I don't know, but if there is I sure don't want to work on it and i hope I retire before I find out."

Can you imagine how demoralizing that is? You've spent $90k on plumbing and you haven't been able to wash your hands for eight weeks. There's a pipe somewhere but it might be so buried you'll never find it. And your plumber is ready to throw up his hands. Your shoes? Permanently smell like dirt fungus. Your gloves are full of grit; you take them off (even after you've been pruning!) and your hands come out brown.

So you come up with a plan. The locators come back out. Don't know if I'm paying for them this time or not, but they were extremely fucking wrong - they now determine the pipe is two feet closer than they thought. So digging continues. And three feet down and two feet away (the locators are off by two feet) there's a TEE.

Not an elbow. A tee. Water comes in on the right, shoots off left to the inch and a half "lawn hydrant" (my new favorite phrase) used to fill the pool, shoots upward under the living room, under the house, out front, where it elbows in galvanized (big no-no), goes back under the house, pops up in the foyer and rejoins the rest of the house. The tee illustrates why the fucker was hard to find, it's complicated down there. Also, catching where it comes in means eliminating 20 feet of ABS to the tee, 30 feet of galvanized under concrete to the lawn hydrant, 30 feet of extremely ephemeral ABS under the dining room and 20 feet of already-rusting galvanized up front so my plumber? He cuts off that tee and we put a fish tape down it. Twelve feet in, it elbows. Right about where we were digging, really - He starts digging in my trench.

And fails to find the fucking pipe.

So I get mathy with it. The plumber's argument is that inch and a half ABS does not like to bend, so odds are good we're dealing with a straight line, at least to where we think. I get out my lasers and my tape measures and my fish pole and I do my calculations and I determine that where I dug my trench is two feet further than where we think it elbows. So I get back under my bathroom with my mattock and start digging a new trench.

And fail to find the fucking pipe.

So okay. Let's get real. I have all this as a WhatsApp conversation with myself - the most complete way to math it up. "5" from laser to slap. 35" from laser down to pipe. Laser is halfway up the joist, which is 7". Laser is now 17" lower than it was. 35" - 17" = 18" below laser... plus grade. Laser is 11" above ground. Therefore pipe is 7" down, plus however much it dives."

We're already 18" deep.

So okay. Let's confirm that the elbow is an elbow, and let's see if we can figure out which way the elbow turns. I have an endoscope (yes, we're now at lasers and endoscope). I tape it to my fish tape. And I discover that the elbow is not an elbow, it's a UNION and I can push two full feet beyond it.

In other words, both of my trenches should cross the fucking pipe... assuming they're deep enough. But how deep do they need to be? So I get out a level. And I brush away a lot of dirt on the known pipe. And I crawl down in a hole with my level and a tape measure and bending in some truly interesting ways I determine that over 4.85 inches of run I have 0.9 inches of drop which works out to a ten degree down angle but that doesn't matter this is algebra not trig and out where the union is? Assuming the pipe is straight? it's 34 inches down.

So I dig. With a mattock. On my face. And 36" down I hit hard clay. There are spots where I'm definitely digging through disturbed sand and spots where it's really clear nobody has been through that dirt since the glaciers so we'll assume the pipe is in the sand. So we triple-check our locations and there's no. possible. way. This trench WON'T intersect that fucking pipe.

But now we need more luck, and our FRP grates (subject to the most amusing product photos on Amazon have arrived. So we head to metal supermarkets and buy some angle iron. We head to Home Depot and buy two boxes of red heads. And we head to Harbor Freight and buy a drill press, and we spend a couple days turning this

To this

___________________________________________________

Sidebar: With all the information I have on these people I decide to look up his mother, for completeness (she's mentioned in a letter as being unwell, I wanted to see where his parents' deaths fit into the overall narrative). She has almost no presence on the Internet, which is interesting for reasons we'll get into in a minute. Where she does show up is here, as "another Henry descendant." See those extremely politically-incorrect native american statues? I have photos of the 1986 yard renovation (which undoubtedly coincided with this damn water main cutting loose) and uhhhhhhhhhh

So you go "wait what the hell do they mean by "another Henry descendant" and you go "HOLY SHIT THAT HENRY" and you realize that while the guy who built this house was rich AF on his dad's side, he was thunderously wealthy on his mom's side and you're telling this to veen who points out that according to Wikipedia, this guy's great grandfather had a five car garage in Seattle in 1901, and you didn't think there were five cars in Seattle in 1901, and two days later the Seattle Times reports the first traffic count in Seattle as "on this day" and on that day in 1901, the first traffic count in Seattle counted ZERO CARS all day and you realize that this ghost, who built a five car garage, who had a grandfather with a five car garage prior to the advent of cars, had his widow sell his house to a jackass crab fisherman who filled in his service pit with garbage

and his dog

And if you wanted to be haunted? Well that's a damn fine start.

___________________________________________________

So. Service pit. Restored. Dog. Buried. Let's buy a trowel with extra reach, let's get the picnic blanket the radio station gave us for fundraising, let's cross our fingers and start digging.

90 minutes later

I burst into fucking tears.

You'll notice it's at a hell of an angle. For a pipe that don't bend, it's pretty bendy. It was also at 22", not 36", which suggests that trigonometry is a pain in the ass when you're in a hole. But more than that I now have a REAL GOOD INDICATOR where that sucker's gonna be when it hits the footing and lo and behold

Now let's talk about this fucker.

'cuz here's the thing. The whole point of this fucking cartoon is to encourage you to keep trying or some shit. Not sure why these fuckers are wearing dress shirts and ties, probably because anyone needing a business meme is applying this to TPS reports or some shit. And what I will say? Is that once we tore up the floor, once we jackhammered the concrete, once we had locators out twice, once I spent NINE FUCKING HOURS ON MY FACE, that pipe was a scant four inches from where I had been digging. But you know what? We didn't know if it went left or down. We didn't know how down it went. We didn't know what the fuck was going on and no, you shouldn't keep pick-axing in your fucking dress shirt as if holes are somehow fun to dig, you should get out the math and laser beams

AND KNOW WHERE THE FUCKING PIPE IS

Because even with all the math and laser beams, my un-bending pipe was bent at a pretty jaunty angle and a good eighteen inches from where it should have been in X and a good fourteen inches from where it should have been in Y.

And now? Tomorrow? I will have water again. And it will be in a place where no more floors will need to be destroyed to deal with it.

As an added bonus, enough floor has been destroyed that it's just a little more added chaos to take my (REF) kitchen, my (-4.5") dining room and my (-8") garage and build the dining room subfloor at four and a half inches higher. This eliminates two tripping hazards, adds a third step to give me a truly sunken living room, and provides me a single 8" step into my garage. None of which would have been on the docket without eight weeks without water, due to the eruption of a geyser under my dining room.

House has been badly rekt since a little before Thanksgiving. In order to tip the balance of order to prevent my morale from plummeting I've been emptying my service pit. Did I mention I have a service pit? Yeah guy I bought the house from figured covering it in plywood was inadequate to the purpose of keeping his 8, 12 and 16 year old daughters from falling in so he filled it with dirt and garbage.

"Dirt and garbage" started out with me paying my slack-jawed yokel to empty it out but as it turns out, not only was he a junky he was also a pussy. I started with a bucket on a pulley from the rafters but it turns out a 5gal bucket full of dirt and rocks is heavy. So then I went with a block'n'tackle but what they don't tell you is that coiled-core rope on a b'n't spins like a mutherfucker and ceases to be a b'n't. So then I grabbed my chain hoist which I use to move FrankenKerns around but holy shit chain hoists are stupid for lifting 200lbs. So then a buddy lent me his unused Harbor Freight winch but the minute it had any load it ejected its planetaries and crumbled to dust. So then I went to HF and bought a new one, hooked it up to a used UPS battery, hooked the UPS battery up to a trickle charger and now we're in fully-mechanized "it puts the lotion in the basket" territory.

I've found a bunch of busted sewer pipe in the service pit. Also a 40 gallon barrel of oil. Also a bunch of carpet, which prevents me from just scraping along the bottom. But I've also spent an awful lot of time in the rafters of the garage and that's where things get interesting.

That's one woman's life, nearly every document, from 1973 to 1975. Bank statements, bills, letters, report cards, medical intake forms, tax returns, car tabs. It's an easy fifteen pounds of documents, including a typing textbook, two yearbooks, a handful of hairstyle guides, a broadway musical script and a few rolls of negatives. It took four days just to go over. But holy shit. It was like sitting down to have a drink with a ghost.

There was this guy. He was born rich, never had to work, but his dad had just died and his mom was unwell. He lived all alone in this castle on a hill with his dog and his '65 Mustang GT. He was a drunk and he was irresponsible; he owed Columbia House the equivalent of $600 for a bunch of Burt Bacharach 8-tracks. And there was this lady - she and her husband owned a restaurant out in the sticks and she owned and operated a three-chair hair salon. She drove a '72 Riviera; he drove a '68 Beetle. The restaurant went under and her marriage was on the rocks; she had a 22-year-old son and an 18-year-old daughter and even though she was overdrawn at every department store and hair supply house in a hundred mile radius, her daughter still managed to be voted "best dressed."

Pretty sure the guy ran into the lady while she was making ends meet waiting tables. They totally hit it off. She kicked out her husband and he got an apartment; it probably helped to stay ahead of the law because he was a drunk driver. He paid her bills and sent her cards, she dealt with a dying mother in a nursing home and a dying mother-in-law in another nursing home. He refused a breathalyzer and Oregon suspended his license and forwarded his new address to Washington; he got arrested and sentenced to 90 days in minimum-security detox. And he wrote her and she wrote him and once he was out she bundled up all her shit and bailed on the sticks forever, leaving the kids, leaving the husband, and moving in with a newly-reformed, newly-sober fellow ten years her junior. She never had to worry about money ever again. Neither did her kids. The lady and the guy lived happily ever after, becoming well-loved social butterflies in a number of communities over the 35 years they had left together. And when he died, nobody wanted to find the box of letters.

I found the kids. Tried to get them all this. I was told that it was a painful time they chose not to revisit and if I could please "throw it all away" they'd appreciate it. Two sides to every story; I have no doubt in my mind those two loved each other deeply and made each other very happy.

I found this under the box.

I've been working an internship at a job I wanted for the last four months. I really busted my ass and did a ton of gladhanding, I felt really good about my prospects. The internship was lot of fun, I really appreciated the culture of the work place.

I've spent the last year and half in school trying to get this job, not another job in the industry somewhere else but specifically this job. This might have been a little dumb of me but I set my goal and perused it with determination. I have done really well in school, holding a 4.0 for the first time in my life. I've pounded through school doing no less than 12 credits every semester with my biggest load being 18 credits.

It's about as good a job I can hope to get with an associates degree.

I interviewed for the position, I felt like it had gone well. They told me that if I was accepted for the position they would call me on XXX date and that I wouldn't be contacted if I didn't get the position. The day came and went and I heard nothing, nor did I hear anything the next day. I didn't have access to the people who I interviewed with for almost a week (I was back in school full time and they weren't around the days I was working.

I felt pretty crushed. The next best job in the field was at Intel but they had already soaked up a third of my class. My classmates had done internships there and had filed up most the openings. It was going to be hard to find anything near as good as I what I was going for. Maybe I had been an idiot. People with a decade of experience and a handful of certs hired on to the position I was trying to get, happily starting at the bottom rung because the pay and benefits are so good.

Turns out I got the job and they just fucked up and forgot to notify me.

It's going to be pretty life changing.

We have been drowning in our kids medical bills. We are paying over 10k a year for insurance that doesn't really help us until we've burned about the same for our deductible. Shit is expensive even after the deductible. We were making it work but it was eroding our savings, it wasn't going to be sustainable year after year. My new insurance is going to be significantly better and cost about $50 a month for the whole family. No huge deductible. It's like my wife, who is providing our current insurance, is getting a $500 dollar a month raise right off the bat.

The pay is great, my offer was about five dollars more an hour than I thought it was going to be. I'll get a big raise in nine months if I complete probation. I was supposed to start in January but someone pulled some strings and got me a December start date which does a bunch of things to improve my benefits package.

I'm going to have a crazy schedule for 2-5 years but I've often worked crazy schedules. I'd be happy enough to bid into a C shift so I can see my family in the evenings, sleep in the day and work overnight.

I'll get to work outside a lot, and get to spend a lot of time on my feet (I can not sit at a desk all day). There is a fair amount of problem solving to be done an equal amount of hard labor. That's all stuff I enjoy. I'm getting older and it's not that hard on your body while still being a physical.

I'd be super happy if my kid wasn't sick. My wife and I are facing a reality that we might outlive our child. It's not a given or anything but it's something that we have to face, to prepare for.

I have to be happy about the job, you have to be happy about the good things, stay grateful, stay positive. I really need to see a therapist. I haven't had the time with work and school. I haven't felt like I could add one more medical bill. There is a reasonable chance it'll all shake out ok. Kid is stable at the moment but things have got scary very fast a few months ago and the overall the year has been frightening. It's easily been the hardest year of my life with work, school and money have nothing to do with my anxiety.

As someone who grew up with it, that’s what turned me off of it. Back in the day, it was perfectly willing to try new things, to say things about culture and science and ask deep questions about reality and so on. At present, it goes in one of two directions.

First you have the Nostalgia Trek, which seems mostly interested in catering to people who like Star Trek as an aesthetic setting. People who like the setting of Guys who Explore Space and Lecture Aliens about Neoliberalism. They like the aliens, the ships, the politics, they like to see their favorite childhood stories and heroes on their TVs. But they have no interest in the ethos of Trek, or even Science Fiction as a genre of fiction. This version in essence is Sci-Fi for people who want to pretend to like sci-fi but hate all the stuff that makes it actually science fiction— the hard science, the philosophical questions about reality and the questions about things that modern Americans take for granted. To them the Federation is America, but in space, and Starfleet is the USA military who are always right and never fail.

Second, you have the too-cool-for-school Trek. It’s not any more willing to tweak noses or really shake things up. They just decided they don’t like the old Trek aesthetic and therefore “deconstruct” it, or lampoon it, or “subvert” it in utterly predictable ways. What if … the federation is the bad guys? What if we totally glued teeth all over Klingons for no reason? What if we suddenly discovered the Roger’s and Hammerstein Nebula? Or turned Spock human just before his mother comes to visit. None of this is deep or interesting it’s more like a kid deciding it’s cool to deface a painting.

launching a satellite next week. as flight director.

I no longer have a girlfriend…

…because I now have a fiancée! We’re currently on holiday in the Italian Alps. When I mentioned our plans for our summer vacation to kleinbl00 he went “you know, being proposed to on a lake in Como is pretty storybook” and I was like “you’re not wrong that’s for sure”. Proposing had until that point been an idea for a future day, but we’re still going strong after five oftentimes turbulent years.

So after finally finding a ring two days before we left, carrying it in my camera bag where she wouldn’t have any reason to look around in, finding to a gorgeous green lakeside pergola in a beautiful village on Lake Como, and her mentioning how romantic this place is, I tell her I’d love to make a video of us with my new camera to capture this wonderful place and go down on one knee. She was completely surprised and elated. (And she loves the ring! Phew.)

I’m still surprised it worked out as well as it did. I even got the video exactly the way I hoped. Not that that matters too much, but it’s the cherry on the cake that I got both the composition right as well as the technical settings that I wanted (6.2K, 30fps, shutter at 1/60 with my variable ND filter and the Eterna Fuji film setting). It helps that my new Fuji camera has been a joy to (learn to) shoot with.

Hi Lil. Hope the best for you.

I just had my tracheotomy tube removed. 14 months of Stage 4 terminal larynx cancer was fairly unexpected after my organ transplant. I've battled 5% and 1% chances of even living and I'm still here somehow. Just gained 47 pounds. Strong as ever. Hope everything goes as well for you. :)

1. 56 Weller Crescent.

2. I think I am but no one reads. Having been terminally ill for 5 years... no one reads that series.

3. Very long story. No one has given me support except one of three.

4.

5. I'm not invincible. I've always done death defying feats but.having a heart attack, organ transplant and cancer within 10 years should humble me.

6.Yes I'm kinda resentful of my oldest friend who said some hurtful things over covid and the so called freedom convoy. I'm sad about that.

7. Am I going to still have cancer?

8. Professionally, changing case law and textbooks

Being quoted by the Supreme Court in a fundamental case.

Personally... getting all my neices and nephews to go to uni and paying for it.

9. Bukurije. My first girlfriend. We cool.

10. To be continued. I'm loving life right now

Garbage disposal went out a few weeks back. Just started leakin'. It's okay, it's a Sears; my father-in-law put it in back in like 2004 which I recognize is exactly the sort of thing old people say.

The total time to diagnose, research, purchase, remove and replace the garbage disposal was approximately 2 1/2 hours spread across two days. That included a run to Home Depot to get an assortment of plumbing to replace the father-in-law's "rocket garbage out the other sink" drain geometry.

This made me realize that the machine, from an "effort and cognition" standpoint, has been the equivalent of two, two and a half "garbage disposals" a day, six to seven days a week, for two years.

My cousin and his friends are having a boy weekend, a "for those who tried to rock" adventure at an AirBNB to recapture the mood of trying to be rawk stars back when they were in their teens and early 20s. They're all extremely excited about it even though it's weeks away. I declined my invite because frankly, I was nowhere near them as a teenager (and when they were teenagers I was... seven) but pointed out to my cousin that they clearly need to do this more often; with "deaths from despair" leading all other causes for white dudes over 50, simply bringing guitars, poker chips and tequila to a beach cabin twice a year could extend their lives an easy 20 years. My cousin agreed (several of them clearly neeed this) and pointed out I should come next time as dorking around with a bunch of aging butt-rockers might just clear up my musical constipation.

I said that every ten-fifteen years I'm apparently required to do something stupid and laborious that shuts everything else down. In high school it was a 4x4 Triumph TR-7 with a Chevy 400. In my 30s it was a birth center. In my 40s it's apparently a $150k CNC machine. Besides which...

I had the world's cheapest Atmos studio. I've been limping along on these ancient Tascam surround controllers, one of which I've owned since it was new in 2003. They were born at the height of the capacitor plague, and yes I've recapped all three of them multiple times. I taught myself surface-mount soldering just so I could rebuild the analog section of one. And about five months ago a yahoo in a stolen car drove through the substation that shares a yard with the police department. I heard the bang from here, a quarter mile away. Power flickered in a crazy way, then went out, and despite having four separate UPS in this house, it took out a 40TB server and two surround controllers. The server? Came back once it was allowed to express its outrage. But the controllers started dying in ways I've never seen, that the Internet has never catalogued, that cannot be solved without replacing and reprogramming ePROMs and ICs that have not been available since Obama was president.

Said-same cousin pointed out that Washington's current laws make it so that I will have to pay capital gains on the amount of crypto I'll need to sell in order to expand the birth center. The thought process went like this:

- For that amount of money I could move to another state for a few months while I pull the money.

- But it's going directly to schools.

- Which absolutely need it, this is why your kid is a private school brat.

- Besides which, the only people who would be sympathetic to your plight are the sort of people you hate.

- You aren't even vaguely poor anymore. Why do you feel so poor.

- Because you haven't spent any gains on anything since before COVID.

So I sold some crypto and bought myself a $5000 audio interface. B-stock, of course; I'm not a monster. It showed up yesterday. I put Kai through the monitors one last time and tore it all out.

I dunno. It should feel like a victory. So far it feels like a defeat. I've spent two years trying to find a cheaper solution. I failed. This will solve my problems perfectly - I goddamn saved myself some time by subconsciously buying the wrong bits of eBay which will serendipitously allow me to remove an entire digital-analog conversion chain consisting if eight cables and three powered devices - and yet, my inability to figure out some clever way to solve the problem is absolutely galling. Never mind the fact that this is such corner-case weirdness that the cheapest solution is to use actual movie theater parts - since they aren't made anymore, and since my chosen gadget interfaces at a systems level with the rest of my gadgets, it would be stupid to, you know, not do what every other Atmos studio does. Not that there's a lot of those.

I think there's a fundamental alienation that takes place when your problems are so far removed from the normal experience of everyday life that they take paragraphs to describe. It's probably why, despite being wildly successful by any metric whatsoever, things are a constant goddamn struggle.

LOOK AT THIS LITTLE FUCKER

Goddamn R2 unit right there. It's 650-odd parts in SolidWorks. I did not design about 150 of them. I had to model them in Solidworks, though, and they all need to line up in three dimensions. 650 parts, no tolerance stacking errors. It all fucking bolts together.

I used to get sick at the end of every season. It's my body responding to stress, basically, by collapsing once I'm over the hump. I haven't had a season since 2019 but I've made a speedrun from stomach flu to thanksgiving to my kid's birthday to COVID to Christmas. My wife has caught none of it. I said something like "I'm embarrassed for my genes" and she said "that's not your genes, that's your ACE score" and she's probably right. That, and those 650-odd parts are... kind of it. There are a few bits and bobs that need to be modified or tweaked, and a couple minor components that need to be created and tested but fundamentally, the next part is "wire it, plumb it and program it."

Two garbage disposals a day for two years. No excuse me, nearly three. Fucker showed up April 2021. While it was crossing the ocean, the Ever Given was clogging the Suez.

George Orwell wrote in 1984 that "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." Governments work relentlessly to distort public perceptions of the past.

Governments are not the only ones, of course, but they are certainly the greatest practitioners. The term of art is "active measures", a direct translation of the term used by the Cheka. The first active measures campaign was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a badly transliterated version of a diatribe against Napoleon III riven through with blood libel in order to gin up support for the pogroms.

Put a pin in that for a minute. I am 1/4 Belarusian Jew. My ancestors had means and had emigrated from The Pale to Moscow so experienced most of the second pogrom second hand, in the accounts and losses of their friends and relatives to antisemitic terrorism and genocide. They decamped for Boston in 1891 because they saw the proverbial writing on the wall; thanks to the work of the Okhrana, the active measures of the Cheka had a circulation of 900,000 a week thanks to Henry Ford. As a consequence, this discussion is academic to me? But also not academic. There are no more Belarusian jews. Prior to the pogroms, Jews were 15% of the population. There are now fewer than 20,000. American antisemitism and its propagation delayed American entry into WWII and objectively made the Holocaust worse.

There's a term coined and used by the Bolsheviks that is relevant to this discussion: fellow travelers, or those with similar goals but no formal alignment with the Communist Party. And there's a term coined and used against the Bolsheviks that is relevant to this discussion: useful idiots, or those who lack the intelligence to not serve the purposes of adversarial political forces. Donald Trump is a useful idiot. Jeffrey Sachs is a fellow traveler.

Thomas Rid, in his seminal work Active Measures, catalogs the distortions of public perceptions of the past and future from the Renaissance (when it wasn't practiced) through the 2016 election (where it was practiced extensively). Aside from one Japanese example (a false Soviet battle plan between wars) and two American examples (a CIA-published fashion and lifestyle magazine distributed in East Berlin and material support for an underground Ukrainian independence movement through 1991), all catalogued examples of active measures have been practiced by Russia under the Okrana, the Cheka, the nKVD, the KGB and the FSB. Rid goes one further by pointing out that democratic governments have a poor risk/reward ratio with active measures because if they are discovered, the democratically-elected government loses credibility and, therefore, power. Totalitarian governments suffer no such misfortune as their actions are not constrained by popular will. A democratic government operates with the permission of the populace and Watergate breaks the government. A totalitarian government can spread the rumor that AIDS was genetically engineered against the Africans to cover up systematic Soviet poisoning of Afghan wells to cripple the Mujahideen without experiencing a single hit to its agency.

Now that we've set the scene, let's continue:

Regarding the Ukraine War, the Biden administration has repeatedly and falsely claimed that the Ukraine War started with an unprovoked attack by Russia on Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

This is more a diplomatic measure by the United States than anything else because if they call it February 2014 then the wholesale slaughter of hundreds of Dutch tourists would arguably have triggered Article 5 and led to continental war. If you examine the conflict as a whole, the Russio-Ukrainian War is generally accepted to have commenced with the Russian invasion of Crimea In response to the Maidan on February 20, 2014.

In fact, the war was provoked by the U.S. in ways that leading U.S. diplomats anticipated for decades in the lead-up to the war, meaning that the war could have been avoided and should now be stopped through negotiations.

"Provocation" was the justification for the Munich Agreement, whereby Britain opted not to "provoke" Nazi Germany by defending Czechoslovakia against invasion. This was the basis for Nevill Chamberlain's "Peace for our time" speech, now widely considered to be the greatest diplomatic failure of the 20th century. The Tory government bargained that Hitler would be satisfied with annexation of Czechoslovakia and thus would not jeopardize the West-leaning Polish Republic. Poland, of course, was invaded less than a year later.

As outlined in The Gates of Europe, a history of Ukraine from the Scythians to the Maidan, "provocation" has been the fundamental justification of war in Ukraine, Poland and Belarus since the dawn of empire. The plain between the Urals and the Alps has always been considered a "buffer state" for whomever is more civilized at the time against whoever is less civilized and in general, the stretch of land between Armenia and Sweden is the first to betrayed and the first to get overrun. Despite this extensively bloody history, the only polity to routinely practice genocide against the Cossacks, Slavs and Tatars are the Russians, first under Ivan the Terrible, then under the First Pogroms, then under the Second Pogroms, then under the Russian Civil War, then under the Holodomor, then under the Deportation of the Crimean Tartars..

"Provocation", then, has historically meant "letting authoritarianism do what it wants when it wants where it wants" and any act that defies the authoritarian is seen as justification of authoritarian behavior. By the authoriarians, anyway. And the fellow travelers and useful idiots.

A far better approach for Russia might have been to step up diplomacy with Europe and with the non-Western world to explain and oppose U.S. militarism and unilateralism.

Note the careful use of the words "might have been" here - speculative passive voice. It's never worked before, but maybe this time would have been different.

The Biden team uses the word “unprovoked” incessantly, most recently in Biden’s major speech on the first-year anniversary of the war, in a recent NATO statement, and in the most recent G7 statement.

In no small part because the FSB has flooded the zone with the word "provoked."

There were in fact two main U.S. provocations. The first was the U.S. intention to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia in order to surround Russia in the Black Sea region by NATO countries (Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia, in counterclockwise order).

Worthy of note: Russia was participating in NATO at the time.

The second was the U.S. role in installing a Russophobic regime in Ukraine by the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian President, Viktor Yanukovych, in February 2014.

Right - the same Yanukovich who defied his own parliament and shot hundreds of the 800,000 protesters that demanded his resignation? Speaking as an American, "free elections and the defeat of tyranny" are big on my list of core values. If the price of freedom is "provoking" Putin, gimme the stick.

Biden and his foreign policy team refuse to discuss these roots of the war. To recognize them would undermine the administration in three ways. First, it would expose the fact that the war could have been avoided, or stopped early, sparing Ukraine its current devastation and the U.S. more than $100 billion in outlays to date.

(By allowing a pro-Putin despot to take over a nascent European democracy)

Second, it would expose President Biden’s personal role in the war as a participant in the overthrow of Yanukovych, and before that as a staunch backer of the military-industrial complex and very early advocate of NATO enlargement.

Just so we're clear: the argument here is that if the US had allowed the FSB to overthrow Ukraine unimpeded, there'd be no war in Europe. Let's not look away from that.

Third, it would push Biden to the negotiating table, undermining the administration’s continued push for NATO expansion.

And just so we're crystal clear: It is my firmly held opinion, as an avid scholar of The Deep State, that the 2016 election cemented and prioritized the destruction of Russia by Western intelligence services. An uneasy detente has existed between Russia and the USA since Yeltsin but the benefits of this relationship have diminished yearly while maintaining the fiction of diplomatic alignment has grown ever costlier. Once the Russians attempted to provoke the collapse of American democracy, American operatives dusted off their operational plans and set about to negate Putin. The CIA holds a grudge. The Iranian regime will never be allowed to thrive until the CIA feels satisfied that justice has been served for the barracks bombing and Bill Buckley. There is a straight, bright line between Vladimir Putin and January 6 and whenever Russian mouthpieces talk about American plans for the destruction of Russia, the only thing I can say is "damn right."

But that's not about Ukraine. That's about a criminal organization that thinks nothing of murder, torture and genocide.

The archives show irrefutably that the U.S. and German governments repeatedly promised to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move “one inch eastward” when the Soviet Union disbanded the Warsaw Pact military alliance.

Yeah and they show a mutual defense pact between Ukraine and Russia in exchange for Ukraine giving up their nuclear weapons, too. That didn't exactly work out.

The great US scholar-statesman George Kennan called NATO enlargement a “fateful error,” writing in the New York Times that, “Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”

Worthy of note: Kennan basically established The Cold War by arguing that The Russians were too crazy to be reasoned with. Furthermore, Ukraine in 1997 sure as shit wasn't Ukraine after two Democratic revolutions. Kennan is two decades dead; considering how he felt about democracy I suspect his opinion would be different but Sachs doesn't get into that.

President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense William Perry considered resigning in protest against NATO enlargement. In reminiscing about this crucial moment in the mid-1990s, Perry said the following in 2016: “Our first action that really set us off in a bad direction was when NATO started to expand, bringing in eastern European nations, some of them bordering Russia. At that time, we were working closely with Russia and they were beginning to get used to the idea that NATO could be a friend rather than an enemy ... but they were very uncomfortable about having NATO right up on their border and they made a strong appeal for us not to go ahead with that.”

He's still saying it. His primary concern, however, is Russia's nukes:

The bitterness that emerged from dismissing Russia as irrelevant created a climate ripe for the rise of an autocratic leader who would instead demand respect and power through force. And there is no force greater than possessing a nuclear arsenal capable of bringing about the end of humanity. For those who had asked, “what could this defeated nation do to us?” the newly installed President Vladimir Putin would soon have an answer.

Perry, of course, has exactly fuckall to say about his engineering of the Budapest Memorandum which saw Ukraine disarmed, or about the fact that a document he wrote obligates the United States to defend Ukraine against Russia ("Seek immediate Security Council action to provide assistance to the signatory if they "should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used").

Former Zelensky advisor Oleksiy Arestovych declared in a 2019 interview “that our price for joining NATO is a big war with Russia.”

Arestoyvich was merely parroting Wallerstein, Kaplan, Zeihan, John McCain and others. For reasons of demography, the geopolitical rationalists have been predicting a Russian invasion of Ukraine before 2025 since the early 2000s.

During 2010-2013, Yanukovych pushed neutrality, in line with Ukrainian public opinion.

During 2010-2013, Yanukovich acted as an agent of Russia and suppressed anti-Putin dissent. This is why 800,000 protesters took to the streets to depose him.

After Yanukovych’s overthrow, the war broke out in the Donbas, while Russia claimed Crimea.

"The war broke out." Not "Russian special forces stripped of insignia or flags invaded Donbas in order to kidnap and murder elected Ukrainian officials in furtherance of the future annexation of a sovereign nation."

The new Ukrainian government appealed for NATO membership, and the U.S. armed and helped restructure the Ukrainian army to make it interoperable with NATO.

Under the terms of the Budapest Memorandum - see above.

Russia’s leaders put NATO enlargement as the cause of war in Russia’s National Security Council meeting on February 21, 2022.

It's worth watching that meeting:

...and it's worth watching the template for that meeting:

Historian Geoffrey Roberts recently wrote: “Could war have been prevented by a Russian-Western deal that halted NATO expansion and neutralised Ukraine in return for solid guarantees of Ukrainian independence and sovereignty? Quite possibly.”

"Peace for our time" where "our time" turned out to be exactly 334 days.

By recognizing that the question of NATO enlargement is at the center of this war, we understand why U.S. weaponry will not end this war.

This is historically inaccurate. For over two thousand years, peace in the geographic area we call "Ukraine" has occurred only after the destruction of the invading empire. As a territorial buffer between regions more easily defended, the invasion of Ukraine has been the first step in over a dozen wars of territorial expansion. For over a hundred years, peace in Ukraine has come at the cost of genocide. There will be no peace in Ukraine until Putin is out of power and Russia is under a new regime. Full stop.

___________________________________________________________________________________________

The above is two hours I didn't have to spend. If you were not a friend, I would have responded with a simple "lol eat shit tankie." As it is, I see you neither as a "useful idiot" nor as a "fellow traveler."

So I implore you to think a little, investigate easily disproved allegations and exercise caution before putting the words of fellow travelers on your lips.

The power of language:

But that familiarity didn’t last. By the end of the first month, the class was split on the definition of “ethnic cleansing”—not only how to define it but who, in terms of the subject doing the action, can be charged with this human rights violation.

For those too young to remember, "ethnic cleansing" was a term unheard of before Slobodan Milosovic. The phrase was coined by the Serbians to describe what they were doing to the Bosnians to say "silly NATO! We're not committing genocide! We're practicing ethnic cleansing! What are you worried about!" It's an example of the power of language that "filling trenches with dead children" was very much genocide, but for the past 30 years everyone has been circling around the crime of "ethnic cleansing" to determine what, exactly, is the prosecutable crime there that doesn't trigger UN conventions against genocide.

It's also worth pointing out that when first introduced, embargoes were considered genocide. After all, they target a civilian population for purposes of death and displacement. Now of course they're the first tool in the kit despite knowing that they hurt the civilian population first and foremost.

The power of language:

The professor called our attention to his use of the term “ethnic cleansing” in his own writing. He wrote that around 750,000 Palestinians were displaced in 1948, an act that today would be considered ethnic cleansing. At first read, this statement seemed bold—he may not have named the Nakba, but his writing gestured toward violence. Even so, his examination felt sanitized. Palestinians “were displaced,” he wrote. But there was no mention of who did the displacing.

The Nakba was the direct result of European genocide and, if you like, "ethnic cleansing." The whole of the post-WWII economy of Europe was powered by confiscated Jewish wealth; the whole of the West German economy was Jewish wealth, the post-war economies of Eastern Europe and the USSR were powered by confiscated Jewish wealth and founded on confiscated Jewish property. The overwhelming majority of post-War American influence was due to massive expansion in the Western states which was only possible due to de-facto confiscation of property from Japanese Americans.

Meanwhile, of course, the 1948 war was in response to a partition plan that allowed Europe to kick the can down the road. If you give the Jews palestine you don't have to give them back Brussels. The British Empire, which had ruled the entire region with an iron fist for generations, was too weak to do anything but withdraw and the end result was genocide.

Jews did the displacing. It's also complicated.

The power of language:

After reading part of the article out loud, a girl who had been fidgeting in her seat said it couldn’t be.

“What couldn’t be?” my professor asked.

“Ethnic cleansing. Because it’s what happened in the Holocaust, so we can’t be charged with this,” she replied. Another student cut in. He qualified by referring to himself as a critic of Israel. “There’s a distinction between occupation and ethnic cleansing,” he announced. “It’s an issue of structural power and systematic violence—what happened in 1948 was not ethnic cleansing.”

I can't be guilty. There's no way I have any culpability here I'm just a smol bean. History, on every level, in every country, at any time, is "we did good" and "they did bad." The purpose of history education from a civics standpoint is to sheepdip your populace into the common understanding that defines your collective morals - that's why the southern US skirmishes over slavery every goddamn day and will until the end of time. Nobody wants to be the baddies. It doesn't help that we don't introduce the "are we the baddies" conversation until fucking college because any casual observation of the History Channel will clue you in to the fact that we're the baddies, all of us, at some point or another.

But unless you want to know this shit, there's too much complexity. "I benefit materially and spiritually from the oppression of others" is an ethics question for philosophy majors, not a viewpoint introduced to children and god help you if you try. So here's this poor Intro to Fuckery professor saddled with Mary Jane and Bobby Sue who are pretty sure the Nakba wasn't ethnic cleansing and into that mix you've got a Palestinian auditor who could obviously teach the class? But whose salary and tenure are not dependent on Mary Jane and Bobby Sue.

We're the baddies, all of us, at some point or another.

Munich bombings? Palestinians. Lebanese civil war? Palestinians. October 7? Palestinians. I could very easily make the argument that each of those was justified and retaliatory but I won't. Fundamentally the Israelis wear uniforms, the Palestinians don't, both sides know it's because that would be the end of the Palestinians and the Israelis get to sit there going "checkmate."

The power of language:

The word “complicated” is often used to describe the occupation in Palestine, a word that insists that occupation is untouchable—Palestine’s history is too complex, there are too many moving parts, it’s a puzzle that can never be solved. But this word is condescending—a distraction. It wants us to feel small, worthless, and petty in our investigation. It demands power structures remain in place, allowing some to speak while requiring others to stay quiet.

"Simple" implies it can be fixed. "Complicated" implies that it can't. It's been nigh onto 80 years and the world can't agree on borders, let alone what happens after that, and it's not like nobody has tried. Ben Gurion and Maier firmly believed that there would never truly be peace until they had exterminated the Palestinians but they also knew that Hitler held those exact same firm beliefs about the Jews so they didn't shout it from the mountaintops. Meanwhile four generations of Arab states have loudly proclaimed that the only pathway to peace is the eradication of Israel which - c'mon. You're going to triangulate around the phrase "ethnic cleansing" and ignore that it's a stated goal of Hamas' charter? Bartcop argued the simplest solution would be to give the Jews Oklahoma and I'm not sure he's wrong, despite the obvious distaste Israel would have for replacing Jerusalem with Tulsa.

"Complicated" masks the fact that in a simpler time, both the Palestinians and the Jews would be extinct. That "simpler time" wasn't so long ago.

And that really gets to the worst part of the Israel/Palestine conflict: both sides plead simplicity and if you disagree, you're a murderer.

IN MY ADULT LIFE I have watched the phrase "ethnic cleansing" be born, ridiculed, argued, enshrined and defined. What started out as "you murderous asshole that's genocide" has become "well, but let's figure out if this is bad or bad-bad" and it's nothing more than a way to justify sitting back and doing nothing. A lot of that is because "genocide" was used to set what the Nazis were doing apart from what everyone throughout history has always done, which was generally just referred to as "winning." And yet there are still Palestinians, and there are still Jews, because as a civilization we no longer permit that scale of win.

If it were simple it would be solved already. That it's not means any argument put forth for solving it in Intro to Fuckery is likely to be eliding some important details.

Looks dumb, but I'm a hater and haters are gonna hate, I guess.

Naaaah dawg. My accountant just spent two emails and a phone call trying to make me feel guilty for taking ERTC so I'm going to indulge in a little self care? I'm gonna show you some HATE. You know. For me. And like I'm going to pause every now and then and save a draft and get back to work and come back to this because it's too delicious and I can tell I'ma spend two hours just straight loathing on this fucking Concorde Moment of tech journalism.

because this is the dumbest fucking shit I have ever seen.

I mean, let's start with the endless loop of a hand trivially grasping nothing. Pinch your fingers three times to pause the world's most insipid playlist. "Imagine staring at your empty hand with a logo projected on it." Down to the Sanskrit wedding ring - fuckin' McSweeney's couldn't write this article better. I'ma need that title image as a gif 'cuz this one takes too long:

And it is just so chockablock with cheesy goodness that I'ma have to go inline because holy fucking shit this is self-parody so incising and adept that if it were anywhere but the New York Times, I would accuse them of trolling. But it's the New York Times so naah, it's Principle Skinner And The Children.

____________

A brief aside, though: ever thought much about space helmets?

I have. See, I wrote a short film with a prominent space helmet in it. It's pure science all the way and we hit it out of the park and I'm really pleased with it and so has everyone else been and one of the "a ha" moments of making a movie with a space helmet in it, as a fan of science and technology, is you go "well of course we're not going to project blinding fucking lights on the actor's face like every other film because that's super dumb." Except as soon as you shoot a single frame of an unlit space helmet you realize that the camera doesn't read your actor's facial expressions and the emotion drains right the fuck out of the scene and you run to 7-11 to buy a half-dozen keychain flashlights to gaff tape around the viewport because fuckin' hell you do not have a movie without facial expressions, I'm sorry, and yeah - the actor can no longer see shit and yeah - this is absolutely not what NASA or anyone else would do in this situation but you know what? It's a movie, and what matters is the audience.

Think about that next time you see some jackass flashing gang tags to dismiss their text notifications. Who is the audience here? 'cuz that whole "fuck haptics let's mime" approach that the tech industry loves? They love it because they are the audience, watching their shit up on the big screen, popping a boner over how fyooooooooochur it looks without sparing a single fucking thought of what it feels like to fucking use it. VR helmets, Marcel Marceau moves, those stupid Playmobil creations that Kroger now thinks are their customers? 100% "fuck yeah my shit looks good on someone else." This is why, incidentally, Neal Stephenson will always be a grasping idiot while William Gibson will always be a fucking genius: Gibson invented cyborgs who were fashionable. Stephenson invented "gargoyles" covered in Borg laptops. Everyone wants to be Molly Millions, everyone hits the cons like gargoyles.

And "my shit looks good on someone else" changes with the times. Take the first Star Trek. Phasers that looked like guns, walkie talkies that looked like walkie talkies. Take the second Star Trek. Phasers that looked like hand massagers, walkie talkies that look like lapel pins. The Federation in '66 was a bunch of gunslingers with belts full of domination, the Federation in '86 was a bunch of grief counselors taking in the complexities of the universe in their pajamas. Federation '66 was about giving the actors props to get them into the zone, Federation '86 was about making the actors look good in the minimalist chic your average '86 coke addict thought the future would look like.

So let's get back to the Graspersons:

______________

Inside a former horse stable in the San Francisco neighborhood of SoMa, a wave of gentle chirps emerged from small, blinking devices pinned to the chests of employees at a start-up called Humane.

Douglas Addams could do no better: "Far Out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.”

It was just weeks before the start-up’s gadget, the Ai Pin, would be revealed to the world — a culmination of five years, $240 million in funding, 25 patents, a steady drumbeat of hype and partnerships with a list of top tech companies, including OpenAI, Microsoft and Salesforce.

That's right - we're a quarter billion dollars into ugly brooches. Take it from a jeweler - the only people who wear brooches are postmenopausal grandmothers and they favor rhinestones.

Artificial intelligence “can create an experience that allows the computer to essentially take a back seat,” Mr. Chaudhri said.

What the fuck do you think Youtube is by the way

They’re billing the pin as the first artificially intelligent device. It can be controlled by speaking aloud, tapping a touch pad or projecting a laser display onto the palm of a hand. In an instant, the device’s virtual assistant can send a text message, play a song, snap a photo, make a call or translate a real-time conversation into another language. The system relies on A.I. to help answer questions (“What’s the best way to load the dishwasher?”) and can summarize incoming messages with the simple command: “Catch me up.”

The first appearance of the space helmet: "wouldn't it be cool if some dipshit who didn't know how to load a dishwasher could stare at it like a moron, his hands full of greasy plates, and beg the heavens for guidance? Fuck yeah Sequoia would be all in on that shit." Let's pause to reflect, before moving on, that your average normie doesn't want to take a picture without the ability to look at it. But in the product video we'll just superimpose a perfect snap over his haplessness without having to worry about the fact that generally people want a modicum of QAQC.

The technology is a step forward from Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant.

"Hey Siri how much of a dumpster fire is Alexa" "Hey Alexa How are things going at Google" "Hey Alexa how is Siri generally regarded"

To tech insiders, it’s a moonshot. To outsiders, it’s a sci-fi fantasy.

Or, and I'm just spitballing here, it's the ultimate "if we build it they will come" circlejerk.

Humane will begin shipping the pins next year. It expects to sell around 100,000 pins, which will cost $699 and require a $24 monthly subscription, in the first year. (Apple sold 381,000 iPods in the year after its 2001 launch.)

For $399. With no monthly subscription! And a pretty compelling use case! By 2009, there were 385,000,000 music players sold by Sony alone! "It's like a walkman but it doesn't skip, lasts twelve hours and holds 50 hours of music" is not a hard sell. "It's like a phone but you can't watch videos, scroll Facebook or call people, also

For the start-up to succeed, people will need to learn a new operating system, called Cosmos, and be open to getting new phone numbers for the device. (The pin comes with its own wireless plan.)

..."People will need to learn a new operating system," the NYT said blithely, without the slightest acknowledgement of the simple power of blue bubbles.

They’ll need to dictate rather than type texts and trade a camera that zooms for wide-angle photos. They’ll need to be patient because certain features, like object recognition and videos, won’t be available initially.

Wait wait wait they're expecting this thing to replace your fucking phone? "new phone who dis also don't confuse my AI"

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, said in an interview that he expected A.I. to be “a huge part” of how we interact with computers. He has invested in Humane as well as another A.I. company, Rewind AI, that plans to make a necklace that will record what people say and hear.

For the record, Microsoft abandoned that shit more than ten years ago. Their whole focus was alzheimer's patients. They were winding it down when Google announced Glass because ten years of trying failed to find a use for the fucking thing.

Ms. Bongiorno, 40, and Mr. Chaudhri, 50, have a marriage of contrasts. He shaves his head bald and speaks with the soft, calm voice of a yogi. She sweeps her long blond hair over one shoulder and has the enthusiasm of a team captain. They both dress in Jobsian black.

Let's call it what it is, though - Theranos Black. It's what you wear when you're trying to make people think you're Steve Jobs, not when you're Steve Jobs. See, Dieter Rams also wore all black. So did Karl Lagerfeld. So does Helmut Lang. When Steve Jobs wore all black? He was aping designers to make you think he was a designer rather than a tech nerd. When everyone else wears all black? They're aping Steve Jobs to make you think they aren't grifters.

They met at Apple in 2008. Mr. Chaudhri was working on its human interface, defining the swipes and drags that control iPhones.

In other words, the absolute worst aspects of iOS.

Ms. Bongiorno was a program manager for the iPhone and iPad.

In other words, a bureaucrat.

A Buddhist monk named Brother Spirit led them to Humane. Mr. Chaudhri and Ms. Bongiorno had developed concepts for two A.I. products: a women’s health device and the pin. Brother Spirit, whom they met through their acupuncturist, recommended that they share the ideas with his friend, Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce.

“You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young." Also, Brother Spirit's real name is Denpok

Sitting beneath a palm tree on a cliff above the ocean at Mr. Benioff’s Hawaiian home in 2018, they explained both devices. “This one,” Mr. Benioff said, pointing at the Ai Pin, as dolphins breached the surf below, “is huge.”

“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”

Humane’s goal was to replicate the usefulness of the iPhone without any of the components that make us all addicted — the dopamine hit of dragging to refresh a Facebook feed or swiping to see a new TikTok video.

"Like a phone, except you can't see or hear anything"

The device’s most sci-fi element — the laser that projects a text menu onto a hand — started inside a box the size of a matchbook.

Projected haptics - championed by designers and eschewed by consumers since 1992

It took three years to miniaturize it to be smaller than the size of a golf tee.

Huh, wow! Really impressive. Are you sure it took you that long to miniaturize a laser, Mr. & Mrs. Badhaptics Pointyhair? Or maybe it took you that long to negotiate prices on the one you want? cuz here's Forbes in 2012.

Humane also retained Apple’s obsession with design details, from its device’s curved corners and compostable white packaging to the Japanese-style toilets at the company’s stark office.

LOL "what can we say about the office?" "it was... office-ey?" "no, no, something something design." "Well they bought Totos." "Fucking everyone buys Totos you can buy Toto at Home Depot now." "well what you got mister design" "shit I guess write about the toilets"

Mr. Benitez Cong said he was “disgusted” by what the iPhone had done to society, noting his son could mimic a swiping motion at the age of 1. “This could be something that could help me get over my guilt of working on the iPhone,” Mr. Benitez Cong said.

allow me to show you something worse than swiping

A haunting whoosh filled the room, and two dozen Humane employees, seated around a long white table, carefully concentrated on the sound. It was just before the Ai Pin’s release, and they were evaluating its rings and beeps. The pin’s “personic” speaker (a company portmanteau of “personal” and “sonic”) is critical, since many of its features rely on verbal and audio cues.

Mr. Chaudhri praised the “assuredness” of one chirp noise and Ms. Bongiorno complimented the “more physical” sounds for the pin’s laser. “It feels like you’re actually holding the light,” she marveled.

Less assuring: That whoosh, which plays when sending a text message. “It feels ominous,” Ms. Bongiorno said. Others around the table said it sounded like a ghost, or as if you made a mistake, almost. Someone thought it was a Halloween joke.

Ms. Bongiorno wanted the sound for sending a text to feel as satisfying as the trash-can sound on one of Apple’s older operating systems. “Like ‘thunk,’” she said.

must...resist...lowhangingfroooooooot

The device is arriving at a time when excitement and skepticism for A.I. hit new highs each week. Industry researchers are warning of the technology’s existential risk and regulators are eager to crack down on it.

Yet investors are eagerly pouring cash into A.I. start-ups. Before Humane even released a product, its backers had valued it at $850 million.

You are now aware that Facebook has lost $28b on virtual reality.

The company has tried to promote a message of trust and transparency, despite spending most of its existence working in secret. Humane’s Ai Pins have what the company calls a “trust light” that blinks when the device is recording. (A user must tap the pin to “wake” it.) Humane said it did not sell user data to third parties or use it in training its A.I. models.

Of course, that light has a name. And of course, you need users to sell their data.

In September, in an echo of Apple’s fashion-friendly launch of its Watch, the supermodel Naomi Campbell wore Humane’s pin — barely noticeable without knowing to look for it — on a gray Coperni blazer on the runway at Paris Fashion Week.

FUCK YEAH FASHION CAFE

Humane’s supporters have a pat way of dismissing skepticism about its prospects — they invoke the first iPod. That clunky, awkward device had just one use, playing songs, but it laid the groundwork for the real revolution, smartphones. Similarly, Humane envisions an entire ecosystem of companies building features for its operating system — an A.I. version of Apple’s App Store.

But first, raisins. In a demo at Humane’s office of a feature that will be rolled out in a future version of the product, a software designer picked up a chocolate chip cookie and tapped the pin on his left breast. As it whirred to life with a beep, he asked, “How much sugar is in this?”

“I’m sorry; couldn’t look up the amount of sugar in oatmeal raisin cookie,” the virtual assistant said.

Mr. Chaudhri shrugged off the mistake. “To be fair, I have trouble with the difference between a chocolate chip cookie and an oatmeal raisin.”

1) Smell it.

2) Look closely at it.

3) FUCKING PUT IT IN YOUR MOUTH.

4) And also, read the fucking package.

Space helmet design, personified: "I would never do this, but as the audience I would watch somebody do this, and when it doesn't work I will plead idiocy because fundamentally, my customers are fucking idiots."

What we have here is an expensive device that can barely do the things we need, fails miserably at the things we don't need, but has the words "AI" "Apple" and "valuation" attached to it so of course, they're going to sell 100,000 of the fucking things. Thing about Juicero? At least you got juice. This, apparently, is for people who feel the need to ask the air about their cookies, which is all anyone uses their phones for anyway.

Art.

Guys, it's not a big deal.

Sorry I left in a tizzy.

I'll try to finally make it to shitting all over the recent optimistic fusion news within another week or so.

Glad to be back though, but I'm still on twitter 😬

Shit. That situation sucks. That's all there is to say. I'm in the waiting room for radiation oncology at Henry Ford Hospital ,Detroit. I''m getting Radiation treatment 3of4 for arecurrent glioma. Been surviving it for over ten years now. No cure for gliomas either. We've been managing this shit for over ten years now. Not all of ithas been terrible eitherthough. I'v e had some amazing times with my kids

and family. Times that are farmore amazing as I didn't think knewthey were guaranteed. I heard a hopeful statement about situations like ours. "It doesn't always get worse."

It's true.

I No one's disease is the exact same. Only by keeping fears at bay can we get our best result. I hope you guys find yourselves feeling better soon. I also work hard to live by ," It's rarely as bad as you think it will be and rarely as good as you think. Lastly, I've learned to recognize and discard related fearful thoughts that pop into my head. Listening to your random fears will drive a person to make terrible decisions.

Also , sorry as my typing is shit. My last two surgeries f-ed up my left field of vision. navigating a keyboard by sight is super tough.