Elizabeth Lopatto writing for The Verge:

While Isaacson manages to detail what makes Musk awful, he seems unaware of what made Musk an inspiring figure for so long. Musk is a fantasist, the kind of person who conceives of civilizations on Mars. That’s what people liked all this time: dreaming big, thinking about new possible worlds. It’s also why Musk’s shifting political stance undercuts him. The fantasy of the conservative movement is small and sad, a limited world with nothing new to explore. Musk has gone from dreaming very, very big to seeming very, very small. In the hands of a talented biographer, this kind of tragic story would provide rich material.

While Musk has moved the car industry forward and managed to get Space X off the ground - the way in which he treats those around him and his greed for wealth and self promotion just makes him an awful human being.

Musk has a ‘Donald Trump’ complex.

Erik Wernquist made this fascinating short film One Revolution Per Minute:

It takes place aboard the “SSPO Esperanta” - a planetary orbiter that spins around itself at a rate of one revolution per minute (1 RPM). With a radius of 450 meters, the spin generates artificial gravity with an effect of approximately 0.5 g along its main deck.

With the “Esperanta” I wanted to create a leisure-like environment, such as a hotel or cruise ship, and explore what the views could be like onboard when the orbiter visits some of the worlds in our solar system. I was also particularly interested in how light and shadows from the sun play around in the interior as it spins around. For those reasons, I decided to keep all artificial lights off - with the exception of some emergency lights to avoid complete darkness - and to only let natural light illuminate the interiors. As this made the place appear quite desolate, I found it interesting to imagine someone being onboard…

Now this is what space tourism should be like. Just hope there are plenty of vomit bags available.

Americans, despite living in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, have a much worse standard of living than people who live in poorer countries.

Whats worse is that these same Americans rail against anything that the progressives in the country try to do to benefit them. The political class has created many boogeymen - socialism, socialized medicine, communism, death panels, etc. - to scare the population so they can quietly transfer wealth from the poor and middle class to the corporations and the well connected.

And this combination of fear and ignorance is so powerful that the population happily retreats into a make believe world where America is somehow pre-ordained to be the greatest country on earth.

The first part of solving any problem is to admit you have a problem. It is time for the US citizenry to admit that beyond child poverty, military power, number of incarcerated citizens, deaths due to gun violence - America sucks at everything.

Mark Tyson reporting on UltraRam for Tom’s Hardware :

This potentially disruptive tech is designed to blend the non-volatility of flash storage with faster-than-DRAM speeds. The memory retains data even after power is removed, and the company claims it has at least 4,000X more endurance than NAND and can store data for 1,000+ years. It is also designed to have 1/10th the latency of DRAM and be more energy efficient (by a factor of 100X) than DRAM fabricated on a similar node, drawing the interest of industry heavyweights like Meta.

Impressive technology - its good to see that it is receiving funding. Will be interesting to see where this leads.

Merriam-Webster added 690 words to the dictionary last month including rizz, vector graphics, rewild, jorts, non-player character, jump scare, finsta, beast mode, simp, and thirst trap.

Rachel Wolfe reporting on the consumer spending binge:

Consumers should be spending less by now.

Interest rates are up. Inflation remains high. Pandemic savings have shrunk. And the labor market is cooling.

Yet household spending, the primary driver of the nation’s economic growth, remains robust. Americans spent 5.8% more in August than a year earlier, well outstripping less than 4% inflation. And the experience economy boomed this summer, with Delta Air Lines reporting record revenue in the second quarter and Ticketmaster selling over 295 million event tickets in the first six months of 2023, up nearly 18% year-over-year. Economists and financial advisers say consumers putting short-term needs and goals above long-term ones is normal. Still, this moment is different, they say.

Not it isn’t. It’s just the latest self delusion to indulge in the American tradition of consumerism. I hope they enjoy their purses, trips and wild parties when they are broke and working at 70.

Is this good for the music? The jury is out, even within hip-hop. But in this behind-the-scenes video — the latest entry in our Diary of a Song series, which documents how popular music is created — we track the generational shift through exclusive studio footage of young rappers like Doechii, Veeze and Lil Gotit, plus interviews with genre veterans including the artist Killer Mike and the producer Just Blaze, to track this creative shift and its effects on the still-experimental genre of hip-hop, 50 years after its birth.

I wouldn’t say this is just in the hip-hop community, but throughout most modern music.

Writing is hard. Committing words to paper requires thought, examination and revision. It forces you to ask the question - is this what I want to say to the world?

To me this is just being lazy. Its throwing things against the wall to see what works now. In the moment. Sure, this might work commercially today, but will any of these “punch-in” tracks be relevant 10, 20, or 50 years from now?

To the question ‘Is this good for music?’

No. It is not.

Raspberry Pi 5 comes with new features, it’s over twice as fast as its predecessor, and it’s the first Raspberry Pi computer to feature silicon designed in‑house here in Cambridge, UK.

Key features include:

• 2.4GHz quad-core 64-bit Arm Cortex-A76 CPU
• VideoCore VII GPU, supporting OpenGL ES 3.1, Vulkan 1.2
• Dual 4Kp60 HDMI® display output
• 4Kp60 HEVC decoder
• Dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi®
• Bluetooth 5.0 / Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
• High-speed microSD card interface with SDR104 mode support
• 2 × USB 3.0 ports, supporting simultaneous 5Gbps operation
• 2 × USB 2.0 ports
• Gigabit Ethernet, with PoE+ support (requires separate PoE+ HAT, coming soon)
• 2 × 4-lane MIPI camera/display transceivers
• PCIe 2.0 x1 interface for fast peripherals
• Raspberry Pi standard 40-pin GPIO header
• Real-time clock
• Power button

The things I am most excited about is the R1 custom silicon with P10 and the built in GPU, realtime clock, USB power deliver and POE capability with PCIe interface!. And of course, the real reason to upgrade - a power button.

Current pricing:

• Raspberry Pi 5 4GB - US$60.00 (EAN 5056561803319)
• Raspberry Pi 5 8GB - US$80.00 (EAN 5056561803326)

Nikki Haley to Vivek Ramaswamy:

I feel a little bit dumber for what you say

The second GOP debate was a complete clown show - each of those candidates made Donald Trump look like a stable genius. But when questions about TikTok and emerging technologies came up, I felt a lot dumber for what was being said.

Both of these fools are a disgrace to the Indian American community.

This is to remind me to never get arrested again.

Amazon has turned into a terrible place to shop - the situation is not good for vendors or their customers. It was part of Amazon’s plan all along to undercut local sellers by sacrificing profits and offering free deliveries until they essentially eliminated all competition. Now they get to price gouge both sides - the sellers and the customers. Amazon wins, no matter what.

Brian Barrett writing for The Atlantic:

Amazon feels less like an online Target or Best Buy than it does Big Billy’s Bargain Bin, dollar-store trinkets sold for name-brand prices. The problem isn’t that it lacks what you want, but that it offers infinite permutations of often unknowable quality. Many of the brand-name items aren’t any cheaper on Amazon than they are elsewhere.

The decline of Amazon is closely tied not just to its size but to how it has chosen to grow. Amazon is now less of a store than a mall, or maybe a sprawling bazaar. Last year, nearly 60 percent of units sold on Amazon came from third-party sellers rather than from Amazon itself. Want to set up a booth? There’s a nominal monthly fee to reserve the space. From there, though, the charges add up quickly, according to a report from the ecommerce-intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse.

Amazon takes a cut of every transaction, typically about 15 percent. For front-and-center placement, you’d better pay for one of those sponsored slots. According to the FTC, advertised products are 46 times more likely to get clicks. Call it another 15 percent of revenue. Oh, and if you want to qualify for Prime—and if you want any shot of making a sale, you do want to qualify for Prime—you’ll need to use Amazon to fulfill your orders. That’s another 20 to 35 percent off the top. All of a sudden, half of your revenue is in Amazon’s coffers.

[..]

Of course this is where Amazon wound up. The company spent years sacrificing profit for scale, until it had so many customers that sellers couldn’t ignore it. Now that it extracts billions each month from those sellers, it can afford to ignore those customers—or at least prioritize them less. Amazon gets paid by all of its vendors, no matter which products go in our cart.

[..]

… but in a world where so much of online retail runs through Amazon, choice is an illusion. Dare to offer a cheaper product elsewhere online, and Amazon might bury your listing on its platform. A heavily redacted portion of the FTC suit claims that the company “deploys a sophisticated surveillance network of web crawlers that constantly monitor the internet” for such sellers. (In his response, Zapolsky says that the FTC “has it backwards” and that the company doesn’t “highlight or promote offers that are not competitively priced.”)

There is only one solution - Amazon needs to be broken up.

Heather Cox Richardson has a new book out today about the health of American democracy: Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. From the Virginia Heffernan review of the book:

She has an intriguing origin point for today’s afflictions: the New Deal. The first third of the book, which hurtles toward Donald Trump’s election, is as bingeable as anything on Netflix. “Democracy Awakening” starts in the 1930s, when Americans who’d been wiped out in the 1929 stock market crash were not about to let the rich demolish the economy again. New Deal programs designed to benefit ordinary people and prevent future crises were so popular that by 1960 candidates of both parties were advised to simply “nail together” coalitions and promise them federal funding. From 1946 to 1964, the liberal consensus — with its commitments to equality, the separation of church and state, and the freedoms of speech, press and religion — held sway.

But Republican businessmen, who had caused the crash, despised the consensus. Richardson’s account of how right-wingers appropriated the word “socialism” from the unrelated international movement is astute. When invoked to malign all government investment, “socialism” served to recruit segregationist Democrats, who could be convinced that the word meant Black people would take their money, and Western Democrats, who resented government protections on land and water. This new Republican Party created an ideology that coalesced around White Christianity and free markets.

If you ever wondered how a person like Donal Trump can rise to the White House, read this book. And do checkout Richardson’s excellent Letter from an American substack.

Lee “The Captain” Anderton of Andertons Music Co. & Peter “Danish Pete” Honoré take a trip over to Corona, California to have a guided tour of Fender’s famous USA guitar factory!

This is an older video - but is much more detailed than yesterday’s Popular Mechanics video and shows off the attention to detail at the USA factory. I have never been to the Fender factory, but someday when I go - I will be more of a fan boy then these two are. If that is possbile.

It literally blows my mind how every component is built in house, and some of it is still being manufactured with the same machines and techniques as was done in the 1950s. If it isn’t broke don’t fix it! Leo would be proud.

Name an American product that’s had a worldwide impact, is more popular than ever, yet still looks the same as it did when it was introduced nearly a third of a century ago? Here’s a hint: It might be the only musical instrument whose fame rivals that of the people who’ve played it.

The Fender Stratocaster will be 70 years old next year. When it came out of the factory in 1954, it didn’t sound — or look — like any other guitar. Leo Fender’s small company was looking to improve the Telecaster, its groundbreaking solid-body electric, first introduced three years earlier. But far more than a tweak here or there, Fender created an entirely new instrument that’s become almost synonymous with the phrase “electric guitar.”

It is remarkable how little the Stratocaster has changed over the years. Here is a look by Popular Mechanics on how a Stratocaster comes to life.

The NFT market has cratered. Are we really that surprised?

Data from the Block reveals a weekly traded value of around $80 million in July 2023, just 3% of its peak back in August 2021. So what happened? NFTs had a bull run then crashed. Hard. We now find ourselves in the midst of a bear market for NFTs, with numerous projects now struggling to find buyers following a pessimistic market outlook on their future value.

[…]

Of the 73,257 NFT collections we identified, an eye-watering 69,795 of them have a market cap of 0 Ether (ETH).

This statistic effectively means that 95% of people holding NFT collections are currently holding onto worthless investments. Having looked into those figures, we would estimate that 95% to include over 23 million people whose investments are now worthless.

The whole concept of the NFT was stupid. And if you invested in NFTs, well stupid is as stupid does. Here is a great conversation with Bill Mahr and Ben McKenzie:

You really can’t make this stuff up.

Elizabeth Spiers on recent spat of celebrities on the apology tour - specifically why are they so terrible at apologizing:

That’s the question I have after several weeks of famous people apologizing for bad behavior. They have apologized for not honoring the writers’ strike (Drew Barrymore). They have apologized for speaking up on behalf of a rapist (Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis). They have apologized for belittling musicians who are not white men (Jann Wenner). They have apologized, belatedly and begrudgingly, for groping and vaping in a theater (hello, Representative Lauren Boebert).

For all their supposed regret, not one of these people spoke up until the outcry — from a few million people on the Internet, various television pundits and the people who were harmed or offended — had become deafening. Even my 8-year-old son knows the difference between a desultory eye-rolling “sorry” and genuine remorse. More important, he understands the importance of repairing the damage he caused, regardless of his discomfort or embarrassment.

It’s this last part that makes them all seem so especially shallow.

Katie Heaney wrote about this phenomenon also - but offers an excellent framework for apologizing. Something we can all put into practice.

Dr. Beth Polin, an assistant professor of management at Eastern Kentucky University and co-author of The Art of the Apology, defines an apology as a statement which includes one or more of six components:

• An expression of regret — this, usually, is the actual “I’m sorry.”
• An explanation (but, importantly, not a justification).
• An acknowledgment of responsibility.
• A declaration of repentance.
• An offer of repair.
• A request for forgiveness.

Keith Richards on popular music and rap:

“I don’t want to start complaining about pop music,” he said. “It’s always been rubbish. I mean, that’s the point of it. They make it as cheap and as easy as possible and therefore it always sounds the same; there’s very little feel in it.”

Richards continued: “I like to hear music by people playing instruments. That is, I don’t like to hear plastic synthesised muzak, as it used to be known, what you hear in ­elevators, which is now the par for the course.”

He then turned his ire to rap music, adding: “I don’t really like to hear people yelling at me and telling me it’s music, aka rap. I can get enough of that without ­leaving my house.”

Exactly.

Tim Paradis reporting for Insider:

Companies like Meta, the parent of Facebook, and Salesforce are bringing back some of the workers they let go. Big Tech is hungry for people with skills in areas such as artificial intelligence. Yet, like romantic breakups, whether one-time employees agree to try again will have a lot to do with how things ended.

Companies that handled layoffs poorly are likely to have a harder time convincing ex workers to go back, Sandra Sucher, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School who’s studied layoffs, said. In some cases where the layoffs were conducted reasonably well, a return might be something former workers would consider.

Sure employees will go back - but they are going to want better compensation and a guaranteed employment contract. And thats just to start.

Ron Risman on DPReview:

We had what looked like the exact same image, taken at the exact millisecond in time, from what looked like the same exact location and perspective.

Filmmakers Patrick McCormack and Duane Peterson III made a short film called Jet Line: Voicemails from the Flight Path featuring residents' concerns from a complaints hotline the pair set up.

This short film employs an anonymous hotline to elevate the voices beneath Vermont’s F-35 flight path, the first urban residents to live with one of the military’s most controversial weapons systems overhead.

Tranquil scenes of unassuming neighborhoods near Burlington International Airport are juxtaposed with voicemails of the unheard, those drowned out by the ear-shattering “sound of freedom.” Exploring the relationship between picturesque residential areas and the deafening fighter jets overhead, Jet Line is a poetic portrait of a community plagued by war machines, documenting untenable conditions in a small city once voted one of the best places to live in America.

The American military–industrial complex. If we thought we could keep it at bay from our communities - well all you have to do is listen.