Luke McGee a CNN analysis piece:

Despite the bleak situation on the ground, NATO is unwilling to get directly involved in the conflict – including setting up a no-fly zone – beyond supporting Ukraine’s resistance to an invasion that is killing innocent civilians.

NATO’s Secretary-General, Jens Stoltenberg, said on Friday that a no-fly zone over Ukraine is not an option being considered by the alliance. “We’ve agreed that we should not have NATO planes operating over Ukrainian airspace or NATO troops on Ukrainian territory,” he said.

Why? The sole purpose of the formation of NATO was to prevent rogue dictators and mad man to rain destruction on European nations and to secure the peace. The US and its allies could easily secure the airspace of Ukraine, making the Russian air force irrelevant.

Don’t get me wrong, no one wants a full scale all hands on board ground war in Europe, but appeasement never works. It didn’t work with Hitler and it won’t work with Putin - he is a deranged bully. Here we have a clear cut case to use our military might for what is a moral and justified cause. Iraq and Afghanistan weren’t. Ukraine is.

This video is a helpful overview of some of the geographical, historical, demographic, environmental, political, and economic reasons why, from the perspective of Putin & Moscow, Russia wants to bring Ukraine back into their orbit.

Humans are the scariest animals. And also the most durable. It’s like that. People can get used to anything. But I don’t want to.

The NY Times did a short series of videos about how average Ukrainians were preparing to defend their country. Video journalists spoke to military and residents in Mariupol:

From Vox’s Joss Fong, a video essay on how conservatives turned against the Covid-19 vaccine in the US.

President Donald Trump presided over the fastest vaccine development process in history, leading to abundant, free vaccines in the US by the spring of 2021. Although the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines haven’t been able to stop transmission of the virus, they have been highly effective against hospitalization and death, saving hundreds of thousands of lives and rendering the majority of new Covid-19 deaths preventable.

Trump has received three doses of the vaccine. But many of his most dedicated supporters have refused, and many have died as a result. Why? Obvious culprits include misinformation on social media and Fox News and the election of Joe Biden, which placed a Democrat at the top of the US government throughout the vaccine distribution period. But if you look closely at the data, you’ll see that vaccine-hesitant conservatives largely made up their mind well before the vaccines were available and before Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.

In the early stages, conservative leaders (Fox News anchors and Donald Trump) repeatedly downplayed the severity of Covid-19 to a “flu like symptoms.” Having convinced their base of this, the mask and vaccine mandates seemed like over encroachment. Words matter. Words from leadership matters even more.

The GOP and Fox News has blood on their hands.

As if January 6th wasn’t bad enough - today in an analysis by Stephen Collinson:

“So Putin is now saying, ‘It’s independent,’ a large section of Ukraine. I said, ‘How smart is that?’ And he’s going to go in and be a peacekeeper. That’s the strongest peace force,” Trump said. “We could use that on our southern border. That’s the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen. … Here’s a guy who’s very savvy. … I know him very well. Very, very well.”

Trump was referring to Putin’s declaration on Monday that he would regard two rebel regions of eastern Ukraine, where he has been fostering separatism, as independent and his order for Russian troops, which Putin misleadingly called “peacekeeping” forces, to reinforce the enclaves. The move was a flagrant violation of international law, was resonant of the tyrannical territorial aggrandizement of the 1930s that led to World War II and was, as Biden said on Tuesday, tantamount to “the beginning of a Russian invasion.” In effect, the ex-President is trying to undermine US foreign policy as the current President tries to stop a war that could kill thousands of people and threaten the post-Cold War peace.

Here is what a helicopter blade looks like, from the perspective of a GoPro strapped to the blade show you forward flight and how the blade angles as we move forward.

David Perell on innovation:

It’s counterintuitive, but the more we imitate others, the faster we can discover our unique style. In the entertainment world, there’s a long lineage of comedians who tried to copy each other, failed, and became great themselves: Johnny Carson tried to copy Jack Benny, but failed and won six Emmy awards. Then, David Letterman tried to copy Johnny Carson, but failed and became one of America’s great television hosts.

Reflecting on his own influences, Conan O’Brien said: “It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique.”

Modern creators do the opposite though. They refuse to imitate others and stubbornly insist on originality, which they hold as their highest virtue — even when it comes at the expense of quality. They might deny their ambition toward originality when you talk to them, but they reveal it in their actions. In general, creators spend much less time imitating their heroes than they do trying to make something new. I call it the Originality Disease — a pervasive plague that makes creators feel scared to imitate other people’s styles.

If you’re bored and stuck in traffic, chances are you’ve probably looked around at the vehicles around you, looking for something, anything to ease the pain. As you play Miley Cyrus’ Party In The USA while you inch forward, you’ve probably spotted something off to the side on a slow-moving truck. The wheels on its trailer have little strips slowly rotating, drawing your attention in. What are those for?

[…]

Sometimes, truckers may find that the spring brakes on a wheel may be frozen and not releasing, leading to the wheel dragging. You can get stuck wheels from worn out braking components, rust, bad valves or a number of different possibilities.

One way to check wheel rotation is to paint a mark on a wheel, then drive the truck, turning enough so that you can see the mark in your mirrors. Another way would be to have a spotter check to see if all wheels are moving. Or you could attach wheel rotation indicators to your wheels’ lug nuts and easily be able to check which wheels are in motion.

Image for article titled Here Is What Those Strips Hanging Off Of Truck Wheels Are For Photo: Tyre Protector of North America They work better than a strip of paint because they stick out just far enough that a trucker should be able to see them in their mirrors.

A brilliant product - just surprised it took so long to come up with such a simple solution. Won’t make my compute any better but this files under useless information cabinet - for when I end up on Jeopardy.

people have to learn to disagree and not hate for it

Even though I disagree with him on a lot of topics as of late - he truly believes in, and understands the value of, freedom of expression to a stable and healthy society. Notice how he was able to maintain respect and deference to Whoopi even though it would have bßno matter what, I think we will be OK. We can all learn a lot about civics from this short clip.

Kurzgesagt has made a video that shows what would happen to civilization should the Moon somehow get knocked from its orbit and head straight for the Earth. Spoiler: the Moon doesn’t even need to reach us to kill almost all life on the planet.

An excellent write-up Jan-Peter Kleinhans & Julia Hess for Stiftung Neue Varanwortung:

What customers and markets are currently experiencing as “the semiconductor shortage” is, in fact, multiple shortages happening concurrently in different process steps and supplier markets based on a multitude of dynamics and dependencies. The interplay between the underlying dynamics, such as high market entry barriers, high geographic concentration, high fab utilization and long manufacturing cycles, is the reason why skyrocketing demand and external shocks, from natural disasters and human error to COVID-19-related lock-downs, disrupted the value chain since 2020. Consequently, none of the shortages in semiconductor manufacturing can be explained by one reason alone. Most importantly, some of the underlying dynamics are unlikely to change in the future because they are rooted in fundamental characteristics of semiconductor manufacturing.

You can get the full PDF here. Well worth the 30 page read.

Hard to believe it’s been 14 years since that day. Today the AppStore generates 85.1 Billion+ revenue a year. Apple changed the entire software landscape - overnight the idea of buying physical software disappeard and gave us the term “There’s an App for that.”

Nikon discontinues the mighty D500. Arguably the Nikon D500 was them greatest APSC camera of all time. The show stopper feature (besides image quality) was its ability to shoot at 10 frames per second with a massive buffer. Combined with the incredible write speeds of XQD cards, it was exceedingly rare to ever have to wait for the camera to clear the buffer.

Nikon released the D500 in January of 2016 and supported it with firmware updates until 2020 with its upgrade to support CFExpress cards. 5 years is a long time for a product to reign uncontested in the market. Canon basically threw in the towel after the 7D Mk II and never bother to release a true competitor.

And what does this mean for the future? My bet is that Nikon is readying a mirrorless replacement for the D500. An APSC mirrorless camera with 24 mega-pixels and the Z9 AF system, priced at $2500.

I were Canon or Sony - I would be very worried.

In the video above, game-playing AI bots are pitted against each other in an attempt to find the best strategy for Monopoly.

As part of their rewards program, millions of Starbucks customers have preloaded money onto Starbucks cards, essentially loaning the company more than $1 billion at 0% interest.

Starbucks has around $1.6 billion in stored value card liabilities outstanding. This represents the sum of all physical gift cards held in customer’s wallets as well as the digital value of electronic balances held in the Starbucks Mobile App.* It amounts to ~6% of all of the company’s liabilities.

This is a pretty incredible number. Stored value card liabilities are the money that you, oh loyal Starbucks customer, use to buy coffee. What you might not realize is that these balances simultaneously function as a loan to Starbucks. Starbucks doesn’t pay any interest on balances held in the Starbucks app or gift cards. You, the loyal customer, are providing the company with free debt.

I wonder what Starbucks makes on their coffee - I am willing to bet that its a loss leader. Even at $5.00 dollars a cup.

Davind Dayeb and Rakeen Mabud sums it up in The American Prospect:

You could read hundreds of stories about this phenomenon, about the stress of longshoremen and supply chain managers and government officials, the consequences for consumers and small businesses and retailers, and superficial attempts at explaining why we got here. Many will tell you that the pandemic changed consumption patterns, favoring physical goods over services as barhopping and travel shut down. Some will blame fiscal-relief programs, large deficits, and loose monetary policies for making inflation worse. Nearly all will frame the matter as a momentary kink in the global logistics leviathan, which is bound to work itself out. Anyway, everyone got their Christmas gifts this year, so maybe it was overblown to begin with.

Almost none of these stories will explain how these shortages and price hikes were also brought to life through bad public policy coupled with decades of corporate greed. We spent a half-century allowing business executives and financiers to take control of our supply chains, enabled by leaders in both parties. They all hailed the transformation, cheering the advances of globalization, the efficient network that would free us from want. Motivated by greed and dismissive of the public interest, they didn’t mention that their invention was supremely ill-equipped to handle inevitable supply bottlenecks. And the pandemic exposed this hidden risk, like a domino bringing down a system primed to topple.

Erik Hoel in take on modern cinema’s over reliance on CGI:

The problem is easiest to catch in the sci-fi and fantasy genres. There it is tempting to make use of the full horrors of graphics and post-production processing. It’s undeniable that remakes, from An American Werewolf in London to The Thing to the A Nightmare on Elm Street, have vastly inferior CGI effects compared to the original practical ones. Indeed, this over-reliance on CGI has ruined some of the best genre series. Consider Peter Jackson’s decline from The Lord of the Rings to The Hobbit trilogy. Or The Matrix’s sequels, which eschewed the original’s acrobatic stunt wire-work and practical fight scenes for the digital realm (a cosmic irony if there ever were one). The old original Star Wars trilogy comes to us as dispatches from a gritty world—it is a tighter world, yes, the shots are necessarily smaller, more closely-framed, but it all feels more viscerally real. Ever since the release of the Star Wars prequels in the 1990s, the actors stand apart from digital ghosts they can’t see.

[..]

Trends in cinematography are like fashion or architecture: almost impossible to see while you’re in them. We are always blind to our own age. Yet our era is dated very easily by the incredible unreality of its films, the fantasy of the whole thing, its emphasis on post-production and unreal colors and textures. It’s all just one long high-budget computer game cutscene. Your brain knows the difference, unconsciously, implicitly. And while we may have become accustomed to the digital slop we’re fed, the eyes of the future will pick it out, photon by photon, and judge.

Its going to be really sad when we re-visit these movies a decade or two from now and they will all look so terrible. Star Wars: A New Hope still holds up - Stars Wars: The Force Awakens already looks silly in comparison (I am just referring to the visuals - not the lack of plot).

Neil Young on why he left Spotify:

When I left Spotify, I felt better.

I support free speech. I have never been in favor of censorship. Private companies have the right to choose what they profit from, just as I can choose not to have my music support a platform that disseminates harmful information. I am happy and proud to stand in solidarity with the front line health care workers who risk their lives every day to help others.

As an unexpected bonus, I sound better everywhere else.

Neil Young’s main point here is exactly right: free speech works both ways. Joe Rogan has every right to say what he wants and Spotify has every right to associate with who ever they want. But Young has a right not to want to be with a services that associates with Rogan and the state that publicly.

I am glad that Neil Young is taking a principled stand on what he believes is right. And for any of you who think this is some kind of publicity stunt, he has done this all through his life. Genuine virtue, not mere virtue signaling.

Jessica Wildefire writes:

There’s not enough.

There’s not enough truck drivers. There’s not enough nurses. There’s not enough doctors. There’s not enough teachers.

There’s not enough baristas.

There’s not enough servers, or cashiers, or cooks. There’s nobody to froth your latte to perfection, or make your bed at the fancy hotel, or bring you peanuts and soda on your first-class flight to wherever, or watch your kid while you’re sacrificing the best years of your life.

Here’s the worst part:

There never will be, ever again.

Essential workers ran the economy. We did everything. In return, we got nothing. No raises. No bonuses. No minimum wage laws. No childcare support. No sick leave. When the pandemic dragged on, we were forced back into dangerous workplaces for one reason:

We had to protect the bubble.

We endured sickness and death to keep the fake economy going, to keep stock prices high. We took risks our billionaire overlords never would. Essential workers got sick with Covid, and they were fired.

Fired.

They were fired because they ran out of personal leave. In other words, they stayed sick for too long. Their medical bills got too expensive. So they were terminated. When they died, they left their families with staggering medical debt. If they survived, they had to find new jobs while managing the severe, lingering symptoms of a deadly disease.

There’s going to be a lot of theories when the economy collapses. (It’s already happening.) Here’s the simplest one:

We treated workers like crap.

So they quit.

I am sick and tired of business owners, CEOs and politicians (and I mean specifically Republicans) who are claiming workers are lazy. They just don’t want to work.

No workers want to be treated like human beings and respected for what they do for society. And in a long time, they are finally demanding it.

I am not a listener of Hip Hop - but Rick Rubin is the GOAT of music producers. He has produced the likes of Slayer, Danzig, Red Hot Chili Peppers, U2, Green Day, Adele just to name a few.