The United States will not be brought down by an invasion of immigrants from the southern border - but buy the total lack of intelligence of its citizenry.

As always, Lawrence O’Donnell sums up Donald Trump’s situation. For the first time in Donald Trump’s life he’s been forced to spend time in confinement - a jail of his own making.

Joanna Stern from The Wall Street journal tests drops phone from 300 feet to see what happens.

So what did we learn from dropping all these phones today? Physics is cool. Yes phones have gotten more durable too. Even 30 foot drops on to asphalt didn’t destroy these phones. But yea, if you happen to drop your phone out of an airplane, make sure it lands on grass.

James Poniewozik writing for the NY Times:

Mid TV, on the other hand, almost can’t be bad for some of the same reasons that keep it from being great. It’s often an echo of the last generation of breakthrough TV (so the highs and lows of “Game of Thrones” are succeeded by the faithful adequacy of “House of the Dragon”). Or it’s made by professionals who know how to make TV too well, and therefore miss a prerequisite of making great art, which is training yourself to forget how the thing was ever done and thus coming up with your own way of doing it.

Mid is not a strict genre with a universal definition. But it’s what you get when you raise TV’s production values and lower its ambitions. It reminds you a little of something you once liked a lot. It substitutes great casting for great ideas. (You really liked the star in that other thing! You can’t believe they got Meryl Streep!)

Mid is based on a well-known book or movie or murder. Mid looks great on a big screen. (Though for some reason everything looks blue.) Mid was shot on location in multiple countries. Mid probably could have been a couple episodes shorter. Mid is fine, though. It’s good enough.

Above all, Mid is easy. It’s not dumb easy — it shows evidence that its writers have read books. But the story beats are familiar. Plot points and themes are repeated. You don’t have to immerse yourself single-mindedly the way you might have with, say, “The Wire.” It is prestige TV that you can fold laundry to.

The budgets have soared, the technical aspects are now rivaling the best of Hollywood and the big time stars are now on board. The problem is that we are just re-hashing old ground.

When was the last time we saw a really inspired and imaginative TV show that really challenged us?

Casper Kessels in Car industry on Apple’s big bet on in car UI:

Competition aside, from Apple’s perspective, CarPlay is also not ideal in its current form. For a company that values control over the user experience, it’s an eyesore to see their product embedded inside another product.

Apple’s answer is a new version of CarPlay. It doesn’t have an official name, so I’ll refer to it as CarPlay 2.

Today, CarPlay is a standard that carmakers can use to pass a video signal from the phone to the head unit and return input events. There’s only a limited connection with the vehicle. This is changing with CarPlay 2 which has a deeper integration with the vehicle.

Thanks to a deep integration with the software stack of the vehicle, CarPlay 2 can control most infotainment functions. It can therefore take over the entire infotainment display, the instrument cluster, and any passenger displays.

To be honest - this what Apple should have been doing the whole time instead of attempting to build the car. It allows Apple to do what it does best - the UI and hardware/software integration. If this works out for Apple, this could be a huge revenue stream and part of their move to a more ‘service centric’ platform. Done right they could potentially get a get a cut of every car that is sold.

For All Mankind has been renewed for a fifth season and the show is getting a Apple TV+ spin-off called Star City, which will follow the same alt-timeline as FAM but from the Soviet perspective.

For All Mankind has been one of my favorite series over past 5 years. I really enjoyed the characters journeys and the epic decades long story payoffs from one season to the next. Even though the soap-opera nonsense can get a bit much.

Over all an amazing show - and looking forward to the Star City spin-off.

Merritt K over at aftermath on the LAN party culture of the 1990s and early 2000s:

In the 1990s and early 2000s, three-dimensional graphics in videogames were becoming more and more complex. Titles like 1998’s Half-Life pushed games in more cinematic directions, with lighting and textures that went beyond anything released even a few years earlier. Other first-person shooters (FPS) like Counter-Strike (itself originally a mod for Half-Life) and Unreal Tournament built on the work of earlier titles like DOOM, Wolfenstein 3D, and Duke Nukem 3D. Many of these titles were designed for multiplayer action. However, the typically low network speeds of the period meant that these games, unlike slower-paced and less graphically intensive strategy games, were nearly unplayable over an internet connection. In this moment, in which communications technology was being outpaced by graphical power, the LAN (local area network) party was born.

[…]

LAN parties ranged from small, private gatherings to massive, multi-day events with thousands of participants, such as QuakeCon, DreamHack, The Gathering, and Euskal Encounter.

These were a feature of my youth - I clearly remember hauling our machines to a friends house in eastern Long Island and passing out playing multi-player Quake and CounterStrike until the wee hours of the night.

The highlight of that era was my visit to Assembly in Finland in 1992. Good times.

Michael Phillips writing for the AP:

The Biden administration on Wednesday finalized strict limits on certain so-called “forever chemicals” in drinking water that will require utilities to reduce them to the lowest level they can be reliably measured. Officials say this will reduce exposure for 100 million people and help prevent thousands of illnesses, including cancers.

The rule is the first national drinking water limit on toxic PFAS, or perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, which are widespread and long lasting in the environment.

Health advocates praised the Environmental Protection Agency for not backing away from tough limits the agency proposed last year. But water utilities took issue with the rule, saying treatment systems are expensive to install and that customers will end up paying more for water.

Water providers are entering a new era with significant additional health standards that the EPA says will make tap water safer for millions of consumers — a Biden administration priority.

Of course, the Republicans will attempt to block this and when it gets to the Supreme Court (which it will ), I bet this gets trashed when the Supreme Court reverses the Chevron doctrine this summer.

Three men stranded on a tiny Pacific island for more than a week were rescued after the Coast Guard spotted “HELP” written out on the beach in palm leaves. This isn’t a fluke occurence either - A similar rescue from the same island happened in 2020 — “SOS” that time.

So if you are trapped on a deserted island - start writing!

Reports on heatwaves and wildfires regularly fill the evening news. Summer days exceed 40 degrees in London and 45 degrees in Delhi, as extreme heat waves are now 8 to 9 times more common. These high temperatures prompt widespread blackouts, as power grids struggle to keep up with the energy demands needed to properly cool homes. Ambulance sirens blare through the night, carrying patients suffering from heatstroke, dehydration, and exhaustion. The southwestern United States, southern Africa, and eastern Australia experience longer, more frequent, and more severe droughts.

Meanwhile, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Japan face more frequent heavy rainfall as rising temperatures cause water to evaporate faster, and trap more water in the atmosphere. As the weather becomes more erratic, some communities are unable to keep pace with rebuilding what’s constantly destroyed.

Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan joins Jon Stewart to discuss her work protecting the American consumer against the digital robber barons. This women scared the hell out of the largest business in the world. Kudos to John Stewart for standing up to Apple and having her on.

The car-free schemes end up being so popular and work so well that “once cities make the decision to reduce or remove cars, they rarely go back”.

Plus, traffic-reduction programmes also have impacts beyond reducing air pollution and carbon emissions. In cities like Oslo and Helsinki, thanks to car-reduction policies, entire years have passed without a single road traffic death. It’s even been suggested that needing less parking could free up space to help ease the chronic housing shortage felt in so many cities.

And any attempts to reduce urban car use tend to do better when designed from the bottom up. Barcelona’s “superblocks” programme, which takes sets of nine blocks within its grid system and limits cars to the roads around the outside of the set (as well as reducing speed limits and removing on-street parking) was shaped by having resident input on every stage of the process, from design to implementation. Early indicators suggest the policy has been wildly popular with residents, has seen nitrogen dioxide air pollution fall by 25 percent in some areas, and will prevent an estimated 667 premature deaths each year, saving an estimated 1.7 billion euros.

Good luck trying to pass LTN (“low-traffic neighborhoods”) in the United States. First of all the country would have to invest billions in implementing public transportation network throughout its suburbs. Even if we managed to do that, the car culture is deeply embedded in the US psyche there would be riots in the streets.

Kelly Bauer reporting for Block Club Chicago:

Heinz is helping out ketchup-loving Chicagoans by putting up small billboards that dispense the condiment outside famous local restaurants that refuse to serve ketchup.

Maureen Tkacik writing for the The American Prospect:

Like most neoliberal institutions, Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs. CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had “overvalued experience and undervalued leadership” before he purged the veterans into early retirement.

“Prince Jim”—as some long-timers used to call him—repeatedly invoked a slur for longtime engineers and skilled machinists in the obligatory vanity “leadership” book he co-wrote. Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were “phenomenally talented assholes,” and he encouraged his deputies to ostracize them into leaving the company. He initially refused to let nearly any of these talented assholes work on the 787 Dreamliner, instead outsourcing the vast majority of the development and engineering design of the brand-new, revolutionary wide-body jet to suppliers, many of which lacked engineering departments. The plan would save money while busting unions, a win-win, he promised investors. Instead, McNerney’s plan burned some $50 billion in excess of its budget and went three and a half years behind schedule.

“There’s a form we all had to sign that says you take responsibility for anything that goes wrong, and it states pretty clearly that if something happens to a plane because of something you did wrong, you can face a major fine or jail time for that,” the manager recalled. “The Everett managers took that seriously. Charleston leadership did not.”

This is what happens when you replace highly skilled employees with years of institutional knowledge with managers who only care about the stock price. You would think the Boing board would have learned their lesson - I wouldn’t count on it.

Meanwhile, pieces are flying off the Boeing planes actually in use at an alarming rate, criminal investigations are under way, and another in a long line of stock-conscious CEOs is stepping down. Boeing’s largest union, the Machinists, is trying to snag a board seat because, in the words of its local president, “we have to save this company from itself.”

SPEEA has demanded, understandably, that the board choose an aerospace engineer as its next CEO. But there are few signs that will happen: None of the names floated thus far for the spot have been aerospace engineers, and the shoo-in for the position, GE’s Larry Culp, is not an engineer at all.

Laurie Anderson built a AI chatbot of her late husband Lou Reed.

I’m totally 100%, sadly addicted to this. I still am, after all this time.

There is something unnatural and creepy about this…

Adam Yates reporting on how the the Dutch have transformed the city and made it safer for people to get where they’re going more quickly.

Pedestrians, cyclists, and vehicles can all coexist without conflict, but only if they’re all going the same slow speed. This advances the principles of shared streets.

Jon Heder (Napoleon), Efren Ramirez (Pedro), and Jon Gries (Uncle Rico) mark the 20th anniversary ofNapoleon Dynamite at the Sundance Film Festival.

Micah Toll writing for elektrek:

Believe it or not, electric bikes offer more exercise than pedal bikes on average. That fact might sound strange (and has been known to let the steam out of some fitness riders’ lycra outfits), but the science is clear. Now let’s talk about the “how” and “why”.

Study after study have shown that people who ride e-bikes get more exercise than those who ride pedal bikes.

Its obvious - the ease of electric bikes allows their owners to ride longer and more often.

Methodist pastor Dave Barnhart on Facebook on loving the unborn:

“The unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. It’s almost as if, by being born, they have died to you. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe.

Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.

Joe Scarborough hangs up on Donald Trump live on air. This is a perfect call.