Ernie Smith writing on Tedium about Jaleel White and the 1990s cultural goal post that he created as Steve Urkel:

Jaleel White, as Steve Urkel, successfully did this. But unlike the actors listed above, White successfully pulled this off, with the comic timing of a pro, when he was just 12 years old.

Now, to be clear, kids can have amazing comic timing in their own right—Nickelodeon has numerous comic franchises over its four-decade history that prove it, most notably You Can’t Do That On Television and All That—but White’s creation, a famously annoying kid with a high-pitched voice and a distinctive appearance that you can see from a mile away, felt much more fully-formed than similar comedy creations inhabited by kids.

And that is perhaps why White became an indelible part of 1990s culture.

Tressie McMillan Cottom’s opinion piece on Ozempic:

Solving for obesity will require more than drugs. It will require solving for a culture that makes being fat a woman’s burden, a means test for dignity, work, social status, and moral citizenry.

Pete Davidson hosted Saturday Night Live last night - a perfect cold opening with the horrifying and tragic events of this week.

In his new book, ‘Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism’, Yanis Varoufakis explores how giant tech firms, both in the US and China are expanding their control over the planet. His analysis is that, whilst material resources certainly matter, the real battle ground is over digital real estate. Aaron Bastani sat down with Yanis to talk about how Europe’s power has faded, Elon Musk’s wet dreams and why the US is really afraid of China.

Here is a summary of the key points from the podcast transcription:

• Janis Varoufakis argues that capitalism has been replaced by a new system he calls “techno-feudalism.” This is a result of the rise of “cloud capital” owned by big tech companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc.

• He believes cloud capital has enabled a new form of economic rent extraction, allowing tech lords like Jeff Bezos to collect huge rents from digital platforms that increasingly replace market transactions. This parallels feudal lords extracting rents from their land.

• The massive money printing by central banks after the 2008 crisis provided the funding for this rapid expansion of cloud capital, further entrenching the power of techno-feudal lords.

• Varoufakis sees the rise of figures like Donald Trump as a backlash against this new techno-feudalism from “petit bourgeois” capitalists and workers left behind by deindustrialization.

• However, Europe is now irrelevant compared to the techno-feudal spheres of influence in the US and China, as it has no cloud capital of its own.

• The euro has locked countries like Italy and Greece into permanent austerity and decline. Leaving would be painful but may be necessary.

• Covid provided an opportunity for more debt and money distribution to elites. Liberal individualism is dying as big tech shapes desires.

• In summary, Varoufakis argues contemporary capitalism has been replaced by a neo-feudal system ruled by tech oligarchs extracting rents via cloud platforms.

The official trailer for season four of For All Mankind has dropped. This season the gang will be colonizing Mars and mining asteroids. Can’t wait to watch this. First episode airs November 10th.

Clio Chang reporting in Curbed about Dae - about a new design shop and café that opened in Carroll Gardens this summer, an how they decided to ban influencers doing photo shoots:

How bad did it get? “People were coming in and literally doing photo shoots — they would just get one drink and stay for two hours shooting,” says Carol Song, the shop’s co-owner. While she’s grateful that people like the space, she’s seen influencers bring in Nikon cameras, set up tripods, and take photos of employees for their reels. Some people didn’t even order anything but snapped pictures of food and drinks on nearby tables. “It’s a free-for-all — no one’s regulating the TikTokers,” Song says, laughing.

While some businesses have leaned into the publicity that influencers bring them, Dae is taking a different approach. From conception, Song says she didn’t want an influencer-branded space: “I didn’t want to be a place where people just come and go for the trend.”

I am so proud of the owners. The whole point of a coffee shop is to break away from the everyday and meet new people and have intersting conversations. Lets hope more coffee shops adopt a similar stance.

A fascinating look back at the history of the VCR and the great BetaMax/VHS war of the 80s. Loved the reference to Lord of the Rings 25:38:

Matsushita was kind of like Gandalf at the Battle of Helms Deep bring with him a formidable manufacturing and distribution force.

A fascinating look by Joseph Stromberg for Vox at the history behind the term “jaywalking.”

“In the early days of the automobile, it was drivers' job to avoid you, not your job to avoid them,” says Peter Norton, a historian at the University of Virginia and author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. “But under the new model, streets became a place for cars — and as a pedestrian, it’s your fault if you get hit.”

One of the keys to this shift was the creation of the crime of jaywalking. Here’s a history of how that happened.

[..]

Auto campaigners lobbied police to publicly shame transgressors by whistling or shouting at them — and even carrying women back to the sidewalk — instead of quietly reprimanding or fining them. They staged safety campaigns in which actors dressed in 19th-century garb, or as clowns, were hired to cross the street illegally, signifying that the practice was outdated and foolish. In a 1924 New York safety campaign, a clown was marched in front of a slow-moving Model T and rammed repeatedly.

This strategy also explains the name that was given to crossing illegally on foot: jaywalking. During this era, the word “jay” meant something like “rube” or “hick” — a person from the sticks, who didn’t know how to behave in a city. So pro-auto groups promoted use of the word “jay walker” as someone who didn’t know how to walk in a city, threatening public safety.

At first, the term was seen as offensive, even shocking. Pedestrians fired back, calling dangerous driving “jay driving.”

But jaywalking caught on (and eventually became one word). Safety organizations and police began using it formally, in safety announcements.

Ultimately, both the word jaywalking and the concept that pedestrians shouldn’t walk freely on streets became so deeply entrenched that few people know this history. “The campaign was extremely successful,” Norton says. “It totally changed the message about what streets are for.”

Photographer Trevor Trayner took photos of newstands from all over the world:

On 7/17/12 I shot my 1st newsstand near 6th Ave & 46th St. Drawn in by the vibrant colors & organized product placement, this series began its journey providing an instant time stamp via magazine covers and headlines.

Started out in New York, and expanded to include newsstands in LA, Lima, Tokyo, Jerusalem, Marrakesh, London, Rome, Paris, and several other places around the world.

A real-time 3D digital map of Tokyo’s public transport system by Akihiko Kusanagi that uses real-time data provided by Public Transportation Open Data Center API.

Visiting Tokyo recently from North America felt kind of like the fabled Gorbachev-sees-an-American-supermarket moment for me. Not only do the trains go everywhere, frequently, and reliably, but the condition of everything was astounding. The cleanliness was a big part of it, but also just how non-abused everything was. I was there for a week and didn’t once see a tag carved into the seats or walls of a train car or smell urine on a platform. I don’t think I even saw a single piece of litter on a train. The respect with which people treat public property was genuinely eye-opening.

The cleanliness of Tokyo is (at least) two factor: People are more clean in public (less graffiti, less littering, less spitting, less gum, less urine) and the maintenance spend for public infrastructure (roads, trains, etc.) is higher. That combination is the magic. Restaurants feel similar as well. Many are freakishly clean by any US/CAN/EU/AUS/NZ standards. Again, I would say the key is a combination of neat(er) customers and fastidious cleaning by the restaurant staff.

Thats the transferable lesson that we could apply here where dingy and defaced public infrastructure is just accepted as “the way things are in a big city,” when it’s demonstrably not inevitable.

Speaking of cleaning the Tokyo train system, here is a documentary on how Japanese trains are cleaned:

I can’t believe this level of cleaning is ever done in the NYC subway system.

Oliver Milman reporting on a new housing development in Phoenix, Arizona that is devoid of cars :

But it is here that such a neighborhood, called Culdesac, has taken root. On a 17-acre site that once contained a car body shop and some largely derelict buildings, an unusual experiment has emerged that invites Americans to live in a way that is rare outside of fleeting experiences of college, Disneyland or trips to Europe: a walkable, human-scale community devoid of cars.

Culdesac ushered in its first 36 residents earlier this year and will eventually house around 1,000 people when the full 760 units, arranged in two and three-story buildings, are completed by 2025. In an almost startling departure from the US norm, residents are provided no parking for cars and are encouraged to get rid of them. The apartments are also mixed in with amenities, such as a grocery store, restaurant, yoga studio and bicycle shop, that are usually separated from housing by strict city zoning laws.

The European concept of of “third place” (1st place: work, 2nd place: home, 3rd place: communal spaces) directly correlates with quality of life / happiness of people.

The American obession with cars is killing us - relegating us to an isolated life of home/car/work. Thats surviving, in isolation. Glad to see that at least some attempts are being made to transition to a better way of life.

The Washington Post on the falling life expectancy of the US population:

The United States is failing at a fundamental mission — keeping people alive.

After decades of progress, life expectancy — long regarded as a singular benchmark of a nation’s success — peaked in 2014 at 78.9 years, then drifted downward even before the coronavirus pandemic. Among wealthy nations, the United States in recent decades went from the middle of the pack to being an outlier. And it continues to fall further and further behind.

A year-long Washington Post examination reveals that this erosion in life spans is deeper and broader than widely recognized, afflicting a far-reaching swath of the United States.

The frustrating thing is that the number one reason for this decline are completely preventable and manageable - chronic diseases. Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and liver disease are the leading causes of death for people 35 to 64. This isn’t surprising - especially in a country where healthcare is prioritized over the health of its citizens.

America is failing to live up to its promise to the as stated by the United States Constitution in its opening line:

We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Promote the general welfare – our for profit health care systems need to be overhauled.

You knew it was just a matter of time before lawyers weighed in on the matter. Hailey Mensik for writing for Worklife:

Last week a former Astrazeneca senior director sued the drugmaker saying it breached her contract by refusing to pay her a performance bonus of more than $120,000, and stock options valued at more than $65,000, due to her working from home last year, according to the suit.

She claims her former employer retroactively changed its bonus structure to include RTO requirements which she didn’t meet while working from her South Carolina home last year, where she has since she started in the role in 2016.

The only real answer to this debate/discussion is: What works for your staff at this moment in time? If they can WFH and it helps their lives and they stay productive, who cares? We don’t need to have these debates or get the courts involved. The problem, of course, is that so many people — and especially Americans — wrap their entire personal identity up in work (it’s all they have), and so they want to be worshipped and deified there, because they aren’t at home. That’s the entire reason we’re having this discussion, but no one really says that out loud too often.

Jennifer Liu writing for CNBC Make It:

Yannique Ivey may be going back to the office, but she’s open about the fact that you won’t catch her first thing in the morning. Wait too long in the day and you’ll miss her, too.

Ivey, 27, works for a tech consulting firm in Atlanta and says she drives into the office once or twice a month. When she’s there, she commits to an 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. schedule — just in time for a catered lunch, to catch up with colleagues for a few hours, and head out before traffic stalls her in a “hellish” commute home, she tells CNBC Make It.

She and her team are open about this arrangement. Spending a few shortened days in the office each month “takes needed time away from the actual work” to socialize and build community, she says, but “I’m a lot more productive when I’m home, so I get started there and wind down from there.”

It’s a new arrangement picking up across the U.S.: Workers are showing up for required attendance, but that doesn’t mean they’re sticking around for the full day.

Workers are voting with their feet. The new norm - offices exist for socialization and community building - the real work gets done from home.

It is time the management class stop fighting it.

The Economist reporting on the award of the Nobel Prize for Medicine to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their work that led to the development of the Covid-19 mRNA vaccines:

The World Health Organisation (who) says that vaccines have saved more from death than any other medical invention. It is a hard claim to gainsay. Vaccines protect people from disease cheaply, reliably and in remarkable numbers. And their capacity to do so continues to grow. In 2021 the who approved a first vaccine against malaria; this week it approved a second.

Vaccines are not only immensely useful; they also embody something beautifully human in their combination of care and communication. Vaccines do not trick the immune system, as is sometimes said; they educate and train it. As a resource of good public health, they allow doctors to whisper words of warning into the cells of their patients. In an age short of trust, this intimacy between government policy and an individual’s immune system is easily misconstrued as a threat. But vaccines are not conspiracies or tools of control: they are molecular loving-kindness.

The best way to further honour this extraordinary set of technologies is to use it more and better.

So make sure you get the COVID-19 booster this fall - and while you are at it get the flu vaccine also.

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.