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.

Kathryn Baecht elegantly sums up unregulated capitalism brillianty:

Santa isn’t real, the Tooth Fairy is imaginary, and there’s no such thing as the “invisible hand of the market.”

[…]

Look, here’s the unvarnished truth. Capitalism is corrupt, craven, and continuously enriching the mega rich, further impoverishing the poor and incessantly squeezing the middle class like a python wrapped around the abdomen of a cute furry little animal. No, not Mr. Whiskers specifically, son, some other cute little animal. One that we never met.

It’s time we as a society stop believing the capitalism fairytale. Unregulated capitalism is destroying our planet, stealing our youth’s future and grinding us down for benefit of the one percenters. Unregulated capitalism makes you poor, miserable — and short.

A Lego pamphlet from 1974, unearthed and posted on Reddit, has some advice for parents that rings true 49 years later:

The text reads:

The urge to create is equally strong in all children. Boys and girls.

It’s imagination that counts. Not skill. You build whatever comes into your head, the way you want it. A bed or a truck. A dolls house or a spaceship.

A lot of boys like dolls houses. They’re more human than spaceships. A lot of girls prefer spaceships. They’re more exciting than dolls houses.

The most important thing is to the put the right material in the their hands and let them create whatever appeals to them.

My niece is a obsessed with Lego. She builds houses, gardens, rockets, planes, and robots. Lego nailed it 50 years ago - its imagination that counts. And it is not limited by gender.

Yael Grauer writing for The Atlantic:

We leave digital traces about our health everywhere we go: by completing forms like BetterHelp’s. By requesting a prescription refill online. By clicking on a link. By asking a search engine about dosages or directions to a clinic or pain in chest dying???? By shopping, online or off. By participating in consumer genetic testing. By stepping on a smart scale or using a smart thermometer. By joining a Facebook group or a Discord server for people with a certain medical condition. By using internet-connected exercise equipment. By using an app or a service to count your steps or track your menstrual cycle or log your workouts. Even demographic and financial data unrelated to health can be aggregated and analyzed to reveal or infer sensitive information about people’s physical or mental-health conditions.

All of this information is valuable to advertisers and to the tech companies that sell ad space and targeting to them. It’s valuable precisely because it’s intimate: More than perhaps anything else, our health guides our behavior. And the more these companies know, the easier they can influence us.

The existing laws on the books are nothing more than suggestions that depend on the enormous companies that benefit from having access to this sensitive data to self govern. We all know how that is going to work out. It’s time the laws designed to protect our health information caught up.

So lets get the facts straight first:

• America spends more money per capita on health care than any other nation on earth.
• 16% of the GDP goes towards health care - to put that into perspective, we spend 2.4x more on on the military (3.1% of GDP) and welfare programs (3.6% of GDGP) combined.
• we have more uninsured and under insured citizens then any other developed country.
• life saving drugs often cost 10x what they cost in other countries.
• 500,000+ citizens go bankrupt due to medical bills.
• Life expectancy is dead last when compared to other developed nations.
• US has the highest infant and maternal mortality rates.

Its gotten so bad that towards the beginning of the corona virus, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology requested students in the US to come home:

In accordance with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (UD), NTNU strong recommends that all NTNU students who are outside Norway return home. This applies especially if you are staying in a country with poorly developed health services and infrastructure ando/or collective infrastructure, for example the USA. The same applies if you do not have health insurance.

How can you expect any other outcome? The US health care system is a for profit system in a market place that does not have a true supply/demand curve. When you are sick, seeking health care is not a option. So by definition there is no competition and prices can only go up.

The US health care system is a cruel and inhumane system that prioritizes profit over its citizens. It is working exactly as it was designed.

David Adler and William B. Bonvillian writing for American Affairs:

The United States was once the global leader in manufacturing, ushering in the mass production era from the end of the nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century. It is not a global leader in the advanced manufacturing of the twenty-first century. (Advanced manu­facturing can be defined as the application of innovative technologies to improve manufacturing processes and products, adding significant value through productivity advances and innovation. These would include digital technologies, robotics, 3-D printing, advanced materials, bio-fabrication, artificial intelligence, and nanofabrication.)

The United States does not currently have the correct institutional infrastructure and accompanying operational mechanisms to support ad­vanced manufacturing. Industry, government, and academia are largely unlinked when it comes to advanced production technology and processes, and there is a similar lack of interagency coordination within the government. Pathways necessary for diffusing new technologies and getting them to market are missing, including a lack of scale-up financing mechanisms. The vocational education system has withered as has the corporate lab system. The Department of Defense’s (DoD) mission has traditionally been one of military security rather than economic security and assuring a strong American industrial base. Yet economic security and military security are now inseparable, and by failing to pursue innovation in production, the DoD is putting U.S. economic and therefore national security at risk. Financial markets do not reward advanced manufacturing. They favor outsourcing and the disaggregation of integrated firms. Corporations are not rewarded for pursuing production as opposed to, say, stock buybacks. What is sometimes called the U.S. developmental state has many strengths—in basic research as well as applications in the areas of defense technology, software, and biopharma development—but advanced manufacturing is not one of them.

Robert J. Gordon, in his widely read book The Rise and Fall of American Growth, argues that recent generations of technologies are inherently less conducive to job creation, compared to earlier breakthroughs, leading to lower growth. But the real culprit may be the way in which our innovation system was designed, leaving a manufacturing focus out of the innovation equation. The result of all this has been the decline of U.S. manufacturing and the corresponding weakening of the American working class, growing economic inequality, and protracted political confrontation.

Yea - the real culprit can be traced as far back as 1968 when Victor R. Fuchs coined the term “the service economy.” And US policy over the last 4 decades has pushed the transformation of the economy to a predominate service based economy.

The problem is eventually you will hit a brick wall if the US as a country fails to create value. After all in a capitalist society - with the creation of value, all of the money will eventually filter to a tiny percent of the population.

Senator Mitt Romney will not run for re-election in 2025. The former Presidential candidate will bow out of political service as a real Republican. I don’t agree with most of Mitt Romney’s policy stances but Mitt Romney did his job with honor, class and truth. For that he has my respect. And thats coming from a Democrat.

In an exclusive excerpt from his forthcoming biography of the senator, Mckay Coppins writing for The Atlantic:

Sitting across from Romney at 76, one can’t help but become a little suspicious of his handsomeness. The jowl-free jawline. The all-seasons tan. The just-so gray at the temples of that thick black coif, which his barber once insisted he doesn’t dye. It all seems a little uncanny. Only after studying him closely do you notice the signs of age. He shuffles a little when he walks now, hunches a little when he sits. At various points in recent years, he’s gotten so thin that his staff has worried about him. Mostly, he looks tired.

Romney’s isolation in Washington didn’t surprise me. In less than a decade, he’d gone from Republican standard-bearer and presidential nominee to party pariah thanks to a series of public clashes with Trump. What I didn’t quite expect was how candid he was ready to be. He instructed his scheduler to block off evenings for weekly interviews, and told me that no subject would be off-limits. He handed over hundreds of pages of his private journals and years’ worth of personal correspondence, including sensitive emails with some of the most powerful Republicans in the country. When he couldn’t find the key to an old filing cabinet that contained some of his personal papers, he took a crowbar to it and deposited stacks of campaign documents and legal pads in my lap. He’d kept all of this stuff, he explained, because he thought he might write a memoir one day, but he’d decided against it. “I can’t be objective about my own life,” he said.

[…]

“A very large portion of my party,” he told me one day, “really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.” He’d realized this only recently, he said. We were a few months removed from an attempted coup instigated by Republican leaders, and he was wrestling with some difficult questions. Was the authoritarian element of the GOP a product of President Trump, or had it always been there, just waiting to be activated by a sufficiently shameless demagogue? And what role had the members of the mainstream establishment—­people like him, the reasonable Republicans—played in allowing the rot on the right to fester?

I had never encountered a politician so openly reckoning with what his pursuit of power had cost, much less one doing so while still in office. Candid introspection and crises of conscience are much less expensive in retirement. But Romney was thinking beyond his own political future.

Harvard professor Arthur Brooks teamed up with TV icon Oprah Winfrey to help people find true happiness in life. Brooks sits down one-on-one with Stephanie Ruhle to talk about his new book, “Build the Life You Want.” This is one of the most powerful and insightful 12 minutes of television I have seen this year.

Key take aways:

The number one thing that we get wrong is happiness is a feeling … Wrong! Feelings are evidence of happiness.

Envy is the enemy of happiness.

The secrets - the happiness 401k plan - are faith, family, friends, and work that serves other people.

[…]

What can we do tomorrow to walk one step closer to a path to happiness?

[]

Lets start by making a goal of reading something really heavy and wise for 15 minutes tomorrow right? Read a book by somebody who knows more than you know. About spiritual depth. They mystries of life. 15 minutes. Thats number one.

Number two - make a goal of calling someone in your family every single day.

Number three, you know your real friends and you know your deal friends. Make a list of people you come most in contact with put Rs and Ds after their name - Not Republicans and Democrats. Real, Deal. And if its all deal, and you don’t have enough Rs you need to do more work. A lot of people watching this have not had real friends since college. They have all been deal friends, transactional friends. People who could help them. You know how you find real friends by the way? They’re not useful. They are beautifully useless. And you need more useless people in your life. Like make a list of them and do the work to keep in touch. Look, when I figured out, when I started doing this research, I didn’t have real friends. Now I got my real friends. And I spent an hour on the phone with each one of them a week.

And last but not least, here is how you judge your job. You don’t judge your job in terms of your title, your prestige, or your money. Its number one, are you earning your success? Do you believe you are creating value with your life? Value with the way you are earning your living in your life and the life of other people? And do you believe you are serving other people so you can lift them up and bring them together?