“The protests in Iran, now in their third month, are a historic battle pitting two powerful and irreconcilable forces: a predominantly young and modern population, proud of its 2,500-year-old civilization and desperate for change, versus an aging and isolated theocratic regime, committed to preserving its power and steeped in 43 years of brutality.”
“The Question Is No Longer Whether Iranians Will Topple the Ayatollah”
Sam Hammond via Alex Tabarrok.
“Indeed, within a decade, ordinary people will have more capabilities than a CIA agent does today. You’ll be able to listen in on a conversation in an apartment across the street using the sound vibrations off a chip bag. You’ll be able to replace your face and voice with those of someone else in real time, allowing anyone to socially engineer their way into anything. Bots will slide into your DMs and have long, engaging conversations with you until it senses the best moment to send its phishing link. Games like chess and poker will have to be played naked and in the presence of (currently illegal) RF signal blockers to guarantee no one’s cheating. Relationships will fall apart when the AI lets you know, via microexpressions, that he didn’t really mean it when he said he loved you. Copyright will be as obsolete as sodomy law, as thousands of new Taylor Swift albums come into being with a single click. Public comments on new regulations will overflow with millions of cogent and entirely unique submissions that the regulator must, by law, individually read and respond to. Death-by-kamikaze drone will surpass mass shootings as the best way to enact a lurid revenge. The courts, meanwhile, will be flooded with lawsuits because who needs to pay attorney fees when your phone can file an airtight motion for you?”
Bleak.
After outlining Apple’s new safety-oriented product enhancements, Gartenberg concludes:
“The implied message is: ‘If you want to live, buy our stuff.’ Apple now sells devices the way First Alert sells smoke detectors.
Sadly, he’s absolutely right.
A prediction. Apple’s new “life-saving” product enhancements will lead to increased rates of anxiety and related mental health issues.
Apple is a company that prides itself on being socially conscious, better than the rest.
How disappointing.
The Seattle Mariner’s are headed to the post season.
AAPL’s stock price is cratering.
UCLA’s football team played some defense.
The seven day forecast is for more summer.
“And take on more of the attitudes that a lot of immigrants come into this nation with almost automatically.”
“The creators of a new program that aims to ‘reboot’ your biological age say that within a decade people who live into their 90s could feel as if they are in their 40s, thanks to rapid advances in the longevity field.”
Don’t be like the humble blog reader who fell for this.
Charles could do us all a favor and secure his place in British, if not world history, by dissolving the monarchy.
For the first time ever, people in China (red) live longer than people in the (dis)United States (blue).
“In March this year, 16,238 passenger cars were registered in Norway. Of those, 13,983 were battery-electric vehicles. That’s an amazing 86% of all cars registered that month. Meanwhile in the US, according to the Argonne National Laboratory, sales of light-duty vehicles with plugs (including hybrids) made up just 5.85% of the market in March. That was nearly a 40% increase over the previous year, but still floundering in the single digits.
Why the disparity? Is Norway just a utopia of forward-thinking EV zealots? Not exactly. Where state and federal governments in the US have engaged in a haphazard collection of half-assed, confusing incentives to spur EV adoption, scattering a middling collection of carrots here and there over the years, the Norwegian government has instead chosen the biggest of sticks: taxes. Want to buy a gas-powered machine? Be prepared for a painful whack.”
The “greatest country in the world” is getting its ass kicked. Again.
Pressing Pause 