Learn the finer points of non-commital conversational style, body language, eating, hot dish, offers, and the long goodbye. Applies pretty much equally to anywhere in the Midwest like where I grew up
Of course, there’s also Charlie Berens who lets you know nothing has changed over the decades
Retro computing enthusiast Matthias Werner has shared his design for a device that recreates the old school clicking operational noise of a hard disk drive (HDD).
The HDD Clicker v0.2 is said to be both nostalgic and useful. Nostalgic for the ambience, and useful for providing audible feedback in sync with data access and transfers on silent solid state devices.
If you want one, they’re available here for 25€
Saudi Arabia is planning to construct a mirrored building that will be 656 feet wide, 1,640 feet tall, and 105 miles long. It’s called The Line. It will house 9 million people in a eco-friendly paradise. It’s part of a $500 billion Saudi building project called NEOM being plaanned in the country’s Tabuk Province. It’s become a controversial initiative from the start because around 20,000 people will be forced to relocate by its construction – along with the unknown environmental impact of such a structure.
It’s remains to be seen if it will even get off the ground or will end up like many of the other utopian-like efforts that have gone south in Dubai.
Michael Green did some experiments with Dall-E2 – and it’s pretty mind blowing what it can produce. He tests it out by asking it to reproduce various kinds of photographs in different artists styles.
These are just two of the images that are completely generated by AI:
These fascinating vessels create the most interesting animal sounds when filled with a little bit of water and tilting them.
How do they work? They use some cleverly designed chambers that create the different effects. Steve Mould does a great analysis below:
Tens of thousands of people arrive at the coastal city of Durban South Africa for the annual Durban July – Africa’s biggest horse-racing and fashion event. Much like the pomp surrounding the Kentucky Derby, Durban also turns into an impromptu fashion show.
In 2020, Oregon voters passed the Drug Addiction Treatment and Recovery Act in 2020 which decriminalized possession of heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and other drugs.
So how is it going?
Oregon still has among the highest addiction rates in the country. Fatal overdoses have increased almost 20% over the previous year, with over a thousand dead. Of 16,000 people who were picked up in the first year of decriminalization, only 0.85% entered treatment. But around 60% of them accepted free needles.
Steve Allen, behavioral health director, said that they needed millions more and more time for the “bold and transformative approach.” Unfortunately, experts like addiction researcher, professor at Stanford University, and former senior adviser in the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy Keith Humphreys said, “If there is no formal or informal pressure on addicted people to seek treatment and recovery and thereby stop using drugs, we should expect continuing high rates of drug use, addiction and attendant harm,”
The key piece that seems to be missing is enforcement. Places like Europe that decriminalized drugs also heavily enforce requiring addicts get into treatment programs, shut down drug dens, and still put people in jail if they don’t seek help. Even with all of that, the approach also still has some conflicting results.
It seems like Oregon’s picked the worst of the policies – legalization with no enforcement and no consequences. Unfortunately, the real losers are the thousands of addicts that are now dead. Sadly, it seems that our politicians are more interested in making shows of public policy instead of actually saving lives.
I thought this a really interesting term and article: the End of the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy. Many young people have grown up in a world in which they have never had to pay the real costs of things. How? Venture capital has been helping Silicon Valley companies run with big losses for over a decade now. The goal was growth at any cost – and cost overruns were not a problem with basically 0% interest rates and venture capital and stock market investors pouring money into tech and growth stocks. With rising interest rates however, the last 20 years of free money seem to be slamming shut. The real cost of the Uber trips, complementary next day shipping, cloud storage, free apps, and cheap eats are starting to come out.
Venture capital companies are warning startups that the money is drying up and they need to act fast. Across the entire startup landscape, VC money is dropping by double-digit percentages and costs must be cut. Even Facebook and Google are issuing dire earnings reports that show that the party is likely over. You can read lots of articles on Inc about this rapid change and it’s causing scores of startups to rescind offers and even lay off substantial amounts of their staffs – often 20% or more at a time.
Time will tell if we ever return to the heady days of 2% interest rates. Until then, I think a lot of young people might start experiencing things that many lived through in the late 70’s and 80’s – high inflation with just as high interest rates. Much like the Ghostbusters did:
I grew up in a family that owned a few houses. Besides the house we lived in my dad saw owning a few rental properties as good investments. The reality turned out to be a lot more work than I ever expected. I remember spending whole summers and free weekends painting or fixing various issues on the houses.
Fast forward to the 2000’s and I saw others try the same thing. Then many of them moved to simply buying and flipping. Why? Because actually owning homes is expensive and not ‘passive’ at all. It can, as I learned as a kid, become a major investment of your time and energy.
I found this article to be pretty much spot-on to what I saw us go through.
I think we forget the amazing collections of historical artifacts we have on the internet. The limitations of Covid has left me doing a lot of traveling and bucket list visits to famous places via Youtube and online streamers.
I started looking up filming locations for a favorite movie of mine – The Grand Budapest Hotel. Pre-soviet eastern block countries had amazing architecture. In my searching, it turns out Wes Anderson tried to capture the feel for the movie The Grand Budapest Hotel from old Photochrom prints.
The Photochrom Print Collection is available for free from the Library of Congress and has thousands of early prints of European and North American images from the 1890’s to 1910’s.
It makes me wonder what amazing artistic creations people can make using just the free resources we have at our fingertips today – plus some imagination.