The coalition released its first report earlier this month, which traces how the government spent nearly $17 billion on food in two separate years, 2019 and 2022. And it found that despite an executive order directing agencies to consider greenhouse gas emissions in procurement, another addressing consolidation, and hundreds of millions of dollars granted to small and mid-size farms and processors over the past few years, the government isn’t exactly putting its money where its mouth is.
According to the analysis, the USDA is by far the largest purchaser within the federal government, with programs for school meals, domestic hunger, and foreign aid accounting for more than half of total government food spending. In 2022, USDA spent nearly half of its food dollars with just 25 vendors, several of which represent the same multinational food companies the Biden administration has called out for exploiting American farmers.
https://civileats.com/2023/11/29/the-government-spends-billions-on-food-who-is-it-buying-it-from/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=The%20Government%20Spends%20Billions%20on%20Food%20%20Who%20Benefits%3F&utm_campaign=CE%20Weekly%2020231129
It’s simple to see how this state of affairs comes about – agencies try to spend less and simplify things by buying from the largest, most cost-effective producers. This is not due to some “bad people” doing things – it’s just what happens when you are under pressure and have to deliver. Striking the right balance between reform, diversification and resiliency will be tough, but has to be done.
For nearly all of US history, American property taxes have taken a pretty standard form. Individuals pay a tax based on the assessed value of their land, buildings, and any other improvements to their property combined. If you renovate your house and make it nicer, for example, your overall property tax could go up. The proposed land-value tax in Detroit, by contrast, would effectively tax land at a higher rate than any buildings or amenities on the property.
https://www.vox.com/24025379/detroit-land-value-tax-lvt-property-tax-housing-vacant-blight
In general, although perhaps I’m ignorant, it feels like we need to tinker more at the city and state level with different regulations and taxes like this, just to overall foment the rate of changes and innovations in policies. That way we could learn at an accelerated rate.
For example, models with relatively few parameters — only a few million — could not successfully complete three-digit addition or two-digit multiplication problems, but for tens of billions of parameters, accuracy spiked in some models. Similar jumps occurred for other tasks including decoding the International Phonetic Alphabet, unscrambling a word’s letters, identifying offensive content in paragraphs of Hinglish (a combination of Hindi and English), and generating a similar English equivalent of Kiswahili proverbs.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-unpredictable-abilities-emerging-from-large-ai-models-20230316/?mc_cid=864527ac9f&mc_eid=f83944a043
Emergent properties are fascinating, yet, oddly enough, in my rudimentary knowledge of philosophy I think this is why I’m still so skeptical of AGI. To some degree human intelligence is derived from a staggeringly complex set of inputs and data that is embodied and then imitated as, say, infants develop. But we have not yet been able to program common sense at scale, which is literally child’s play. Emergence is typical for adults, in many ways. It’s also telling the most sophisticated and powerful programs tend to be recursive and/or reinforced learning, which again, is what human intelligence tends to be. But where AI will struggle and humans don’t is that AI relies on even better learning and inputs from humans – and we don’t even understand our own cognitive processes enough to codify them reliably. Emergence is likely self-knowledge or the ability to self-examine, and otherwise pure chance arising from what one would expect when billions of occurrences/data points are inputs. But how could we possibly arrive at passing on self-knowledge when we don’t truly know ourselves, being incapable of full self-knowledge?
Each year, Criterion selects 50 or 60 new entrants to add to its catalog, which now includes 1,650 films. Some Hollywood directors campaign relentlessly for their films — or their favorite films from the past — to make the list. For legions of film fans, Criterion is akin to the Louvre, but with “an aura of hip,” the writer and director Josh Safdie told me in an email. When Safdie’s film “Uncut Gems,” which he directed with his brother, Benny, entered the Criterion Collection with the spine No. 1101, he said they couldn’t help feeling as if they had “snuck in” to the museum that they had admired for so long. “Being a part of the collection is something that we’re both incredibly proud of,” Safdie told me. “It may sound corny but it was more meaningful than awards.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/29/magazine/criterion-collection.html?src=longreads&utm_medium=email
It’s a bit of an indulgence but have to admit and recommend the Criterion Collection streaming channel for any budding cinephile, because they truly do have the randomest and best catalog. Finally saw Blood Simple there and was amazed at how good the Coen Brothers were from the jump.
When the two black hunks of metal had cooled to a few hundred degrees, they took on an almost melancholy gloom of blue-gray, dashed with a distemper of rust, and their random-seeming warts and scars gave them the aspect of objects that had made a long and lonely journey through space, ending with a fiery entry into our world. Only the squared-off shape of these meteorites betrayed the hand of man.
Sam picked up one of the chunks with his tongs, saying, as unlikely as it seemed at that moment, “There’s a knife in there. That’s all that matters.” He also mentioned that the worst accidental burns in a forging shop occur when the metal has cooled off to black and is still at several hundred degrees. The visitor learns to touch nothing.
https://www.chicagomag.com/chicago-magazine/january-2024/a-knife-forged-in-fire/?utm_medium=email
Some solid prose, and also, a great inspiration to engage with the material world with your own hands, in crafting something, anything, whether it be gardening, forging, baking, carpentry, anything. I think two great tensions that will emerge in the growth of increasingly capable VR and AR will be between those seeking to avoid screens or mediated reality and those looking to engage even more deeply.
ayard was sceptical about Hunziker’s theory, but he wanted to know what worked, and knew that, for all the talk, tiny daily doses of iodine had never been put to the test. So he began to devise a new kind of experiment: in an early version of a dose-response trial, he prepared table salt iodised at five different concentrations to give to five families in a goitre area for five months. He worked alone, mixing close to 100 kg of salt with his snow shovel, turning it over until he was sure the potassium iodide was evenly spread. Then, loading up his mule, he set out for Grächen, a remote village even by the standards of upper Valais. It had no train station and no road, and sat on a thin shelf of land, one and half hours by mule from the bottom of the valley. It was badly affected by goitre; 75 per cent of the village schoolchildren had enlarged thyroid glands. Bayard took measurements and photographs, and gave the families iodised salt. He left salt for the cows, to iodise their milk, and for the bakery, so that it would be in the bread. The experiment ran through the winter, the half of the year when children went to school. When Bayard returned in spring, not only had the five families not been poisoned, they all had slimmer necks. He had given the lowest dose – just 4 milligrams of potassium iodide per kilogram of salt – to the family of Theophil Brigger, a farmer who was raising seven children, aged six to fifteen, alone. His children were transformed.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n23/jonah-goodman/a-national-evil?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=learn
In the wake of the COVID public health response and policy disaster (there really is no other word for it), it’s important to study when public-health interventions worked splendidly and why. Regardless of which side you were on during COVID with regard to ever-shifting CDC recommendations or the like, you’ll also find something infuriating in this piece, namely the delay in implementation and also the stubborn resistance of bureaucrats and grifters.
My family all agreed we were going to need a replacement, and while my first instinct was to set up a group on Instagram or WhatsApp, the prospect of having our warm channel surrounded — encroached upon — by all that other garbage made me feel even sadder than the prospect of losing Tapstack.
So, instead of settling for a corporate messaging app …
I built one just for us.
I’ll show you the screen capture again, but the point is that there’s not much to show. The app is a “magic window” that captures photos and videos and shuttles them around. Messages wait in a queue and, once viewed — always full-screen, with no distractions, no prods to comment or share — they disappear. That is literally it. The app has basically no interface. There’s a camera button and a badge in the corner, calm green, that indicates how many messages are waiting.
https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=fav
Would that we all had such skills. The tradeoff, of course, is between ease, convenience, skill, and the killer trait of network effects, wherein it’s so much harder to opt out of something when all your friends and family are using it.
Gaurab and Sean started to connect threads between their projects. Cells had evolved highly efficient molecular machines (enzymes) capable of producing massive amounts of commercially valuable chemicals. Cancer cells even produced too much of it! What if these enzymes could be combined with the metal catalysts Sean had spent years learning to control? Could this transform the process of chemical production as we know it?
https://centuryofbio.com/p/solugen
As part of my gig, seen enough innovations in bio come and go that I veer toward the skeptical, but this is truly intriguing. The basic idea is simple and mimics nature, which is often the key in successful biological applications at scale. I think I’m only a bit skeptical of the speed and true low-energy nature of the process, but they seem to counter that on their How It Works page. Worth reading (if the piece gets a little overly complimentary of the founders).
The beans inside the locust pods can be dried and roasted to make carob, a caffeine-free chocolate substitute. The next time you eat yogurt, read the label. There’s a good chance it includes locust bean gum, a thickener derived from the crushed beans. In arid lands with scant pasture, the high-protein beans have long been an important fodder for livestock.
https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2019/12/a-christmas-tree-you-dont-know-beans-about/
God has indeed gifted us a remarkable world.
There are untold varieties of miso. Some dark as resin and smoky. Others sunshine-yellow, smooth, and sour. Among the most common types is mellow shiro, or white miso, made from rice, barley, and soybeans and aged for just a few weeks. Aka, or red miso, has a similar makeup, but is aged for several years, the long fermentation resulting in a Maillard reaction that turns it brown. The legendary shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu had hatcho miso—made with only soybeans and fermented for almost three years until it was quite pungent. It was brought by boat to Tokyo from his hometown of Okazaki.
https://www.seriouseats.com/miso-soup-history-how-to
I don’t know if I’d go as far as “food is sacred” (a line in the piece) but I do believe there is something sacramental about preparing and communing over food with others, which is the magic Bourdain captured so well and hammered home relentlessly to show it in its manifold forms. That is perhaps one of the more insidious aspects of American culture, namely, the commodification and de-communizing of much of food, though, of course, it is possible to still commune over even the greasiest fast food. I recall late nights in high school after watching a movie with some pals and convening at a local Jack in the Box to eat its curly fries – treasured times with some good pals that I haven’t seen in years since.
Sure, I think America has had enough of the Kennedys. Armed with knowledge of that family’s many pathologies, I would hesitate to give any more power to a representative of that clan. Many of the experiences that Mr. Macker points to as giving Robert Kennedy a unique perspective are experiences he had only because he was a rich American aristocrat. Furthermore, I think the United States suffers from a pathological mixing of celebrity and politics. Let’s be honest. If his name was Robert F. Pelowski, no one would think of Mr. Kennedy as presidential material. Add to that the celebrity wife, and I think we have more a celebrity boomlet than a serious presidential candidate. And, sure, I have my policy differences with him. So, on the whole, I am not convinced.
I must say, however, flaws and all, I think I’d take Mr. Kennedy over the two likely major party candidates. But it must also be said that this is an extraordinarily low bar. Being a better candidate than Donald Trump or Joe Biden is a little like being the fastest three-toed sloth.
https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2023/12/fools-drunks-and-robert-f-kennedy-jr/
With luck, 2024 marks the final gasp of the boomer-dominated political establishment of the US as it inflicts trillions of dollars of debt and misery on the rest of the nation, even if under the guise of being “MAGA” or the like. Make no mistake – Biden and Trump and their respective administrations are but two sides of the same giant, overreaching governmental ooze that ignores fiscal responsibility, states’ rights, realistic foreign policy, and pretty much everything else.
At the same time, though, Kissinger’s narrow commitment to pursuing security interests was insufficiently idealistic and unnecessarily sordid. In a bid to defuse the superpower conflict, Kissinger devised an accommodationist strategy to reconcile the Soviets to a global status quo that was favorable to Washington. Although the architect of détente had no illusions about the nature of Soviet communism or the dangers of Soviet expansionism, Kissinger judged that America was a wounded and weary titan, and so he sought to decrease the tempo of the Cold War. This worked for a time, in the form of arms control agreements and expanded East-West commerce. But it was doomed to fail because it sought to separate ideology from geopolitics in a rivalry where the antagonists had fundamentally divergent views of the world’s future.
https://quillette.com/2023/12/13/kissingers-folly/?ref=quillette-weekly-newsletter
Kissinger was taught in my International Baccalaureate curriculum as a good example of how much of government policy is developed and thought of currently, and have to say, this critique is spot on. Kissinger types commit the fatal mistake of presuming everyone else is atheist/agnostic, realistic, non-ideological and almost Bismarckian in terms of just pursuing self-interest – these types founder and die on the realities of, say, facing Islamic fundamentalism. Geopolitics is a blend of both, as the US has learned at staggering cost in the past couple decades.
Marcelino did what he could to stay alive during his two-week stints on the 40-foot fishing boat. Like other Miskito divers, he was mostly illiterate and had no dive training, but he knew that when he was anxious or scared underwater, he used his air tank faster. So, he tried to remain calm while doing strenuous physical work and fending off sea creatures like sharks. Each tank lasted roughly a half hour, but he never knew when it would run out, endangering his life. And if he didn’t return to the fishing boat with enough lobster, the captain would berate him, or, worse, abandon divers in the water as punishment.
https://civileats.com/2023/12/06/diving-and-dying-for-red-gold-the-human-cost-of-honduran-lobster/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Diving-and%20Dying-for%20Red%20Gold%3A%20The%20Human%20Cost%20of%20Honduran%20Lobster&utm_campaign=CE%20Weekly%2020231206
Capitalist-leaning segments of American Christianity often gloss over the more radical passages of the Bible that, way more frequently than some may suppose, explicitly call out the wealthy and the employers. Of course, socialist enterprises usually tend to produce even worse results in the guise of equality. Both sides are at fault in this globalized economy of ours that is too big to be held to account, and too hard to grasp in its enormity, without consequences for even something like your gourmet lobster ending up producing misery at the far end.
Certainly, it had the authority to substitute and define the obligations of abstinence. But the issue is that the 1966 pastoral statement, as noted, likely terminated the Friday abstinence obligation entirely. One would be hard-pressed to find a canonist (or bishop) who argues that American Catholics violate canon law by not practicing Friday abstinence outside of Lent (whether by abstaining from meat or by doing or not doing something else). Most would simply say that they are free to do a penance or not do a penance, but that they should do a penance (because of the spiritual benefit, etc.). Few, if any, would say they are obligated to do a penance.
But reading the canon (and Paenitemini), it is clear that the substitution is never about substituting an obligation for no obligation, but instead substitution of one type of obligation (abstinence from meat) for some other obligation (another penance). This of course follows the logic that the obligation for penance is a matter of divine law and the notion that all Fridays maintain their special character.
https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/reopening-the-question-of-abstinence-from-meat-on-fridays/?utm_campaign=CLJ_Weekly%20Subscriber%20Email_19-0507&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=286162188&_hsenc=p2ANqtz–CKsqG1PrtbtUl0Gv6re2ZyKp0H_LrVMSrazuA2cAuhcvAlrYd3c0VZL1XnX_b5ZgZFFU96wTgZ8uC1jiI_97XeElmaTU-CqENsSqfYnrwM-dCwY4&utm_content=286162188&utm_source=hs_email
Obligations matter. Rules matter. Discipline is freedom. Given human nature, we simply need rhythmic practices of self-denial to strengthen, remind, cajole and nurture us.
