To find order amid the chaotic landscape, the researchers zeroed in on the water table, which is the elevation at which the ground becomes saturated with water. They noticed that no matter what plants were growing or how much debris had piled up on the peat, the water table was almost always near the bog’s surface. If the water table fell, perhaps due to water flowing out faster than rain could replenish it, some peat became exposed to air and decomposed until the bog’s surface sank to the new level. If the water table rose, as during a period of heavy rainfall, peat accumulated until it caught up.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/simple-equation-predicts-the-shapes-of-carbon-capturing-wetlands-20240528/?mc_cid=d4d66c8bee&mc_eid=f83944a043
The bog’s shape seemed to be essentially governed by the physics of the water table. The researchers found that they could mathematically model the shape of the bog by solving a widely used equation named for the 19th-century mathematician Siméon-Denis Poisson that allowed them to approximate a bog’s depth given only the shape of its boundary.
Increasingly convinced mathematics is the symbologic/semiotic equivalent of music, yet music the animating physical force that permeates every plane of existence, beyond the 4-D world that mostly constraints humans.
Does this mean that the kind of politics rooted in a shared home is impossible in America? Not necessarily. But it would require a very different style of politics than the varieties of nationalism that are currently on offer. It would require attempts to revive the actual authority of local life—both state and local governments as well as civil society. That would mean a radical recommitment to federalism and limits on the regulatory power of the national government, such that people who actually do share a home can make real decisions together about how to live in it—from their schools and universities to public decency laws to economic development. When battling against rule by elites, a politics of home would not seek to raise up new national elites who stand for this or that iteration of the “national idea,” but would seek to disempower them with a revival of American local self-government.
https://www.fusionaier.org/post/our-home-sweet-home
When conversations turn a certain way, and sometimes, people do end up asking a gentle or direct question trying to figure out where I stand politically, it’s hard to capture the above, which is probably closest to my actual position. The real war is always a class war; both major political parties in the US are much more similar than they are different; weakening norms over the past few decades because all politicians slowly kept trying to outdo each other in a race to the bottom (arguably starting with JFK in his personal life, culminating in the latest iteration in Trump); our problems are closer to systemic and cultural consequences of decades of mostly good intentions… etc.
Robert Edwards, Rise’s manager, said over the last year he’s done his best to keep prices competitive. He even goes into Dollar General and the out-of-state Walmart people most frequent to check what competitors are offering. He works with a wholesaler out of Indiana that purchases in bulk for multiple independent stores, an attempt to leverage the lowest prices they can.
https://dailyyonder.com/the-government-spends-millions-to-open-grocery-stores-in-food-deserts-the-real-test-is-their–survival/2024/08/15/
But there are some deals that the store just can’t afford to match. “There are things I can go to Walmart and buy cheaper than I can get from my wholesaler,” Edwards said, though supplier contracts don’t allow him to do that.
He also said some suppliers simply won’t mess with a small store. For months, Edwards watched in frustration from the parking lot as a Frito-Lay truck made deliveries at the Dollar Generals just to the north and south of Rise while it refused to stop at the co-op.
This is the type of piece that makes one wonder why Dollar General, Walmart, etc. simply won’t add produce sections or other such investments at the bare minimum to outcompete whatever communities throw at them. It’s either that or antitrust needs to become much more powerful, which will take a reversal of roughly 40-50 years trending toward that. However, given populist anger that’s gotten us Donald freakin’ Trump, perhaps the time is ripe.
I certainly don’t know—but I imagine that our sense of what computers are for, and what their capacities are, might change and evolve. An ant colony, or a model of one, could be a computer. A tree could be a computer, its roots functionalized to measure changes in the soil and report back to us. A cluster of brain cells hooked up to sensors could be a computer. A computer could be liquid, or bacterial. If we could throw out our existing paradigms and look farther afield, we might really be surprised. Intelligence is everywhere, in different degrees and combinations. The question is finding applications that are suitable and mutually-beneficial.
https://dark.properties/from-silicon-to-slime/?src=longreads&utm_medium=email
Increasingly, as our knowledge of the world grows, we will be forced to acknowledge that nothing makes sense all together without an intertwining force holding all of the cosmos together. Physicists already have to grapple with this the most, perhaps, which is why some of them go quietly crazy, or concoct the wildest scenarios to escape the concept of a God.
This is what I’d wanted: to feel safe. To erect sturdier walls between me and animals that might kill me. To have a partner I could trust. I no longer wanted to find myself looking over my shoulder as I skied across the tundra or walked down the street, wondering who might be following me. And I no longer wanted to carry a gun when I ventured out, always ready to turn beings I met into meat. When I walk through the woods now, I no longer stalk or worry about being stalked—instead, I often clog my ears with headphones, pausing every once in a while to refresh email. The other day, when talking to a friend on the phone while wandering nearby trails, I almost stumbled on a cow moose munching on willows. The sight of her blond fur literally brought me back to my senses. Most of the time, I’m not as awake as I once was; danger, and hunger, no longer demand it. I’m grateful to feel safe, to have secure access to good food, and yet I also occasionally wonder: where has the hunter gone?
https://longreads.com/2024/07/25/predator-or-prey-diana-saverin/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=t5-2024-07-26&utm_medium=email
Can we really live without something, or someone else, bearing a cost? I am not sure – there’s something slippery yet profound I am still thinking through with pieces like this.
There is a growing movement to do just that. Central States is one of 6,533 companies that have formed an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (or ESOP) in the United States, and that number is growing by about 250 companies annually. That’s 14.7 million employees who have ownership in companies worth, collectively, $2.1 trillion.
https://www.elysian.press/p/employee-ownership?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=working
Every year, those employees get a percentage of their salaries in company stock. During Central States’ worst year, employees earned the equivalent of 6 percent of their pay in stock, during their best they earned 26 percent. Last year, an employee earning $100,000 a year received $26,000 worth of stock in their account. As the company has grown the value of that stock has averaged 20 percent returns annually, outperforming the stock market.
These stock accounts are in addition to traditional retirement accounts, not instead of them. Noelle Montaño, executive director for ESCA, tells me 90 percent of employees with an ESOP account also have a 401k or other retirement account, which means employees earn upside without any downside. Employees without an ESOP don’t have that kind of advantage—50 percent don’t have a retirement account at all.
“Real capitalism has never been tried.” – to misquote somebody I’m too lazy to look up. However, the reality is that more tinkering like ESOPS should be occurring. Are they a panacea? Probably not, but are they better than RSUs functioning like a market-based type of bonus, or a way to dangle additional comp without shelling out more in base pay, or the endless gambling many take on early-stage stock options? Yeah, probably.
In the case that generative AI goes on some rocketship trajectory, building random chatbots will not prepare you for the future. Is that clear now? Having your team type in
https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/import openaidoes not mean that you are at the cutting-edge of artificial intelligence no matter how desperately you embarrass yourself on LinkedIn and at pathetic borderline-bribe award ceremonies from the malign Warp entities that sell you enterprise software5. Your business will be disrupted exactly as hard as it would have been if you had done nothing, and much worse than it would have been if you just got your fundamentals right. Teaching your staff that they can get ChatGPT to write emails to stakeholders is not going to allow the business to survive this. If we thread the needle between moderate impact and asteroid-wiping-out-the-dinosaurs impact, everything will be changed forever and your tepid preparations will have all the impact of an ant bracing itself very hard in the shadow of a towering tsunami.
An amusing piece especially in the context of billions in market cap seemingly at the whim of whether there are cheaper ways to run AI queries.
(Forgot to select a quote before my paywall ran out/my Chrome extension I fiddled with finally broke, but it’s a good piece, go and read it if you got access.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/24/magazine/earth-geomicrobiology-microbes.html?src=longreads&utm_medium=email
This same process of learning and remembering lines by deep understanding enabled a septuagenarian actor to recite all 10,565 lines of Milton’s epic poem, “Paradise Lost.” At the age of 58, John Basinger began studying this poem as a form of mental activity to accompany his physical activity at the gym, each time adding more lines to what he had already learned. Eight years later, he had committed the entire poem to memory, reciting it over three days. When I tested him at age 74, giving him randomly drawn couplets from the poem and asking him to recite the next ten lines, his recall was nearly flawless. Yet, he did not accomplish this feat through mindless repetition. In the course of studying the poem, he came to a deep understanding of Milton.
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-actors-remember-their-lines/?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=learn
We transform our living neurons/brains by just ascribing greater meaning, in the meantime memorizing. Simply amazing.
And so, tentatively, in 2017, “without having any real plan” — although briefly having considered and discarded the more traditional option of intergenerational living with one or other set of parents — Oldfield and her husband, Chris, began to look for people who might want to join them. “We asked some people out, basically,” she laughs. “It was very much like dating.”
https://www.thetimes.com/life-style/parenting/article/middle-class-commune-joint-accounts-noisy-sex-peckham-0jnhvhgmh
Just like dating, there were some false starts — a couple of lunches that didn’t go anywhere, and then some extended dating with another family who seemed perfect on paper: similar values and vision, children the same age. “And then we decided to go away together for the weekend to see how that went, and the kids squabbled solidly for 48 hours. And it was just really clear how having children exactly the same age showed up all the very small differences in our parenting approaches far too starkly.”
Life is pretty wild. Not that I’m against the above arrangement, but sometimes I do ponder how hard people seem to try to avoid multigenerational households. The nuclear family isn’t a horrible construct, but has its cons – surely there is some middle ground… maybe the above is it?
Now, researchers at the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences have invented a new material made from modified starch that can completely decompose in nature—and do so within only two months. The material is made using natural plant material from crops and could be used for food packaging, among many other things.
https://phys.org/news/2024-06-biodegradable-barley-plastic.html?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=learn
Hopefully this is more scalable, though the article doesn’t quite seem to spell it out in detail if it is beyond notes around the raw materials being available. Could be significant, though, over the current darkly hilarious performance theater of “recycling”.
