Linkage

The nagging problem is this: Space sucks.

Most of the solar system will never be settled, and the least-bad places still have high radiation, dangerous soil, and low gravity with unknown medical effects. Also there’s no air, no running water, and despite cost-drops and new tech, the best options are far away, insanely expensive, or both. 

If you can do something in space, you invariably can do it more cheaply and easily on Earth. This isn’t only a financial problem or a dying-in-space problem—space proposals are environmentally dubious too. Rockets are about 80% propellant, all of which is burned on the ride to space. Advocates sometimes note that in principle, propellant can be generated using only renewable energy, but in practice, this isn’t yet happening. Adding vast numbers of megarockets to the needs of a grid already struggling to go green seems, to say the least, more likely to contribute to climate change than solve it.

Despite what many of its proponents believe, space is neither a solution to current environmental challenges, nor an escape hatch in case of environmental calamity. We’re here to cast some skepticism on the most popular ideas, not because it’s what we want to believe, but it’s where the data led us. 

Israel has destroyed and nearly emptied the Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. The Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahia is next. Israel is deploying tanks and armored personnel carriers around the hospital and has fired rounds into the building, killing twelve people.

The playbook is familiar. Flyers are dropped by Israel over a hospital telling people to leave because the hospital is a base for “Hamas terrorist activities.” Tanks and artillery shells rip away parts of the hospital walls. Ambulances are blown up by Israeli missiles. Power and water is cut. Medical supplies are blocked. There are no painkillers, antibiotics and oxygen. The most vulnerable, premature babies in incubators and the gravely ill, die. Israeli soldiers raid the hospital and force everyone out at gunpoint.

This is what happened at Al Shifa hospital. This is what happened at Al Rantisi Children’s Hospital. This is what happened at Gaza’s main psychiatric hospital. This is what happened at Nasser Hospital. This is what happened at the other hospitals that Israel has destroyed. And this is what will happen at the few hospitals that remain.

Nearly 160,000 people are living in hidden, often overcrowded and sometimes dangerous bedsit-style accommodation across England, analysis has found.

Intelligence compiled by councils suggests there are almost 32,000 unlicensed large houses in multiple occupation (HMOs). These are believed to be home to at least 159,340 tenants, who are often drawn by cheaper rents amid the cost of living crisis.

Conditions can be dire, with examples of more than 10 people sharing a single bathroom, squalid conditions and little protection in place should a fire break out.

Landlords have doubled their borrowing to invest in HMOs since 2018. A landlord renting to a single family can expect to generate 5% of the property’s value in annual rent, whereas a licensed HMO typically produces about 7.5%, and in some cases 10%. Profits in unlicensed bedsits are likely to be even higher, as landlords can cram in more tenants and do not have to comply with licensing standards.

The great irony of the platformization of the internet is that platforms are intermediaries, and the original promise of the internet that got so many of us excited about it was disintermediation – getting rid of the middlemen that act as gatekeepers between community members, creators and audiences, buyers and sellers, etc.

The platformized internet is ripe for rent seeking: where the platform captures an ever-larger share of the value generated by its users, making the service worse for both, while lock-in stops people from looking elsewhere. Every sector of the modern economy is less competitive, thanks to monopolistic tactics like mergers and acquisitions and predatory pricing. But with tech, the options for making things worse are infinitely divisible, thanks to the flexibility of digital systems, which means that product managers can keep subdividing the Jenga blocks they are pulling out of the services we rely on.

The web is the means by which the acts of revisiting and recall of our collections, our programming and our institutional histories have become technically feasible, economically viable and with a reach and on a schedule that has literally never before been possible.

We would do well to recognize that. We would do well to understand the web not just as a notch in the linear progression of technological advancement but, in historical terms, as an unexpected gift with the ability to change the order of things; a gift that merits being protected, preserved and promoted both internally and externally.

The point is not that our relationship with technology should end with the web. The point is the web allows us to reframe our relationship with technology. Importantly, it enables – it does not guarantee, but it enables – us to reframe our relationship and dependence on the providers of those technologies.

The challenge of that relationship lies in the fact that as often as not the motivations of those providers and their platforms are not our own. Yet we continue to make an increasingly Faustian bargain to engage with them because we believe that these places are where our audiences have gone. Sooner or later that debt will come due so we would do well to recognize that the alternative, and a good alternative at that, is within our grasp.

If demand for storefronts is down, why don't landlords just lower the rent and get a tenant in there? That's supposed to be the magic of capitalism — its ability to auto-adjust to anything the world throws at it. But that's not what is happening with vacant shops. Even before the pandemic, one study found, street-level retail spaces in Manhattan were remaining vacant for an average of 16 months.

So if COVID isn't to blame for all the shuttered stores, what is? Well, when a landlord doesn't lower the rent to get a new retail tenant, it's because that landlord can't. The market that sets retail rents isn't only between tenants and landlords. It's also between landlords and the banks that finance the buildings. And the banks, in many cases, won't let property owners lower their rents enough to fill their properties. The pandemic may have emptied out America's storefronts, but it's banks that are keeping them that way.

An address from the should-be-prime-minister:

I deplore the targeting of all civilians. That includes Hamas’ attack on 7 October, which I have repeatedly condemned in in Parliament, in print and and at every demonstration that I have attended. And that includes that Israeli response; there is no meaningful sense that the Israeli army is avoiding civilian casualties when it drops 25,000 tonnes of bombs onto a tiny strip of land populated by 2.2 million people. If we understand terrorism to describe the indiscriminate killing of civilians, in breach of international law, then of course Hamas is a terrorist group. The targeting of hospitals, refugee camps and so-called safe zones by the Israeli army are acts of terror too; and the killing of more than 11,000 people, half of whom are children, cannot possibly be understood as acts of self-defence.

We should not entertain questions from those who have no interest in applying this basic consistency. We should stand up to those who insist on seeing some people as innocent civilians and others as collateral damage. And we should reject hectoring from those whose questions serve to justify the horror unfolding before our very eyes. Ultimately, we do not just have a responsibility to end the bloodshed. We have a responsibility to stop bloodthirsty voices from dictating the terms of debate, and to push back against cynical attempts to distract us from our urgent goal: bringing about an immediate ceasefire. 

More than a fifth of "brand safe" ad placements end up on "made for advertising" sites, which 404 Media describe as "trash websites that plagiarize content, are literally spam, pay for fake traffic, or are autogenerated websites that serve no other purpose than capturing ad dollars" […]

Despite all this, many progressives have become cheerleaders for "brand safety," as a countervailing force to the drawdown of trust and safety at online platforms, which led to the re-platforming of Nazis, QAnon conspiratorialists, TERFs, and other overt elements of the reactionary movement's vanguard on Twitter and Facebook. Articles about ads for major brands showing up alongside Nazi content on Twitter are now a staple of progressive reporting, presented as evidence of Elon Musk's lack of business acumen. The message of these stories is "Musk is bad at business because he's allowing Nazis on his platform, which will send advertisers bolting for the exits to avoid brand-safety crises."

[…]

But progressives are out of their minds if they think the primary effect of the brand safety industry is punishing Elon Musk for secretly loving Nazis. The primary effect of brand safety is killing reality-based coverage of the news of the day, and since reality has a well-known anti-conservative bias, anything that works against the reality-based community is ultimately good for oligarchy.

Some of the first protests against lockdowns were outside of gyms. And I was trying to understand what was going on with that. Why were these super buff folks having these protests, doing push-ups outside of their gyms?

And I came to the conclusion that there was something similar to the way in which some ultra-religious people were reacting, where they were insisting no matter what this was, they had to go pray. They had to be in these collective spaces, because that was their force field. Prayer was their protection against death or what happens after death.

I vividly remember watching the news one night, and there was a story about a megachurch that had broken lockdown. Journalists were interviewing people as they were streaming out of the megachurch. And they said: “Aren’t you afraid of Covid? You’ve just been in a room with thousands of unmasked people singing.” And the answer from one worshipper was: “No way! I’m bathed in the blood of the Lord.”

I saw these gym protests as a similar idea: my body is my temple. What I’m doing here is my protection; I’m keeping myself strong. I’m building up my immune system, my body is my force field against whatever is coming.

The proposed development will include 129 studio apartments for low-income people and those experiencing homelessness. A minimum of 50 per cent of units will be held for people who are currently homeless and on income assistance, with the other half for people earning earning between $15,000 and $30,000 per year.

More than 200 people signed up to speak to the city’s public hearing, with emotions high on both sides. Opponents argued the project was a “failed model of housing,” that would “warehouse” a high-proportion of proposed residents with complex issues. Opponents also raised concern about nearby schools.

Thursday’s ruling un-pauses the original judicial review application against the city, which was suspended in September pending the outcome of the MEVA 5 challenge.