Sunday, January 15, 2023

15: Harry

Why Republican Politicians Still Hate Medicare The Republicans who now control the House will soon try to slash Social Security and Medicare. ............ George W. Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security in 2005 surely played a role in the Democratic takeover of Congress in 2006; Donald Trump’s attempt to kill Obamacare helped Nancy Pelosi regain the speakership in 2018. ......... Even now many, perhaps most Republicans in Congress aren’t culture-war zealots. Instead, they’re careerists who depend, both for campaign contributions and for post-Congress career prospects, on the same billionaires who have supported right-wing economic ideology for decades. They won’t stand up to the crazies and conspiracy theorists, but their own agenda is still tax cuts for the rich and benefit cuts for the poor and middle class. ......... .

Big Banks Set Aside Billions as They Brace for a Downturn The country’s largest lenders increased their reserves to protect against deteriorating economic conditions this year, after reporting resilient profits for the end of last year. ......... The bank anticipates a drop in demand for auto loans, home equity lines and other consumer credit because “people are reading the same headlines we’re all reading, about a recession is coming and they should be careful” .

The Trouble With Paradise Within hours, midwinter gloom had been transformed, as if by magic, into tropical sunshine. I was paying two dollars a night for a cottage of my own with a golden beach 45 seconds away, down a fragrant, palm-shaded lane. ........ In Sri Lanka I’d realized that the island has so often been taken to be Arcadia — Arabs saw it as “contiguous with the Garden of Eden,” and an Italian papal legate announced that the waters of paradise could be there — that the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British and millions of us tourists have all scrambled to grab a piece of it. ......... In Jerusalem, like every other visitor, I’d been vividly reminded that the city of faith has always been a city of conflict. .......... In Kashmir, I’d sat on a houseboat in the sun — nothing to be heard but the sound of kingfishers’ wings above a lotus pond — as locals in little boats paddled past, offering aromatic spices and exquisitely carved small boxes. I was truly in Heaven — so long as I forgot that, minutes across the water, army roadblocks and encampments spoke for the more than half a million soldiers trying to maintain peace in a bitterly contested territory claimed for more than 70 years now by both India and Pakistan. ........... In Ladakh, the kind of pristine Himalayan region that might have inspired the notion of Shangri-La, I discovered more peace and beauty than I dared to dream of — along with local kids who reminded me that the real paradise was that place called California. ........... Besides, if I really did come upon a calm and self-contained Eden, what would it have to gain from me? I, like any visitor, could only be the serpent in the garden. .......... Naked ascetics, smeared in ash, were expressing their contempt for simple notions of right and wrong by living in graveyards and drinking from skulls. The holy waters the faithful were gratefully imbibing contained hundreds of times the maximum level of coliform bacteria the World Health Organization has deemed safe for drinking. .



Don’t Ban ChatGPT in Schools. Teach With It. OpenAI’s new chatbot is raising fears of cheating on homework, but its potential as an educational tool outweighs its risks....... ChatGPT, the buzzy chatbot developed by OpenAI that is capable of writing cogent essays, solving science and math problems and producing working computer code. ........ Students are using it to write their assignments, passing off A.I.-generated essays and problem sets as their own. .......... One high school teacher told me that he used ChatGPT to evaluate a few of his students’ papers, and that the app had provided more detailed and useful feedback on them than he would have, in a tiny fraction of the time. ......... “Am I even necessary now?” he asked me, only half joking. .......... (Tim Robinson, a spokesman for Seattle Public Schools, told me that ChatGPT was blocked on school devices in December, “along with five other cheating tools.”) .......... ChatGPT is a freakishly capable tool that landed in their midst with no warning, and it performs reasonably well across a wide variety of tasks and academic subjects. ........

banning ChatGPT from the classroom is the wrong move.

......... schools should thoughtfully embrace ChatGPT as a teaching aid — one that could unlock student creativity, offer personalized tutoring, and better prepare students to work alongside A.I. systems as adults. ........ Right now, ChatGPT is the only free, easy-to-use chatbot of its caliber. ........... while they found the idea of ChatGPT-assisted cheating annoying, policing it sounded even worse. ......... schools should treat ChatGPT the way they treat calculators — allowing it for some assignments, but not others, and assuming that unless students are being supervised in person with their devices stashed away, they’re probably using one. ........ with the right approach, it can be an effective teaching tool. ......... It could serve as an after-hours tutor (“explain the Doppler effect, using language an eighth grader could understand”) or a debate sparring partner (“convince me that animal testing should be banned”). ......... ChatGPT wasn’t a threat to student learning as long as teachers paired it with substantive, in-class discussions. .......... today’s students will graduate into a world full of generative A.I. programs.
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How Western Goods Reach Russia: A Long Line of Trucks Through Georgia With Western sanctions barring many imports, a lot of what Russia needs now travels a slow, crowded truck route through the Caucasus Mountains from Georgia. ........ The trucks wait for days with their cargo — car parts, industrial materials, chemicals, even the paper for tea bags — to cross the frontier on a journey that usually starts in Turkey and ends in Russian towns and cities where Western goods are in high demand. ........ While growth prospects remain dim, the outright collapse that some economists had predicted in the face of Western sanctions did not come about. ......... The lines sometimes stretch all the way to Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, about 100 miles from the border, with special parking lots along its bypass road where truckers can rest, and sleep, while they wait. ........ “Georgia is performing a balancing act between its official pro-Western orientation and its economic dependence on Russia” .......... Since May, Russia has received more than $20 billion worth of goods, through the so-called parallel imports process — when something is brought to a country without the consent of the company that owns the trademark ........ Overall, by the end of 2022, Russia had almost restored its prewar level of imports, according to the country’s Central Bank — while also adding to a major source of income: the customs duties it collects on goods entering the country. ........... the boost to Georgia’s economy could just be too much for businesses and the government to resist. .

She Witnessed Mao’s Worst Excesses. Now She Has a Warning for the World. At 93, the memoirist Yuan-tsung Chen hopes that her recollections of China’s tumultuous past will help the country confront its historical wrongs — and avoid repeating them. .......... the story of the man so hungry that he ate himself. ......... “When you do things in the spirit of Mao, that scares me,” she says, referring to China’s top leader, Xi Jinping. ...... Under Mr. Xi, China enforced a sweeping crackdown on Hong Kong that included an all-encompassing national security law put in place in 2020. Since then, the city has fallen under a cloak of silence that Ms. Chen says she recognizes. “My current situation looks uncannily like the one I found myself in more than 60 years ago.” .

African and Invisible: The Other New York Migrant Crisis Like many who have crossed the border from Latin America, they arrived in New York after a desperate journey. But these men have few options in the city, often relying on one man in the Bronx. ......... there is a Little Senegal in Harlem, and more recent immigrants from Gambia have established themselves in the Bronx. ........ About two million African immigrants arrived in the United States in 2019, up from 600,000 in 2000....... Imam Omar comes from a long line of imams in Senegal — his father, grandfather, uncles and now his 21-year-old son are imams — and manages the migrants like one gigantic congregation. .

Microsoft Bets Big on the Creator of ChatGPT in Race to Dominate A.I. As a new chatbot wows the world with its conversational talents, a resurgent tech giant is poised to reap the benefits while doubling down on a relationship with the start-up OpenAI. ........ But at Microsoft, it was a cause for celebration. For several years, Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, had been putting the pieces in place for this moment. ....... In 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI, the tiny San Francisco company that designed ChatGPT. And in the years since, it has quietly invested another $2 billion .......... The $3 billion paid for the huge amounts of computing power that OpenAI needed to build the chatbot. And it meant that Microsoft could rapidly build and deploy new products based on the technology. ......... Microsoft is now poised to challenge Big Tech competitors like Google, Amazon and Apple with a technological advantage the company has not possessed for more than two decades. Microsoft is in talks to invest another $10 billion in OpenAI as it seeks to push its technology even further ......... The potential $10 billion deal — which would mainly provide OpenAI with even larger amounts of computing power .........

what has become the hottest technology in the tech industry.

......... ChatGPT answers questions, writes poetry and riffs on almost any topic tossed its way. ...... generative artificial intelligence, the term for a system that can generate text, images, sounds and other media in response to short prompts. ....... The new generative A.I. technologies could reinvent everything from online search engines like Google to digital assistants like Alexa and Siri. ........... OpenAI is working on an even more powerful system called GPT-4 ........ OpenAI is led by Sam Altman, who became well known in Silicon Valley as the head the start-up builder Y Combinator. Mr. Altman, 37, and his co-founders created OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit. But he soon remade the venture as a for-profit company that could more aggressively pursue financing. ......... With backing from Microsoft, OpenAI went on to build a milestone technology called GPT-3. Known as a “large language model,” it could generate text on its own, including tweets, blog posts, news articles and even computer code. ......... GitHub, a popular online service for programmers owned by Microsoft, began offering a programming tool called Copilot. As programmers built smartphone apps and other software, Copilot suggested the next line of code as they typed, much the way autocomplete tools suggest the next word as you type texts or emails. ......... Google, Meta and other companies have spent years building models similar to ChatGPT. The A.I. systems develop their skills by analyzing enormous amounts of digital text, including books, Wikipedia articles, computer programs and chat logs. ............. most of Microsoft’s $1 billion investment came in the form of the computing power OpenAI needs — and that Microsoft would eventually become the lab’s sole source of computing power. ............ as much as 10 percent of all data could be A.I.-generated in just three years, which could lead to as much as $7 billion in revenue for Azure
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Prince Harry’s Memoir Has Record Breaking Sales The steady drumbeat of revelations that preceded the book’s release helped push early orders and initial sales, making “Spare,” on its first day, one of the best-selling hardcover books in recent memory........ Prince Harry’s memoir, “Spare,” has become a record-breaking success, with first-day sales that exceed some of publishing’s biggest hits, including blockbusters by Barack and Michelle Obama. ........ the largest first-day sales for any nonfiction book ever published by Penguin Random House, the world’s largest publisher. ....... the velocity of sales throughout the day was gigantic.” ......... In Britain, “Spare” set a record for first-day sales of a nonfiction book, selling 400,000 copies ........ “The only books that have sold faster in a day have been about the other Harry, Harry Potter” ....... and the last section of his tell-all degenerates into a tiresome back-and-forth about who’s leaking what and why ........ “if Harry is going to set fire to his family, he has at least done it with some style.” ........ The Guardian ran an article that detailed a physical confrontation between Prince William and Prince Harry; as Harry describes it in the book, William knocked him to the floor. That same week, copies of “Spare” accidentally went on sale early in Spain and were snatched up by news outlets. Dozens of stories followed from around the world: Prince Harry said in the book that he killed 25 people in Afghanistan. Prince Harry wrote that his brother encouraged him to dress as a Nazi for a costume party. Prince Harry lost his virginity to an older woman in a field behind a bar. .......... the news media frenzy that followed each new release appeared to help the book sell. .......... pre-orders jumped after the article in The Guardian detailing the scuffle between the brothers ....... Barnes & Noble expects the book to be one of the biggest releases of 2023. .........

the “expertise and talent” of the book’s ghostwriter, J.R. Moehringer

......... “Spare” was sold for a rumored sum of $20 million as part of a multi-book deal .......... His answer was that by publishing a memoir, he was trying to put many of the rumors to rest by speaking up.
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When the Writing Demands Talent and Discretion, Call the Ghostwriter Ghostwriters write books in someone else’s voice — without leaving fingerprints. Doing it well requires great technical skill and a flexible ego........ Perhaps the most exalted practitioner of a little-understood craft, Moehringer aims, ultimately, to disappear. ......... Doing it well requires a tremendous amount of technical skill ......... “The lion’s share of my job is about getting out of the way, vanishing so the voice of my client can come through as clearly as possible.” ....... they provide the raw materials to build a house and she puts it together, brick by brick. “You own the bricks,” she said she tells them. “But you — and there should be no shame in this — don’t have the skill set to actually erect the building.” ........ Fees can range from about $50,000 to many times that, into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. ......... “Authors run the gamut from someone who is a complete control freak and has to approve every semicolon to those who barely phone it in,” said Madeleine Morel, an agent who specializes in matchmaking book projects with ghostwriters. “And when you start working with someone, you don’t know where they’re going to fall on that curve.” ........... Often, a writer will meet the subject only a few times, then follow up with phone calls, emails and texts. Others say that in order to get enough of a sense of the person to capture on the page, they need at least a few dozen hours in the presence of a client, sitting together in a room or shadowing the daily routines of the subject’s public and private lives. ......... To write Andre Agassi’s memoir, “Open,” Moehringer moved to Las Vegas, where Agassi lived. Agassi said he bought a house a mile away from his own, and Moehringer occupied it for two years while he worked on the book. All the writer requested was a long table where he could lay out the scenes he’d piece together “like a necklace,” Agassi recalled. They’d meet in the morning, fueled by breakfast burritos from Whole Foods. .......... “I’d spend a couple of hours with him over breakfast and a tape recorder,” Agassi said. ......... A former newspaper reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, Moehringer has a reputation for intense work habits — he rarely sleeps when finishing a book ......... Prince Harry’s book is his third ghostwriting project. Maybe. ........ by pushing their subjects, ghostwriters can make books more authentic than if they were written by the public figures themselves ........ “He’s half psychiatrist,” Phil Knight, a founder of Nike, said of Moehringer, who was the collaborator on his memoir, “Shoe Dog.” “He gets you to say things you really didn’t think you would.” ....... She doesn’t interview them, she said, but tries to have normal conversations. She broaches delicate subjects in phone calls late at night ............. some of his books are more merchandise than literature, meant to capitalize on someone’s 15 minutes of fame. ....... most people don’t have the time, or the ability, to write a good book .......... “Writing is a technical skill” ........ in the old days, nobody would ever admit to internet dating, and now everybody talks about it .

Lisa Marie Presley, a Life in Pictures The daughter of Elvis was famous from the moment she was born. .

Could Black Flight Change a Model of Integration? American suburbs have long faced the issue of white families leaving as more residents of color move in. But in Shaker Heights, Ohio, Black families, upset about changes in the schools, are trickling to nearby suburbs........ American suburbs have long faced the issue of white flight, where white families pack up in large numbers as demographics shift and more residents of color move in. But in Shaker Heights, it’s Black families who are leaving. Many of them point to initiatives rolled out over the past decade meant to combat systemic racism in the classroom — good intentions that they feel have done more harm than good when it comes to their children’s academic achievement. ......... Home values and school rankings exist as two sides of the same real estate coin. About 90 percent of American children attend public school, and higher school spending produces higher property values. Stronger school rankings, in turn, are often offered as justification for higher property taxes. And Shaker Heights, which is governed by the motto “A community is known by the schools it keeps,” has one of the highest tax rates in Ohio. ........... Siobhan Aaron, 42, who in 2020 switched her 16-year-old son Kareem to private school and then moved out of the district to Twinsburg, a community 15 miles south of Shaker Heights, where the property taxes are significantly lower. ............ Kareem was often stereotyped by administrators, who presumed that because he was Black, he needed extra help ....... “Curriculum and instruction that works for gifted students is usually good for all students.” ........ Shaker Heights appears integrated, but within its schools, where gifted and honors classes have long skewed overwhelmingly white, it is anything but. ......... In the 1950s, a handful of Black and white couples formed the Ludlow Community Association — a group that encouraged Black families to move in while also imploring white families to stay. The result was the first successfully integrated community in Cleveland, and one of the first in the nation. And for many years, it was considered something of a utopia. .......... Like Black students in districts across the country, they also receive a disproportionate share of discipline, which ricochets into higher suspensions and lower grades ........ Parents I interviewed said they are not elitist or classist; they just want the best for their children. .

15: Nepal

Are Protein Bars Actually Good for You? Or are they just glorified candy bars? The global market for protein bars is growing quickly and expected to swell to more than $2 billion by the end of 2026 ........ “We’ve just gone completely off the rails with protein in recent years” ........ Despite the advertising, though, nutrition experts say that protein bars aren’t all that healthy. ........ “We value protein so much that it’s the central thing on our plate” ...........

You’d be hard-pressed to find an American who actually needs more protein, though

........ Most meat eaters get far more than the recommended daily dose of protein (which is about 0.4 grams per pound of body weight). And those who don’t eat meat can get enough protein from plant sources like tofu, nuts and legumes. ......... many protein bars are also full of sugar. ....... A Gatorade protein bar in the flavor chocolate chip contains 28 grams of added sugars, twice the amount in a Dunkin’ Donuts chocolate frosted doughnut with sprinkles. .......... “By and large, they’re highly processed, high in sugar and salt — kind of a ‘Frankenfood’” ........ grapes, a banana, an apple or yogurt with berries ....... a handful of nuts ....... tuna or hard-boiled eggs, which are high in protein but not processed.


Kellyanne Conway: The Cases for and Against Trump Shrugging off Mr. Trump’s 2024 candidacy or writing his political obituary is a fool’s errand — he endures persecution and eludes prosecution like no other public figure. That could change, of course, though that cat has nine lives. ........ It’s tough to be new twice. ........ A popular sentiment these days is, “I want the Trump policies without the Trump personality.” ......... it was a combination of his personality and policies that forced Mexico to help secure our border; structured new trade agreements and renewed manufacturing, mining and energy economies; pushed to get Covid vaccines at warp speed; engaged Kim Jong-un; played hardball with China; routed ISIS and removed Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s most powerful military commander; forced NATO countries to increase their defense spending and stared down Mr. Putin before he felt free to invade Ukraine. ......... When it comes to Donald J. Trump, people see what they wish to see. ........ what some perceive as an abrasive, scornful man bent on despotism, others see as a candid, resolute leader unflinchingly committed to America’s interests. ...... until one faces the klieg lights, and is subjected to raw, relentless, often excessive scrutiny, and unfair and inaccurate claims, there is no way to suss out who possesses the requisite metal and mettle. ........ Trump boasts that his general election win-loss record was 233-20 and that he hosted some 30 rallies in 17 states and more than 50 fund-raisers for candidates up for re-election, and participated in 60 telerallies and raised nearly $350 million in the 2022 cycle for Republican candidates and committees. .......... For seven years Mr. Trump hasn’t stopped campaigning .

Republicans Are Getting It Wrong About DeSantis and Florida After his commanding performance in the midterm elections, I informally polled my conservative family members in Miami, who all said they had dumped Mr. Trump and were on team DeSantis for ’24. One colorfully called the former president she had voted for twice a “whiny crybaby” who could only talk about losing the last election. .......... Florida now has the fastest-growing population in the country ........ “People vote with their feet,” he said. “We are proud to be a model for the nation, and an island of sanity in a sea of madness.” ........ Florida is not a model for the nation, unless the nation wants to become unaffordable for everyone except rich snowbirds. .......... Florida is underwater demographically. Most of those flocking there are aging boomers with deep pockets, adding to the demographic imbalance for what is already one of the grayest populations in the nation ....... All of the new arrivals have contributed to a growing unaffordability crisis in Florida. You can see it everywhere ......... Eighty-year-old wooden bungalows nearby now go for almost $2 million, and glitzy new projects have moved into historically Black neighborhoods like Little Haiti, pushing out local people. ......... While Mr. DeSantis has been busy limiting what can be taught in schools, flying immigrants to Northern states and punishing “woke” Disney, working-class Floridians are being priced out of many Florida cities. Miami now surpasses Los Angeles and New York City as the least-affordable city for housing in the United States, and joining it in the top five is the once working-class South Florida Cuban-American bastion of Hialeah. Miami is also second in income inequality, with levels roughly comparable with Colombia’s and Panama’s. .........

Florida is having many of the same problems as its liberal archnemesis California

......... More than 76 percent of Floridians live on the coasts
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Date Like a Monk ‘We’re not here to impress each other. We’re here to connect.’ ........ The Sanskrit word for monk, brahmacharyi, means “the right use of energy.” ......... my practice teaches that we all have a limited amount of energy, which can be directed in multiple directions or one. When energy is scattered, it’s difficult to create momentum or impact. ......... If you haven’t developed a deep understanding of your motivations and obstacles, it’s harder to move through life with patience and compassion. ......... During college in London, I had devoted so much time to a long-distance girlfriend that I missed most of my classes. Celibacy allowed me to use that time and space to understand myself and develop the ability to still my mind. .......... When I left the ashram for good, I hadn’t watched TV, seen a movie, or listened to music in three years. I didn’t know who had won the World Cup or who the Prime Minister of England was. ....... The night was going to cost me nearly a week’s income, and I wanted it to be perfect. ........ She smiled politely, but she wasn’t eating much. ....... Monks never try to impress anyone. As a monk, you strive to master your ego and your mind. We think love is its own puzzle ........ when you explore the dark lanes of your own mind, as monks are trained to do, you develop patience, understanding and compassion toward yourself, which you can then bring to all your relationships. Going through the process of learning to love yourself, as monks are also trained to do, teaches you how to love someone else. ........ what she actually said: “I’d be perfectly happy to go to a grocery store and buy some bread.” ......... My monk teachers never tried to impress me and never wanted me to impress them. ........ you’re never better or worse than anyone else ........ Her grandmother worried I would leave her and return to the ashram. Her friends assumed I was against watching TV or going to movies and imagined that all we could do together was sit and meditate. ......... monk training is mind training ......... I haven’t gone back to eating meat or drinking alcohol ....... it opened my mind to understanding and acceptance. .......... I respected that everyone was moving at their own pace, in their own time. My way wasn’t right or wrong; they weren’t too slow or too fast. I learned to see the essence of a monk in everyone I met. Everyone has a part of themselves that is compassionate, loving and beautiful. .......... She was more of a monk than I would ever be, and we didn’t need a fancy restaurant to connect. For our next date, I took her to an outdoor ropes course, where we helped each other swing from trees, climb walls and walk narrow balance beams. We were bowing to each other, in our way. ........ The monks, who say nothing about romantic love, had taught me everything I needed to know about romantic love.

Electric Vehicles Keep Defying Almost Everyone’s Predictions Around the world, E.V. sales were projected to have grown 60 percent in 2022 ........ There are now almost 30 million electric vehicles on the road in total, up from just 10 million at the end of 2020. E.V. market share has also tripled since 2020. ........ what looked not that long ago like a climate pipe dream is now undeniably underway: a genuine transition away from fossil-fueled transportation. ........ a net zero transportation sector by 2050 ....... In Norway, electric vehicles now represent four out of every five new cars sold; the figure was just one in five as recently as 2016. In Germany, more than 55 percent of new cars registered in December were electric or hybrid. In China, where more electric vehicles are sold than everywhere else in the world combined, the rise is perhaps even more dramatic: from 3.5 percent of the market at the beginning of 2020 to 20.3 percent at the beginning of 2022. .......... Its largest single manufacturer, BYD, has surpassed Tesla for global market share ..........

market share of E.V.s will approach 40 percent by the end of the decade

.......... In the United States, investments in battery manufacturing reached a record $73 billion last year — three times as much as the previous record, set the year before. Globally, battery manufacturing capacity grew almost 40 percent last year, and is projected to grow fivefold by just 2025. By that year, lithium mining is expected to be triple what it was in 2021. .......... many other areas of the green transition experiencing similarly shocking exponential or quasi-exponential growth: renewable energy investments in the United States quadrupling in a decade, global investments in clean tech growing more than 30-fold over the same period, a solar supply chain already big enough to facilitate a total transition ........... the world hasn’t undertaken a breakneck allover revolution like this ever before in its history. .......... like carbon itself, which hangs in the air for centuries at least — dirty cars stay on the road for a very long time, emitting all the while............ demand already outstrips supply ........ China produces about 75 percent of all E.V. battery cells, manufactures roughly the same share of those cell components and does more refining of many of the biggest raw inputs than the rest of the world combined. ........ At what point do gas stations become unprofitable, and what happens then? ........... But there, at least for now, the electric vehicle revolution is taking a very different shape — often with two or three wheels rather than four. Globally, there are 10 times as many electric scooters, mopeds and motorcycles on the road as true electric cars, accounting already for almost half of all sales of those vehicles and responsible already for eliminating more carbon emissions than all the world’s four-wheel E.V.s. ......... In 2020, Americans bought twice as many e-bikes as they did E.V.s.
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The Dystopia We Fear Is Keeping Us From the Utopia We Deserve usable nuclear fusion remains, optimistically, decades away. ....... humanity courts calamity if we don’t respect our limits and discard fantasies of endless growth. ....... the third possible goal:

a world of energy abundance

. ........ His titular flying car stands in for all that we were promised in the mid-20th century but don’t yet have: flying cars, of course, but also lunar bases, nuclear rockets, atomic batteries, nanotechnology, undersea cities, affordable supersonic air travel and so on. Hall harvests these predictions and many more from midcentury sci-fi writers and prognosticators and sorts them according to their cost in energy. What he finds is that the marvels we did manage — the internet, smartphones, teleconferencing, Wikipedia, flat-screen televisions, streaming video and audio content, mRNA vaccines, rapidly advancing artificial intelligence, to name just a few — largely required relatively little energy and the marvels we missed would require masses of it. .............. The water crises of the future could be solved by mass desalination. Supersonic air travel is a solved technological problem. Lunar bases lie well within the boundaries of possibility. ........ an “ergophobic” society, which he defines as a society gripped by “the almost inexplicable belief that there is something wrong with using energy.” .......... The true conflict, he says, is not between the haves and the have-nots but between the doers and the do-nots. “The do-nots favor stagnation and are happy turning our civilization into a collective couch potato,” he writes. And in his view, the do-nots are winning. ............ the villainy of lawyers and regulators and hippies. .......... He predicts that if solar and wind “prove actually usable on a large scale,” environmentalists would turn on them. “Their objections really have nothing to do with pollution, or radiation, or risk, or global warming,” he writes. “They are about keeping abundant, cheap energy out of the hands of ordinary people.” ........... the Deploy Solar and Wind Everywhere and Invest in Every Energy Technology We Can Think of Act. ............. Too often, the right sees only the imagined glories of the past, and the left sees only the injustices of the present. ........ We’ve lost sight of the world that abundant, clean energy could make possible. ........... “Take any variable of human well-being — longevity, nutrition, income, mortality, overall population — and draw a graph of its value over time,” Charles Mann writes in “The Wizard and the Prophet.” “In almost every case it skitters along at a low level for thousands of years, then rises abruptly in the 18th and 19th centuries, as humans learn to wield the trapped solar power in coal, oil and natural gas.” .............. visitors to the Palace of Versailles in February 1695 marveled at the furs worn to dinners with the king and the ice that collected on the glassware. It was freezing in Versailles, and no amount of wealth could fix it. .............. A hundred years later, Thomas Jefferson had a vast wine collection and library in Monticello and the forced labor of hundreds of slaves, but his ink still froze in his inkwells come winter. ......... Today, heating is a solved problem for many. But not for all. There are few inequalities more fundamental than energy inequality. ............ 2010 ....... roughly two billion people had little or no access to electricity and still cooked food and heated water by fire. About three billion had access to enough electricity to power electric lights. An additional billion or so had the energy and wealth for labor-saving appliances like washing machines. It’s only the richest billion people who could afford to fly, and they — we — used around half of global energy. .............. “You load the laundry, and what do you get out of the machine? You get books.” There is no global aid strategy we could pursue that would do nearly as much as making energy radically cheaper, more reliable and more available. ......... “Flights that take 15 hours on a 747 could happen in an hour on a point-to-point rocket” .......... Vertical greenhouses could feed far more people, and desalination, which even now is a major contributor to water supplies in Singapore and Israel, would become affordable for poorer, populous nations that need new water sources most. Directly removing carbon dioxide from the air would become more plausible ......... definition of superabundance ............... but the combination of fixed-price for infinite compute and the new trend of inefficient but modular technology has created an inventor out of almost everybody. ........... longevity drugs, which can only be synthesized in pristine zero-G conditions. Then you scoot off to a last-minute meet-up with friends in Tokyo. .......... dinner (made from ingredients grown in the same building and picked five minutes before cooking) ......... You bask in yet another serendipitous, in-person interaction, grateful for your cross-continental relationships. ........... it is not just fusion. The advance of wind and solar and battery technology remains a near miracle. The possibilities of advanced geothermal and hydrogen are thrilling. Smaller, modular nuclear reactors could make new miracles possible, like cars and planes that don’t need to be refueled or recharged. This is a world progressives, in particular, should want to hasten into existence. Clean, abundant energy is the foundation on which a more equal, just and humane world can be built. .............. “Folks will look back and be blown away by how we used energy today. They’ll say, ‘Wait, you just burned it?’”
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famously unfinished film These evocative, well-composed and tonally immaculate images were generated in seconds with the magic of artificial intelligence. ....... The project ended once Alejandro presented his massive compendium of artwork to the Hollywood studios. They turned it down out of fear or shortsightedness or simply because they could not comprehend what he was trying to do. ........ threatening that his “Dune” would be as long as 20 hours. .......... It will forever be the greatest film never made, because it exists solely in our imaginations. ......... This unfilmed film’s influence on our culture is nothing short of astounding. Specific ideas and images from the “Dune” art bible have escaped into the world. They can be experienced in movies such as “Blade Runner,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Prometheus,” “The Terminator” and even the original “Star Wars.” His “Dune” does not exist, yet it’s all around us. ........... It took Alejandro and his team two years of pure analog struggle to create his “Dune” — pencil on paper, paint on canvas, inventing the practical effects required to deliver his onscreen spectacle. ......... It’s different with A.I. No struggle was involved in creating these images of “Jodorowsky’s Tron.” It didn’t require any special skills .......... I want to say that influence is not the same thing as algorithm. But looking at these images, how can I be sure? .......... The technology is jaw-dropping. And it concerns me greatly. ............ Is the training of this A.I. model the greatest art heist in history? How much of art-making is theft, anyway? ....... If A.I.s were eligible for the Academy Awards, I’d vote for “Jodorowsky’s Tron” for best A.I. costume design just for dreaming up such outrageous retro sci-fi hats and helmets. ......... He needed to state his prompt cleanly and clearly. But the creativity bubbled out of the machine. ........ What will it mean when directors, concept artists and film students can see with their imaginations, when they can paint using all the digitally archived visual material of human civilization?