Afternoon Tea 1.4.2021 - 11,780

Welcome to the Year of Mad Max!

January 04, 2021

Happy New Year! Now that 2020 has gotten into the soup, 2021 is coming out swinging! Trump is preparing for his 1 year anniversary of getting impeached by doing double impeachment, giant wind turbines might change the world, Alphabet workers are trying to unionize, the Army can put an unguided shell into a target 43 miles away, and the most interesting read on imagination I’ve ever encountered. It’s Monday, January 4th 2020, and this is the Tea.

In extraordinary hour-long call, Trump pressures Georgia secretary of state to recalculate the vote in his favor (Washington Post) Trump Campaign’s Jason Miller Calls Jake Tapper ‘A Fake News P*ssy’ After CNN Host Tells Him to Pay His Child Support (Mediaite) & White House Made 18 Previous Attempts to Call Georgia’s Secretary of State (Intelligencer) Seems Trump has gone full psycho ex-boyfriend in his attempts to stay in power. And it looks like there is evidence that Lindsey Graham might have been in on it. My favorite bit about the last 24hrs is the lawsuits that Trump filed about recording a telephone call, in a one party consent state:

I’m somewhat reassured that we all seemed to have the same reaction to this news break. It felt like we all heard it, assumed this re-impeachable offense was in November or December, and then we all went “What do you mean it happened yesterday?!” immediately. Which, is hilarious and depressing as hell.

The best joke I’ve seen so far, goes to the Monty Python Holy Hand Grenade video. After hearing the call, the only thing I can think of is this scene from The Simpsons:

One way to fight invasive species? Eat them. (National Geographic) A uniquely American solution to a global problem. In a few years, some of these species are gonna be delicious.

A Monster Wind Turbine Is Upending an Industry (NY Times) A single gigantic wind turbine with rotors the size of 2 football fields can power 12,000 homes. If fossil fuel companies aren’t pissing themselves, they should be.

New Army Cannon Hits Target 43 Miles Away in Test (Military.com) & King of Battle: Russia Breaks Out the Big Guns (Assoc Of the US Army) Russia has slowly edged ahead of us in conventional artillery distance capability. This allowed them to mess around in Crimea and Syria in ways that the USA couldn’t match. So, we clearly needed to make a bigger, better, conventional way to put unpowered death almost 50 miles down range. I love physics problems that involve the curvature of the earth.

The mystery of Siberia’s exploding craters (BBC Future) As the permafrost melts, cryovolcanoes become a risk. That’s a word you’ve probably never encountered before, but “gas emission craters” are kind of insane.

Pillar or pawn (Rest of World) As China and America continue to play tackle football in global markets, Southeast Asia might actually be the biggest beneficiary.

“I have no idea what I’ve done wrong.” Why I distrust parents of estranged children (MSN Lifestyle) When I meet someone who has divorced or estranged themselves from their parents, I try my hardest to listen and understand. When I meet a parent of estranged children, I am happy to be surprised, but they rarely say anything that isn’t depressing, horrifying, or abusive in and of itself.

"I have no idea what I’ve done wrong!"

Pretending you don’t know is what you have done wrong. Pushing your children to break a really strong bond is what you have done wrong. Not learning from this and taking accountability to what you have done wrong. And the most hurtful part if that you haven’t learned a thing. You continue to put your ego first by spreading your version of events rather than listening to the pain of your children. That is what you’ve done wrong.

Biased language models can result from internet training data (Search Engine Land) The driest, least biased read summarizing the situation with Dr. Timnit Gebru, who was hired to do ethical AI research for Google. She did a bunch, found bad things, and was then pushed to resign. Alphabet is now staring down the barrel of a unionization drive. They’re not causally linked, buy definitely connected, as this history of tech contracting shows.

How the US Military Brought Soul Food to the World (Zocalo Public Square) & White people’s bland food isn’t just an internet meme. It’s a centuries-long obsession (Quartz) A pair of reads that introduce deeply interesting history and context on how American food, both bad and good, spread across the country and the world.

The hard work of imagining (Interconnected) Fantastic & terrifying essay talking about how technology iteration and advances change how we have normal experiences. This reminder that we need to keep pushing and straining to think outside of normal lines of business and surveillance. The dystopias and utopias the author imagines, are truly reality-breaking to contemplate:

But let’s take it an extreme. I can imagine a free apartment where everyday activity is monetised. A free house that comes with a bundled app store of Amazon Dash-style subscription purchases for cleaning products, and food, and clothes, and rental furniture; all carefully and automatically optimised by monitoring usage through connected cameras and sensors.

This is a dystopia where humans, you and me, are farmed as consumers, by platform capitalism. We never own, we pay rent.

It could be built today. It’s just that nobody’s gotten round to it yet.

Song of the Tea: Tobe Nwigwe continues to push my definition of what hip hop can be. I’m so glad his family looks happy and healthy. Nell also kills the beat like woah.

You’ve probably stumbled already, that’s ok. When it’s a 52 game season, shaking those jitters and mistakes out early on is the best thing you can do for your performance.

Yours,T