Factual Dispatch

This dispatch assumes you're vaguely aware of the news, so it will endeavor to provide perspectives, visualizations, analysis, and other odds & ends you won't find anywhere else.

With the recent announcement that Amy Winehouse('s hologram) will be touring in 2019, people are finally starting to wonder what the hell our rights actually are, concerning being broadcast flossing & dabbing by brands after our deaths. While the debut of the "Pepper's Ghost" illusion created to reproduce Tupac at Coachella in 2012 wasn't technically a hologram, the creation sent shockwaves through the entertainment community. One of the first legal discussions surrounding holographic rights was published in the Washington Journal of Law, Tech, and Arts in 2014 and a good primer for holographic authors, IP case law & individual rights was released by the American Bar Association in September 2018. The International Hologram Manufacturers Association also released a review of specifications, moral rights and the Berne Convention on how international copyright works with holograms. This might seem like a niche interest for Instagram influencers at Bonnaro or people who haven't realized Rave is over, but the financial stakes are massive. Japan is preparing to debut an entire World Cup captured & reproduced holographically, So get used to musicians being "brought back to life" as more and more estates partner with technology firms and law offices to give you the tour you never thought possible.

A study published by the Vision Zero Network & the American Public Transportation Association reviewing dozens of cities, found that metro areas with residents that average 40+ public transit rides a year see half the traffic fatalities of metro areas where residents take under 20 rides a year. Unlike traditional urban planning, the Vision Zero project is a set of ethical design principles that put human life above monetary or logistics-based value. Launched in Sweden back in 1997, the Vision Zero City Network has grown to 5 cities in Canada, 17 major cities in the USA, the UK, Norway, the Netherlands, and the Dominican Republic, which managed to reduce its traffic fatality rate to under 40 per 100,000, an unheard of rate of progress.  The planning tenets require construction of roadways that prevent lethality by reducing speed of actors (walking, biking or driving) to the point where impact simply cannot kill. If the roadways can't be constructed that way, different segments of travelers need to be prevented from interacting entirely, simple as that. As Vision Zero research takes hold, local policymakers will begin to put two and two together. Combining public transit with autonomous vehicle development and swarm driving is the best chance we have for eliminating an entire category of death that is responsible for the loss of over 34,000 annually, in the US alone.

Any discussion of public transit, especially in the USA, can't pass without me bringing up High Speed Rail. With CNN documenting the arrival of Virgin Trains USA & the expanded hopes for High Speed Rail in California & Florida, Americans might finally get exposure to train systems that don't rhyme with AFLAC and largely go between where John Kerry lives and where Joe Biden lives. This would be good news if it wasn't several decades behind the rest of the world. While America pretends that laying new track or charting new routes that trains can take at greater speeds, France, Spain, and Japan have laid 100x the distance of high speed track lines that the US has since 1976. That would be impressive, if China hadn't build over 900x the distance of track the US has. Since 2004. Given that China's both a similar size to the USA, and our Eastern seaboards approximate each other (re: location of & distance between population centers), there's no reason besides greed, malaise, and apathy/antipathy towards the government that we're all stuck without shoes and belts in TSA security theater lines instead of chugging beer in the cafe car while speeding through America's heartland. 

Eye-Watering Data Visualization of the Week: How the Communist Party rules China (correct only for after the 19th Party Congress).

Vaguely Dystopian News of the Week: The Electronic Freedom Foundation won a lawsuit against the DEA, earning the right to a ton of records on a "bigger than the NSA" surveillance program named "Hemisphere." Not only has the DEA denied this program exists, but it is more expansive than even what Edward Snowden & the New York Times released back in 2013.Annoying-But-Correct Take of the Week: Elite universities, through investing their endowment, have become hedge funds with schools serving as tax shields. A sprawling, critical look at why college will remain unaffordable, essentially by design, unless we do something significant about it."Huh, Interesting" Read of the Week: Many of the people that you think are witty are doing essentially the same thing: assuming people can recognize connections loosely held between dissonant topics.Dunk of the Week:

Last year of the decade starts now! Time to party like we live in the shadows of a failing empire!Tarik