WWonderings 2.7.24 - Zombie Complex

Decision-paralysis is amazing! Also with January over, photography of a certain skyline might find its way into emails. If people want it & also play their cards right of course. On to our damp, poorly insured, but excellently tagged show! (Keep scrolling for an amazing video of abandoned buildings in LA hit with hundreds of graffiti tags) 

LA records 475 mudslides during storm that has drenched SoCal (ABC 7) & ‘Pineapple Express’ sweeps California as an atmospheric river fuels storms and floods the state (AP) Atmospheric Rivers are bands of concentrated water vapor in the sky, not a storm per se, but can funnel/redirect the path of storms. In this case, to the tune of almost 500 mudslides in LA.

Majority of debtors to US hospitals now people with health insurance (Guardian) Previously, uninsured Americans owned the majority of the medical debt. Today, people with insurance are the lion’s share of debt. Once the cost of elder care or end of life treatment is factored in, this doesn’t seem sustainable at all.

Viral afterlife: SARS-CoV-2 as a reservoir of immunomimetic peptides that reassemble into proinflammatory supramolecular complexes (Applied Physical Sciences) Fragments of this virus can connect to each other & become "zombie" complexes, called “XenoAMP-dsDNA.” These raise many of the yellow & red alerts the full virus does affecting healthy, uninfected cells. Which is wild because the common cold doesn’t have respawn capabilities. Also, Elon really should be a better father to XenoAMP.

FCC moves to criminalize most AI-generated robocalls (NBC News) & AI-Generated Taylor Swift Porn Went Viral on Twitter. Here's How It Got There (404 Media) The deluge of disinformation, deepfake images and crazy spam is in full swing, with the gov’t finally waking up to the potential threat…after it’s already hit our election system. Strong work all around.

Inside the collapsing U.S. political-media-industrial-complex (Semafor) & The Messenger Was Built To Fail, And Did (Defector) & Public Funding of Journalism Is the Only Way (Hamilton Nolan) The ongoing destruction of journalism won’t be prevented by VC funding, “smart goals,” or small-batch subscriptions (but more on that soon). Hamilton Nolan’s idea is better than people will give credit, as Free Radio <Insert Region Here> is still funded and running today.

FDA panel recommends more diversity in pulse oximeter trials (CNN) If your R&D only includes white skin possessing human test subjects, you might want to caveat/asterisk findings that rely on shining a light through skin.

The White House has its own pharmacy—and, boy, was it shady under Trump (Ars Technica) Almost 500k spent on prescriptions for “ineligible staff members” including Provigil, Ambien, Fentanyl, and Ketamine. Trump might be sober, but the staff around him were anything but.

Why Movements Fail (Liberal Currents) Movements, at least modern ones, make things worse at times. Millennials & Gen Zs have watched Occupy Wal Street, Black Lives Matter, the Arab Spring, 2019’s Hong Kong Protests, the Gezi Park protests in Turkey, Euromaiden in Ukraine, even the Women’s March, fail. Not just fail, but spark counterrevolutionary autocrats across the globe. Samantha Hancox-Li tries to explain why.

The “Ghost Budget”: How America Pays for Endless War (Just Security) It is said that a tank is constructed in so many districts that Congress would never vote to stop producing them, as too many individual representatives benefit from the pork. We don’t even write down how much we’re spending on weapons or war anymore. From the article:

lateral thinking with withered technology (Bijan Stephen) A bit from this write-up made me stop in my tracks: “All of the designers of the original Super Mario Bros. on the original Nintendo Entertainment System are credited designers on Super Mario Bros. Wonder.” 20+ years later, the designers are still credited and being paid. Can you imagine how much lateral thinking you could do if you had 20 years of job security?

Ten Years Ago, Daft Punk Threw a Legendary, Star-Studded Grammy Party (Variety) It is rare I am jealous I didn’t attend a thing. This event is that rarity.

Quote of the week

Life is not a game of chess, it doesn’t reward strategy – it rewards repetition and effort.~Scantron

Poem of the week

By Cynthia Marie Hoffman

Vibe of the week

If 2024 heralds a wave of classic dance/actual classical music being reworked with modern tech, we will be better for it. The world might break, but the symphony of destruction will be amazing.

Keep your head up,tn