I love jwz’s capsule movie and TV reviews. I made a list of about nine movies and series to check out.
CSP leaders don’t fear losing jobs to AI, according to a Fierce Network survey — Despite gloomy prognostications from the experts, communication service provider (CSP) leaders think the outlook for AI and jobs is bright: Over two-thirds of CSP leaders surveyed believe AI and automation will increase or minimally impact job numbers, not reduce them. My latest on Fierce Network.
Why Dining Rooms Are Disappearing From American Homes
The dining room is the closest thing the American home has to an appendix–a dispensable feature that served some more important function at an earlier stage of architectural evolution. …
Americans now tend to eat in spaces that double as kitchens or living rooms–a small price to pay for making the most of their square footage. But in many new apartments, even a space to put a table and chairs is absent. Eating is relegated to couches and bedrooms, and hosting a meal has become virtually impossible. This isn’t simply a response to consumer preferences. The housing crisis–and the arbitrary regulations that fuel it–is killing off places to eat whether we like it or not, designing loneliness into American floor plans.
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The transition from the classic dining room to the great room mirrors the changes in gender norms and family formation that have occurred over the past 125 years. The dining room emerged in the early 20th century, when an ascendant upper middle class hired migrant laborers as servants. Many American homes from that era were designed around creating a separate sphere for “the help,” with sectioned-off kitchens, laundry rooms, and servants’ quarters….
In households where servants were unaffordable, domestic work fell to women. Separate dining rooms and kitchens thus reinforced the segregation of male and female spaces, while allowing generations of newly minted homeowners to ape the design norms of yesteryear’s elites.
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“For the most part, apartments are built for Netflix and chill,” Bobby Fijan, a real-estate developer and floor-plan expert, told me. “The reason the dining room is disappearing is that we are allocating [our] limited space to bedrooms and walk-in closets.” Even though we’re dining at home more and more—going to restaurants peaked in 2000—many new apartments offer only a kitchen island as an obvious place to eat.
This is partly a response to shrinking household size. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the share of one-person households more than tripled from 1940 to 2020.
We eat our meals at our computers or the TV. I’m a little ashamed to admit that. I read this article at my Mac over lunch.
Former President Donald Trump led House Republicans through a gripe-filled closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill on Thursday, airing grievances about his legal and electoral challenges, attacking his critics in the room, and only briefly addressing policy matters like abortion and taxes, according to multiple GOP lawmakers in the room.
— CNN
Trump doesn’t care about abortion, taxes, immigration and other issues Republicans care about. He only cares about revenge.
The US has the rich world’s most expensive healthcare system, and that system delivers the worst health outcomes of any country in the rich world. Also, the US is unique in relying on market forces as the primary regulator of its health care system.
— Cory Doctorow, The health industry’s invisible hand is a fist
The Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit brought by the survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre.
The legacy of slavery and America’s history of racism is still alive. Structural racism is a pervasive force in American society. Racism is still prevalent.
American Blacks have significantly less generational wealth than whites, simply because of centuries of white people building wealth on Black slave labor. White people in America have a head start of centuries.
America’s response: Too bad, so sad, nothing we can do about it.
Reparations may well be neither practical nor just. But that’s not what this case is about. This case was about actual victims of a specific event suing for damages, and Oklahoma told them to piss off and die. Which is exactly what happened because the plaintiffs were centenarians when they sued.
An end to the climate emergency is in our grasp — Good news/bad news from Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr: Renewable energy is set to double by the end of the decade. But it needs to triple.
Clean energy is going through the same kind of boom that transformed the Internet and other emerging technologies in the last century—though in the case of past emerging technologies, big business drove demand while in the case of clean energy, the big fossil fuel companies are slowing it down, Cory says.
According to research, we’ll hit peak demand for fossil fuels this year or next, says Cory, adding:
The reason for this is that so much renewable energy is about to come online, and it is so goddamned cheap, that we are about to undergo a huge shift in our energy consumption patterns. This past decade saw a 12-fold increase in solar capacity, a 180-fold increase in battery storage, and a 100-fold increase in EV sales. China is leading the world in a cleantech transition, with the EU in close second. Cleantech is surging in places where energy demand is also still growing, like India and Vietnam. Fossil fuel use has already peaked in Thailand, South Africa and every country in Latin America.”
Federal judge strikes down Florida ban on medical treatments for transgender kids — In overturning a barbaric Florida law blocking medical care for transgender children U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle said the law’s advocates failed to find “a single adversely affected Florida patient.”
Trump Is Not America’s Le Pen. He’s worse — Le Pen and other right-wing European politicians tone down the hate for general elections. Trump is letting his inner Nazi run freely.