Billionaire Larry Ellison has turned the Hawaiian island of Lanai into a luxury health resort, and plans to use it to save the world. Philanthropy, he said, is the definition of unsustainable. Profit is sustainable.
He “is tackling three sets of complex issues on the island: the global food-supply chain, nutrition and the transition from fossil fuels to sustainable energy sources.”
Ellison also distances himself from Trump, saying he has worked with every President.
AWS engineer Tim Bray resigns from Amazon following worker firings – Bray quit Amazon in protest over the company firing vocally critical employees. Bray was an Amazon Web Services VP and distinguished engineer, who previously did stints at Google and Sun.
“… remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised,” he said. “The victims weren’t abstract entities but real people…. "
He adds: “I’m sure it’s a coincidence that every one of them is a person of color, a woman, or both. Right?”
Inspired by a conversation with Mike Elgan yesterday, I’m going to do Facebook a lot less for a while.
The Scientists Who Won’t Give Up on the Warp Drive — Dozens of engineers and physicists are trying to do the impossible, develop a means of moving faster than the speed of light. They see it as an interesting thought experiment that could shed light on the boundaries of physics — and maybe more.
School bus converted to mobile, full-time off-grid home. And it’s a really NICE home too.
The Coronavirus Is Rewriting Our Imaginations
Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson went off the grid in mid-March, rafting down the Colorado River. He returned into a new world. He sees Covid-19 as a precursor into crises yet to come – chiefly global warming – and finds reason for hope.
Possibly, in a few months, we’ll return to some version of the old normal. But this spring won’t be forgotten. When later shocks strike global civilization, we’ll remember how we behaved this time, and how it worked. It’s not that the coronavirus is a dress rehearsal—it’s too deadly for that. But it is the first of many calamities that will likely unfold throughout this century. Now, when they come, we’ll be familiar with how they feel.
What’s coming? Droughts, food shortages, electrical outages, storms, floods.
Imagine what a food scare would do. Imagine a heat wave hot enough to kill anyone not in an air-conditioned space, then imagine power failures happening during such a heat wave…. Imagine pandemics deadlier than the coronavirus. These events, and others like them, are easier to imagine now than they were back in January, when they were the stuff of dystopian science fiction. But science fiction is the realism of our time. The sense that we are all now stuck in a science-fiction novel that we’re writing together—that’s another sign of the emerging structure of feeling…
Right now we’re hearing two statements being made. One, from the President and his circle: we have to save money even if it costs lives. The other, from the Centers for Disease Control and similar organizations: we have to save lives even if it costs money. Which is more important, money or lives? Money, of course! says capital and its spokespersons. Really? people reply, uncertainly. Seems like that’s maybe going too far?”…
Even though our economic system ignores reality, we can act when we have to. At the very least, we are all freaking out together. To my mind, this new sense of solidarity is one of the few reassuring things to have happened in this century. If we can find it in this crisis, to save ourselves, then maybe we can find it in the big crisis, to save our children and theirs.”
Welcome to your work-from-home dystopia: Employers are using spyware to monitor remote employees' work at home, requiring workers to leave their cameras and microphones on at all times. Surveillance software on employee computers monitors every keystroke, takes screenshots every few seconds, and tracks every email, message, the music employees listen to while working, and records facial expressions.
What The U.S. Might Learn From China’s Approach To COVID-19 – New York Times health and science reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. points to China as a model of how to stop a fast moving pandemic in its tracks.
China is not to blame for this virus. They didn’t release it on purpose, or accidentally from a lab. And they didn’t cover it up. The mayor of Wuhan covered it up and when Beijing found out about it they chastised him hard, forced him to apologize on national TV, and took swift, decisive action.
Chinese people were required to take mandatory testing and if they were positive, they were immediately taken away, separated from their families, and put in gymnasium-style hospitals where they slept on beds separate from each other, were tended by workers in PPE and – when they recovered – set free and home. It’s harsh but not cruel and it got the pandemic under control.
China has committed numerous awful crimes against its own people, but this was not one of those cases, McNeil notes. Quite the opposite; the Chinese government is demonstrating leadership and doing the right thing.
The US’s more wishy-washy approach is going to stretch out for years and cost many, many unnecessary deaths. This doesn’t mean autocracy wins; World War II teaches us that free societies can beat autocracies when those free societies have a national will and strong, intelligent leadership (rather than the current Republican Party).
Boy raises a hammer during a solidarity rally for the 42,000 miners on strike in the Zonguldak coal fields in Turkey, November 1990. via
Wearing a mask is for smug liberals. Refusing to is for reckless Republicans. – Mask-wearing and other pandemic protections have become political virtue-signaling.
Good article, but I think it overstates the polarization. Most Americans recognize that the current situation is both unsustainable and necessary.
The people ranting about rights and Communism are lunatics. A tornado doesn’t care about your property rights when it knocks down your house.
John Belushi reportedly visited the set of “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” on the day he died. He wanted to work on his William Shatner impression.
For those of you who are not Trekkies, that was the one with Ricardo Montalban rocking the daring decolletage.
The U.S. Needs Way More Than a Bailout to Recover From Covid-19 – We need a new New Deal to fix structural problems with the US economy that long predate the current crisis.
If we want to restart the engine that made this nation a superpower, we need to do something big. I mean really, really big: defeat-the-Nazis, land-a-man-on-the-moon, invent-the-internet big.
By my college pal Barry Ritholtz (and by “pal” I mean we talked a few times and said hello).
Funniest work videoconferencing misadventures
When videoconferencing meetings go wrong, you get to see flossing, naked husbands and more.
… I could tell both his dogs were barking frantically but couldn’t figure out what the rest of the noise was, and I was concerned. “Are you OK?” Deep sigh. “We have a parrot, and the parrot has learned to call the dogs. He waits until the dogs come in the room and then imitates my wife. When the dogs can’t find her, they lose their minds.”