12.19

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The Times’ Boeing expert offers context on ‘Flying Blind’ — and the sky-high challenges the company faces

“It’s like they want to appear like they’re doing something, but aren’t as concerned about actual impact,” said Celine Gounder, an infectious disease specialist.

U.S. Housing as a Global Safe Asset: Evidence from China Shocks

I think there are actually two quite distinct supply constraint stories. One is the supply chain stuff that we all talk about. And the other is the Great Resignation, the surprise drop and persistence of low labor force participation.

For example, any of us can easily access Baidu, but Chinese officials block Twitter and other U.S. social media in their own market, even as they deploy those same platforms to spread propaganda abroad. The state-owned China Daily is available right here in Washington, but private U.S. news outlets like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are banned in China. Foreign cloud service providers must enter joint ventures with PRC firms, but Alibaba has its own data centers in the United States. Most American movies cannot be shown in Chinese theaters. These and other lopsided market access barriers have persisted for years.

Central banks first stop bond buying and then raise interest rates. Whether U.S. bond buying programs actually lower treasury yields is debatable. But there is no question that the ECB’s bond buying keeps down Italy’s interest rate, by keeping down the risk/default premium in that rate. If the ECB stops buying, or removes the commitment to “whatever it takes” purchases, debt service costs will rise again precipitating the doom loop.

The effects are long term, but the achievements are incremental and can be implemented by website owners without being dependent on anyone else or waiting for a network effect. You can do this now for your website, and that already would be a positive outcome. Like using a recycled shopping bag instead of a taking a plastic one, it’s a small individual action. This article is meant to provoke and lead to individual action, not propose a complete solution to the decaying web. It’s a small simple step for a complex sociotechnical system. So I’d love to see this happen. I intend to keep this page up for at least 10 years.

Self-identified Christians make up 63% of U.S. population in 2021, down from 75% a decade ago

Why do we so seldom see people smiling in painted portraits? Nicholas Jeeves explores the history of the smile through the ages of portraiture, from Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa to Alexander Gardner’s photographs of Abraham Lincoln.

A deep dive into an NSO zero-click iMessage exploit: Remote Code Execution

Smartphones and on-the-go internet access have made many of our working lives more efficient and flexible. But the requirement for constant connectivity isn’t only a fact of white-collar work—it has spread to workers up and down the income ladder. And while the requirement has spread, the resources that workers need to maintain it are not evenly distributed. Today, more than a quarter of low-income Americans depend solely on their phones for internet access. Amid historic levels of income inequality, phones and data plans have become an increasingly costly burden on those who have the least to spare.

What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?

Don’t Start With Microservices – Monoliths Are Your Friend – heresy 🙂

More companies are turning to remote monitoring tools to keep tabs on their employees while working from home.

Let’s talk Web3. If you skipped the Technology part, welcome back. Let’s try to summarize what Web3 actually is. Web3 isn’t a clearly defined set of technologies or protocols or workflows, but Web2.0 wasn’t either really. Just like Web2.0 Web3 has certain technological foundations and assumptions but is just as much an aspirational term, a set of overlapping visions, ideologies and goals. In a lot of ways Web3 is doing something and calling it Web3. But with all the contradictions and unclarity a few things are foundational to Web3.

In moving away from fossil fuels, some in aviation are thinking of bringing back helium-assisted flight.

What have we gotten instead of a real postmortem? An insistence that Russia stole the election, the attitude that the voters failed Hillary Clinton instead of the other way around, a remarkable tightening of the vice grip with which activists with bizarre niche politics hold the party’s messaging and values, and the utter nihilism of the widespread belief that the country’s simply too racist and thus no electoral losses are the party’s fault. That’s the tenor of the liberal position post-2016, that the country’s willingness to elect Donald Trump did not reflect any failures of Hillary Clinton or her party but rather that the electorate was full of unrepentant bigots who probably do not even deserve the wise and enlightened leadership of Democrats. Remarkable that the same people so recently laughed at the inability of their opponents to look critically at themselves.