One of my biggest policy disappointments of the Obama years was that they didn’t close the “light truck” loophole that American car manufacturers have exploited for decades to make increasingly larger trucks. It’s a terrible bit of policy that has directly led to tens of thousands of deaths, and indirectly to hundreds of thousands more, because it lets car makers build bigger, dirtier, more dangerous trucks — and rip off buyers to boot.

A new set of EPA regulations will finally close the loop a bit, at least for gas-powered cars. These too-little-too-late rules will reign in gas guzzlers, but it does absolutely nothing to disincentivize selling bigger and bigger cars. And since battery powered electrics are going to be even heavier, it looks like the new rules will do nothing to make cars and roads safer. By encouraging automakers to take their trucks electric first in order to avoid the new emissions standards, it seems like we’ll be putting even more bigger trucks on the road.

This is just more bad policy. The obvious solution here is to regulate cars based on weight and height. Tall, heavy vehicles are simply more dangerous. Decades of marketing have led normal people to think they “need” a tall SUV to be safe despite the fact that SUVs are intrinsically more dangerous  and now that SUVs are everywhere, it’s become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Set height limits on cars and require additional safety protocols and probably even additional licensing standards for drivers of jacked up trucks. Tax trucks over a certain weight, even if they’re electric. Force manufacturers to adhere to safety standards that take into account the non-drivers that are dying in higher numbers due to these brutish vehicles. And redesign roads to force the people driving these tanks to slow down.

It’s time to bring some sanity back to the streets not dither with half measures.

During the first two impeachment trials, the inimitable Dan Sinker put out a regular newsletter with everything you’d need to know so you didn’t have to drive yourself mad tracking down all the news. And he’s at it again with indictment.fyi.

This first issue was perfect — much needed background, well sourced links, professional but not without personality.

Don’t forget to leave a tip this is hard work!

I was finishing getting dinner prepared — always a shaky moment for me personally — when news of Trump’s indictment dropped, leading to a barrage of questions from our older son. Some of the questions I couldn’t really answer because I didn’t know (“I’m not sure, I don’t think they’ve actually said what he’s being charged with”), some of them required a delicate bit of circumlocution (“Well, imagine how mamá would feel if I was hiding the fact that I had the same kind of relationship with another woman”), and some led to still more questions (“Do you know what ‘allegedly’ means?”). We mostly let it drop during dinner.

All of the for and against arguments feel so pre-rehearsed at this point. Is this a relief? A win for democracy? The final blow to cleave the nation? I have no idea.

In the early days of the Trump era, possibly even before he took office or even won the nomination, I remember thinking how disgraceful it was that he even managed to get that far. Obviously, we’re well past that now, but this remains such a great indignity: there were countless opportunities to stop this and none of them were taken by people who know better. That moral failing feels like one we’re not coming back from any time soon.

Substack, which has raised over $80M since it was founded in 2017, is looking to raise more money, this time directly from writers using the Wefunder crowd funding campaign. As of this writing, the campaign had raised $4.2M of the $5M maximum allowed by the SEC; the investment terms say this raise is “an extension of their series B, with a pre-money valuation of $585M”. Some of Substack’s big names, likeTed Goia and Heather Havrilesky, are onboard.

From the Substack founders:

When we raised our last round of funding, in March 2021, we explored how we might make it possible for a large group of writers to invest alongside the traditional investors, but it ultimately proved too complex. Most importantly, it was difficult to include people who were not already accredited investors—a qualification determined largely by wealth. But the idea never left our minds.

We are serious about building Substack with writers, and this community round is one way to concretize that ideal. We’re doing this because the dynamics of a platform like Substack change if the people who are building their businesses on it are owners of it too. And we’re doing it because it not only provides something good for our company but also presents an opportunity for the people who use Substack to participate in the benefits that come from building this network—including the financial upside.

Substack was founded as something of an antithesis to social networks and has always pitched itself as not only a home for serious writers of all stripes but something of a return to the promise of the internet for readers as well. Remove the incentives that allowed the platforms to degrade the web and a more authentic culture could emerge, the thinking went.

Of course these ideals quickly met the reality of the human race and brought plenty of controversy to Substack’s doors: about advances, handling criticism, the media industry, spreading misinformation, and of course shitposters. Started as an alternative to the tech giants, Substack soon became yet another example of the VC-funded platforms and would go on to inspire its own alternatives like Ghost and Buttondown.

Even beyond these critiques, there’s something that just didn’t sit right with me about announcement. Maybe it’s all the talk of “democratization” in the Substack post or the way Wefunder promises to fix capitalism with … more capitalism. I’m automaticallhy deeply skeptical of anyone who uses the language of human liberation and progress in service of, well, things that are not that.

Maybe it’s just this weird moment we’re in, where rising interest rates have the effect of exposing Silicon Valley’s more absurd tendencies — is Substack really trying to give back to their community or are they suddenly finding scant few VCs answering their calls?

Elizabeth Lopatto shares my concern.

Substack is desperate, huh? That’s what I understand from their fundraising email, anyway. They’re now hitting up retail investors for millions of dollars after they failed to raise last year.

After certain recent historical events, I have become skeptical of the term “financial inclusion,” a set of buzzwords for making financial services more available to people who are not stratospherically rich. Maybe my cynicism is because Facebook tried to launch a stablecoin for the “unbanked” that you nonetheless needed (at least, according to the now-scrapped plan) a credit card to use. Maybe it is because Robinhood made a big fuss about how many brand-new retail investors it brought onto its gambling platform. Or maybe it’s the proliferation of buy now, pay later services from the likes of Klarna, Afterpay, and Affirm (and now Apple.)

Anyway, Facebook’s stablecoin play failed and was sold for parts. Robinhood’s share price has fallen by a third in the last year. Oh, and Gen Z’s credit card debt is growing fast and furious. So yeah, when someone talks about financial inclusion, I assume the game is afoot.

I have a few qualms with Lopatto’s critiques — for example, I think she’s mistaken the pre- and post-money valuations when she says Substack’s valuation is down — but certainly agree there sure is a lack of information about the company’s operations. For all of the information Substack provides about cumulative writer payout (that strikes me as a rather creative metric), there’s nothing about actual revenue or burn rate.

Or it may just be the timing is actually right. As Scott Nover notes at Quartz, a 2021 rules change by the SEC allowed for the increase in crowdfunding raises and $5M is, ultimately, not that much additional runway. Of course, a fraction of that $5M also doesn’t provide much potential upside, especially with their already massive valuation. It may be the smart money is to just keep posting.

By now the scene is only too familiar in America. Thoughts and prayers. No way to prevent this. There’s a mental health crisis. Our Moloch.

These are, as sociologist Kieran Healy wrote in 2019, rituals of American childhood.

In any given week in America, you can watch as a different ritual of childhood plays itself out. Perhaps it will be in El Paso, at a shopping mall; or in Gilroy, at a food festival; or in Denver, at a school. Having heard gunshots, and been lucky enough to survive, children emerge to be shepherded to safety by their parents, their teachers, or heavily-armed police officers. They are always frightened. Some will be crying. But almost all of them know what is happening to them, and what to do. Mass shootings are by now a standard part of American life. Preparing for them has become a ritual of childhood. It’s as American as Monday Night Football, and very nearly as frequent.

UPDATE: And just like that, the Observer is saved. (Here’s a bit more color from the New York Times.) In my initial write up, I noted the extreme asymmetry between right-wing funded media, which proliferates and serves mostly to stir up grievance among a terrified base who will then pass on tax cuts to the billionaire funders, and left-wing media, which basically has none of that. The success of this crowdfunding campaign offers some hope.

The Texas Observer is closing, reports the Texas Tribune:

The Texas Observer, the storied progressive publication known for its feisty, combative and often humorous investigative journalism, is shutting down and will lay off its 17-person staff, including 13 journalists, several members of its board said Sunday.

The decision marks an end to 68 years of publication, starting with its founding in 1954 by Ronnie Dugger and including a six-year period under the helm of the legendary Molly Ivins from 1970 to 1976. The magazine, in its first few decades, represented the liberal wing of the once-conservative Democratic Party. It was a thorn in the side of Lyndon B. Johnson when he was Senate majority leader (before he became president), Govs. Allen Shivers and John B. Connally, and other conservative Democrats. And it chronicled the era in which Texas was remade into a Republican stronghold that sent a governor, George W. Bush, to the White House.

The closing of the Observer raises questions about whether small progressive publications can survive the digital transformation of journalism and the information ecosystem during a time of rapid social, demographic and technological change.

I don’t track local media in Texas all that closely, though I know the Observer by reputation — how could you not when it counted the great Molly Ivans as an editor. Running a non-profit media company has always been a massive challenge, and it sounds like they ran into some real demographic changes.

What’s striking to me is how small the staff and budget actually were — fewer than 20 people, costing about $2 million a year. That’s not a lot of money, especially given the investigative work they were able to do. Compare that to the hundreds, if not thousands, of right-wing think tanks, blogs, and publishers that are awash in plutocrat money and whose sole purpose is to flood the zone with bullshit so their benefactors can reduce their own taxes.

The Texas Observer may not have been able to “to build a bridge to the younger, progressive generation,” but they were doing necessary work. This asymmetry helps explain, in part, why the right-wing is so effective at messaging: the right has donors who will spend tens of millions of dollars to create a false alternate reality that helps save them billions. How else does anyone explain the existence, let alone titanic stupidity, of Ben Shapiro.

Liberal donors instead prefer to spend big on causes that will reflect back directly on them, a sort of charismatic megafauna of philanthropy. Until liberals are willing to counter the right’s assault on reality, they shouldn’t be surprised they keep losing to just the absolute worst people on offer.

The United States invaded Iraq twenty years ago. The commemorations of this inauspicious time have been muted and largely resigned to editorial pages. James Fallows remembers:

Part of today’s convenient, hazy memory emerges as: Yes, what a rough time that was. Everybody believed the propaganda. Wasn’t that too bad. If only we had known! That is a destructive way to understand the Iraq years, because not everybody believed the propaganda. Many people tried their best to stop the war.

I’m not even talking about the hundreds of thousands of Americans (and many others around the world) who took to the streets in protests. Nor the leaders of most of the traditional U.S. allies, who formally opposed the decision to invade. With the egregious exception of Tony Blair.

I despised everything about this time in history — the illegitimate president, his psychopath of a vice president and cabinet full of gleeful, ghoulish neocons; the fear and weaponization of that fear; the disdain of my own country. It was all a precursor to a Republican party that’s only taken the slack they were given by a docile public, shaken institutions, and cowed media to become the authoritarian farce they are today. I despise the warmongering party of Bush and Cheney no less than the populist white supremacists that rally around Trump.

I was a journalist at the time of the invasion, pulling long hours in newsrooms where coverage was 24/7. I was nowhere near the war but still the coverage leading up to and then after the invasion was relentless — I wouldn’t exactly recommend the experience! Still, it’s vital that time be remembered authentically. The podcast Slow Burn captured the chaos and confusion and mendacity of the run-up to the war. Spencer Ackerman’s Reign of Terror is an account of how the Bush/Cheney war on terror reshaped America beyond just the response to 9/11 and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan to where we are today.

Maximum Fun, the long-going podcast network built up by Jesse Thorn, is becoming a collective. Wendy Lee, writing for the L.A. Times:

On Monday, Thorn — who has co-owned Maximum Fun with his wife since it was incorporated in 2011 — announced his company would become a worker cooperative, a novel business model in the podcast industry, but one that has been tried by many small businesses including bakeries and pizza places. The ownership will be shared equally by at least 16 people, including Thorn, the company said.

The process of converting Maximum Fun into a co-op took about a year and a half, Thorn said.

Thorn said he would receive an upfront sum and a percentage of the company’s revenue for a limited number of years. The company is taking out a loan from a community development financial institutions fund.

Based solely on my demographics, I should land squarely in the center of the Maximum Fun ideal listener matrix, yet it’s never really been my thing. I was an early booster of Put This On, the web series Thorn co-produced with the inimitable Adam Lisagor, I’ve just never fallen into the MaxFuniverse. They seem to be doing ok!

I love the thinking here, drawing on a tradition of worker owned collectives and co-ops to face down gigification platforms and other collectively owned media orgs. Thorn seems to be allergic to consolidation that’s happened around podcasts over the past decades and it’s deeply encouraging to see an alternative to the raise money and sell to a big company route.

A.O. Scott is leaving his post as the co-chief film critic at the Times, and wrote his own exit interview in recognition of the past 23 years.

Scott is, if not my favorite film critic, certainly the one I’ve read the most, given his tenure at the Times tracks with my own cultural growth. I haven’t always agreed with his critiques (it’s probably more like a 90% hit rate), though I can always see his point. He takes the work (thankfully, not himself) seriously, isn’t above popular fare, but also isn’t going to be bowled over by public opinion.

I thought this riff on the toxicity of modern fandom was excellent and, given his perch overseeing the tumult in culture over the past two-plus decades, exceedingly fair.

I’m not a fan of modern fandom. This isn’t only because I’ve been swarmed on Twitter by angry devotees of Marvel and DC and (more recently) “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” It’s more that the behavior of these social media hordes represents an anti-democratic, anti-intellectual mind-set that is harmful to the cause of art and antithetical to the spirit of movies. Fan culture is rooted in conformity, obedience, group identity and mob behavior, and its rise mirrors and models the spread of intolerant, authoritarian, aggressive tendencies in our politics and our communal life.

Beyond his movie reviews, I thoroughly enjoyed his book Better Living Through Criticism, a paean to the gift that true criticism can, though often fails, to be. Published in 2016, Better Living arrived at a massive cultural inflection point — the post-gamergate internet of the aforementioned toxic fandom, but before the fully unleashed torrent of Trump-era culture warring that has subsumed nearly everything.

Scott isn’t leaving the Times or his role as a critic, instead turning to a critic at large. I look forward to more of his critical gifts.

Here’s a fun story: the waste energy thrown off by a small compute cluster is being used to heat a public swimming pool. Zoe Kleinman, writing for the BBC:

The heat generated by a washing-machine-sized data centre is being used to heat a Devon public swimming pool.

The computers inside the white box are surrounded by oil to capture the heat—enough to heat the pool to about 30C 60% of the time, saving Exmouth Leisure Centre thousands of pounds.

The data centre is provided to the council-run centre free of charge.

Start-up Deep Green charges clients to use its computing power for artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Founder Mark Bjornsgaard said the company would also refund the leisure centre’s electricity costs for running the “digital boiler”—and seven other England pools had signed up to the scheme.

The concept, developed over five years, is relatively straight forward - the hot oil is pumped into a heat exchanger to warm the water in the pool.

As a one-off proof of concept, this is great. As a new paradigm to think about public resources and energy management, I love it.

Deep Green’s pitch is to create “climate and society friendly compute,” essentially replacing giant, exurban datacenters with small, local, urban, carbon-neutral “data furnaces”. They’re creating a more distributed AWS with a built-in heat management solution.

What if cities themselves built these out and provided the compute resources as a sort of civic benefit. Imagine dozens (hudreds? thousands??) of these “washing-machine-sized data centers” scattered across cities, connected not just to swimming pools but boilers in school basements, heat pumps in office buildings, water heaters in fire departments. They could be powered by rooftop solar panels, accessible to residents via a nominal compute fee, and reuse the heat that usually goes to waste. A local, sustainable public cloud!

Of course, you can’t just give people free compute cycles, people would immediately do terrible things with them. Surely, though, there are services you could provide — easy backups, or local caches to speed up home internet, or just power a city’s ever growing need for computers.

The compute pod as mini heat furnace is also a fun way to reconsider energy storage. A few years ago, I started thinking about how I wanted to redesign the energy usage for my house. Solar panels were an obvious choice, but what about storage? Backup batteries are expensive and strike me as wasteful, but then I started expanding my thinking beyond just electrons to energy. A water heater is a store of energy, after all, so if you use your solar panels to fill up a heat-pump-powered water heater connected to radiant floor heating, you’ve obviated the need for one of your home’s biggest consumers of electricity. A bit more obviously, the giant batteries that millions of people drive around town are now also able to power their homes. With a bit of planning, and some Bidenbucks, you could retrofit to netzero without having to install a bank of lithium in your garage.

One change I’ve noticed over the past decade or so that I find generally pretty exciting is new ways to think about climate solutions. For the longest time, the conversation got defined by the forces aligned against change — this will all be too expensive, and it won’t work anyway, we’ll just be shivering through brownouts in our solar-powered shacks. Now, try to tell me a network of distributed data furnaces isn’t cool as hell. Obviously, we can’t just keep going with unchecked growth, nor are we doomed to a grim future of limited imagination.