This piece by Christopher Leonard outlines one of the biggest dangers of the Barrett nomination (other than the brash illiberalism of the process) and a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court: that the U.S. regulatory framework, tenuous and imperfect as it is, will be replaced by an even more lassiez-faire system. Naturally, Charles Koch appears to have been a major player in orchestrating this.

I haven’t been following the Barrett nomination all that closely — it’s a depressing farce and there’s nothing to be learned from such a horrifying display of abuse of power from a Republican party hellbent on solidifying their minority rule for a generation. From the headlines, it appears the usual battle lines are being drawn, over abortion and healthcare primarily.

I don’t believe the Republican party actually cares all that much about making abortion illegal — Mike Pence, a creepy weirdo, probably personally cares, as do his fellow evangelical cultists. But so much of of the project of the Republican party for the past fifty years has been to dismantle and delegitimize the post-New Deal consensus about the role of government in favor a Hobbesian free market that favors the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.

Which really gets at the heart of so much of the cynicism of the Republican party. Charles Koch is almost certainly not motivated by abortion or even voting rights — his professed commitment to libertarianism, in fact, should make him a champion of safe and legal abortion access. He does care deeply about destroying regulation and undoing even the most basic collective commitments of government, so deeply to have spent five decades and a vast inherited fortune making it happen. This cynicism is inseparable from the Republican party today, whether it’s McConnell’s abuse of the legislature to tilt the judiciary or the entire party rallying around a criminally stupid horrorshow like Donald Trump to sign off on all of it before he blithely kicks off to watch four straight hours of Fox News.

I don’t know how simply getting rid of Trump, a vital first step, is going to counter this very long game. The existential problems we face, from climate change to racial justice, require collective action and we are now in a world where that no longer appears possible.

I’m trying to stick with this ongoing reporting, even as the collective world only burns faster and hotter and brighter since the first story dropped just a few weeks ago. What struck me about this latest piece — and it’s something we all know intuitively — is how much of the corruption is just out there in the open. The fact that the Times has to rely on an inside source for tax records to even expose Trump’s malfeasance is, in and of itself, a massive scandal. Then there’s the chart that shows so clearly how often he visits his own private clubs and meets with favor currying donors at the same clubs, all paid for by the government. It’s just a stunning amount of self-dealing and cheap grifting and it’s right out there in the open!

Like the Mueller report before it, the details of the President’s total abdication of duty will have no effect on how people think about the job he’s done. That’s a stunning indictment of our times. We can hope, though, the outcome could be different, even if this reporting has been lost in flood of shit that is the 2020 election. If we manage to excise the cancer and the malignancy that created it, the law comes next.

Machines in space need to operate both quickly (real-time, so they can reorient if they’re about to, say, get fried by too much solar radiation) but also deterministically, so they know how long a process takes to execute, every single time.

(Probably telling that NASA licenses a proprietary, commercial OS where the European Space Agency uses the open source RTEMS)

Following the success of their Illinois unit, ProPublica is adding distributed hubs that will cover North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee in the South, and New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Utah and possibly Colorado in the Southwest. They’re also expanding the Illinois coverage to the rest of the Midwest.

ProPublica does fantastic work and this is decidedly great news, even as it’s also indicative of the broader media landscape shift. Not that long ago, there were excellent local and regional news outlets that most folks living outside of those areas had never heard of, doing the grinding work of journalism. Most of these were not only self-sustaining businesses but wildly successful thanks to owning a natural monopoly on local coverage.

The massive realignment wrought by the internet over the past twenty years has meant consolidation at best, and often shuttering of these institutions. Google and Facebook captured most of the revenue that used to go to local news without providing any of the services that people, businesses, and a functioning democracy relied on. ProPublica’s success is in some ways a strong counter to this, albeit at a scale that doesn’t fully replace what’s came before; it’s also funded — very generously — by philanthropy.

One of the interesting things to watch about this move is how ProPublica will (and won’t) be able to fill in those gaps in their regional expansion. It’s somewhat similar to how the New York Times and the Washington Post have grown in stature, and succeeded after some lean years, while so much of the rest of industry struggled or died. All are doing incredible work, but there are inevitable gaps that scale won’t ever be able to fill. There are, of course, innumerable blogs and newsletters filling in at micro-scale of varying degrees of quality. I don’t mean to sound defeatist or grim — there are lots of opportunities here! — but also opportunists who use this institution gap to dark purposes.

I’ve recommended Park MacDougald’s excellent and horrifically prescient 5-year-old piece on the “neo-reactionary” alt-right before. With the news that Silicon Valley types are hanging out with Mencius Moldbug, a Republican congressman says democracy is overrated, and militant right-wing terrorists plotted on Facebook to kidnap the governor of Michigan, now is perhaps time for a revisit.

Mitsui Fudosan and Takenaka Corporation are planning to build a 17-story wood-frame office tower in Tokyo’s Nihonbashi district. With a proposed height of 70 meters, this would be the tallest wooden building in Japan.

The wood is coming from a sustainable forest owned by Mitsui. The building will use about 20% less carbon than a steel framed building would have.

He makes readers feel in on the savage joke that is late capitalism

Like most newsletters, I read Money Stuff sporadically. Unlike most newsletters, I always learn something and laugh along the way. Levine is an incredibly humane writer about a topic that rarely is.

Radiative cooling is a phenomenon that allows people to make ice in the dessert on a clear night, but practical uses in our modern world have been limited — primarily because it’s most useful at night. Aaswath Raman and his team of researchers are using nanotechnology to create a material that reflects solar radiation and disrupts thermal heat enough to make radiative cooling possible during the day. It’s an incredibly elegant solution to how to keep materials cool without using mechanics or electricity. They’ve commercialized the tech into a way to make air conditioners more efficient.

I genuinely love solutions like this to the biggest problem we face as a planet. It’s innovative, cheap, works with existing systems, and doesn’t require some massive sacrifice. When I see how these small changes can add up, it give me hope, as well as infuriates me that we waste so much time arguing over whether climate change is even a problem worth addressing instead of getting to the urgent work of making the world a better place.

One of Facebook’s more salient and successful qualities is the ability to see where things are headed in a big picture sense — perhaps that’s generous, or perhaps it’s what you’d expect from the most pervasive panopticon ever created. They realized early on normal people don’t care about things like privacy online and exploited that to their maximum advantage, for example. It made them wildly successful and largely unassailable.

They’ve finally looked into the fetid swamp of QAnon and decided that being a vector for this insane malignancy of a truly mad age is not a great look. Only three years too late and after this dark conspiracy has become an untamable Lovecraftian horror. But they see there’s a political, if not necessarily cultural, shift and playing along with Trumpism no longer seems like a winning game. Their cowardice and irresponsiblity will haunt us for a long long time.

Reagan Ray isolated the lettering from dozens of iconic jazz artists. These are glorious.