3 stars
4.5 Billion Years in 1 Hour | kurzgesagt [YouTube]
While I’m admittedly a palaeontology nerd, and while most of you won’t watch the entire thing at 1x speed, this is still my top recommendation this week. (Plus, it has 6M views in 2 weeks, so it can’t be that niche…)
Earth is 4.5 billion years old - which is approximately the same amount of time it took us to create this video.
We’ve scaled the complete timeline of our Earth’s life into our first animated movie! Every second shows about a million years of the planet’s evolution. Hop on a musical train ride and experience how long a billion years really is. It’s the perfect background for your next party, a great way to take a break from studying, or a fascinating companion while you’re on the go … and our celebration of 10 years of kurzgesagt.
Wang Huning and the Eternal Return to 1975
Insightful:
Part travel diary, party philosophical reflection, America Against America was published well before Wang began his upward climb in the Party ranks. This makes it an unusually honest statement of the ideas and ideals of one of China’s most powerful men.
I think almost every analysis of America Against America published in English gets this book wrong. Most describe it as a treatise on American decline, a screed against American decadence, and so forth. It is very difficult to read America Against America cover to cover and walk away with that conclusion. For every passage of piercing critique there is some other section of unqualified admiration. For the most part Wang’s tone is contemplative and curious. He is driven to discover what aspects of the American experience are accidents of American history, and which point to more general lessons that might be applicable to his home country. […]
Thus for Wang, the American obsession with the future is the one countervailing force in American life strong enough to moderate the atomizing tendencies of modern capitalism. He sees evidence of American futurism everywhere he looks: in the science fiction blockbusters Americans watch, in the ambitious urban planning committees of American cities, in farsighted Pentagon budgeting and base building, in the money Americans pump into the university education system, and in the fantastic engineering marvels Americans build. […]
Foreigners were saying things like this about the American people all the way back in the 1820s. I do not think this would be most foreign visitors first observations about Americans today. It is, however, the sort of thing foreign visitors say about China. If a road was to be built across the Pacific today, we would expect the Chinese to build it.
This is not a judgement about the relative power or even economic vitality of China and the United States. Rather, it is a judgement about which society cultivates, in Wang’s terms, a greater “spirit of novelty.” In 1989 Wang feared that China could not advance because its people were not willing to accept an American pace of change. Events have proved these worries wrong: in the years since Wang published his book Chinese society has changed at a pace with no parallel in world history. Almost everything Wang celebrates about American society in these passages—the American people’s indomitable drive to build, their quick acceptance of new technologies into their daily lives, their celebration of science and technology, their willingness to sacrifice time and money in the present for the sake of technical advances that will only bear fruit after a generation of labor, an optimistic and future oriented worldview—are now more characteristic of his own society. Even the world’s most famous living science fiction novelist is Chinese.
Why Dumb Ideas Capture Smart and Successful People | Rob Henderson’s Newsletter
Many have discovered an argument hack. They don’t need to argue that something is false. They just need to show that it’s associated with low status. The converse is also true: You don’t need to argue that something is true. You just need to show that it’s associated with high status. And when low status people express the truth, it sometimes becomes high status to lie. […]
The increase is especially pronounced among the educated class. The researchers report, “It is also noteworthy and perhaps unexpected that those who engage in self-censorship are not those with limited political resources… self-censorship is most common among those with the highest levels of education… This finding suggests a social learning process, with those with more education being more cognizant of social norms that discourage the expression of one’s views.”
2 stars
The Bond villain compliance strategy | Bits About Money
For years I have used the phrase “Bond villain compliance strategy” to describe a common practice in the cryptocurrency industry.
In it, your operation is carefully based Far Away From Here. You are, critically, not like standard offshore finance, with a particular address in a particular country which just happens to be on the high-risk jurisdiction list. You are nowhere because you want to be everywhere. You tell any lie required to any party—government, bank, whatever—to get access to the banking rails and desirable counterparties located in rich countries with functioning governments. You abandon or evolve the lie a few years later after finally being caught in it.
Your users and counterparties understand it to be a lie the entire time, of course. You bragged about it on your site and explained it to adoring fans at conferences. You created guides to have your CS staff instruct users on how to use a VPN to evade your geofencing. The more clueful among your counterparties, who have competent lawyers and aspirations to continue making money in desirable jurisdictions, will come to describe your behavior as an “open secret” in the industry. They will claim you’ve turned over a new leaf given that the most current version of the lie only merely rhymes with the previous version of the lie.
And then we begin the third act.
So anyhow, Binance and its CEO Changpeng Zhao (known nearly universally as CZ) have recently pleaded guilty to operating the world’s largest criminal conspiracy to launder money, paying more than $4 billion in fines. This settles a long-running investigation involving the DOJ, CFTC, FinCEN, and assorted other parts of the U.S. regulatory state. Importantly, it does not resolve the SEC’s parallel action.
How’d we get here?
The Super-Scary Theory of the 21st Century | Noahpinion
Back in late 2020 I sketched a theory of how modern technology might lead to a shift in global power that favored totalitarian countries over free ones. In brief, the basic idea is that social media might throw democracies into instability and chaos, while AI allows totalitarian governments to control their populaces more tightly than ever before.
Three years later, I’m still just as worried as I was back then. Pro-Palestine protests are rocking Western cities and college campuses, support for Donald Trump and other chaos agents remains strong, and social media “vibes” have contributed to American pessimism even in the face of a strong economy. In a post last week, I argued that Chinese control of TikTok and Russia’s influence on Twitter, combined with liberal governments’ refusal to block these incursions or to engage in active messaging of their own, constitute a dramatic collapse of liberalism’s position in the information war.
Australia’s subterranean oasis | BBC
Coober Pedy is at the centre of Australia’s opal mining industry. Now, 60% of its residents live underground, and the town is becoming a leader in sustainable living.
What's the deal with Biden's poor polling with young voters? | Silver Bulletin
There's no shortage of explanations for why young voters are unhappy with Biden — without having to unskew the polls.
Feeling strangely optimistic about Egypt | Noahpinion
It’s kind of a tradition for opinion writers to get topic ideas from cab drivers. When I was heading to the airport to go to Ireland and Singapore a few weeks ago, my cabbie, who had recently immigrated from Egypt, asked me to write about his home country.
If Americans think about Egypt’s economy at all (which they typically don’t), they generally regard it as a basket case. And with some justification. It’s a mostly-desert Middle Eastern country with a large and growing population but without much oil, and it runs a large trade deficit. A decade ago it was shaken by a revolution followed by a military coup. The man who spearheaded that coup, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, is still in charge of the country. All of these factors usually make for a pessimistic outlook.
But when I had a chance, I took a closer look at Egypt’s economic situation, and I found some things to be encouraged about.
1 star
Unauthorized “David Attenborough” AI clone narrates developer’s life, goes viral | Ars Technica
"We observe the sophisticated Homo sapiens engaging in the ritual of hydration."
Study tracks how we decide which groups to join | University of Oxford
Not really surprising:
Researchers have used high-definition video cameras on the roof of a large indoor stadium to track how strangers formed groups.
They found that individuals were likely to join groups containing members with similar physical traits – including levels of attractiveness. The researchers also discovered that attractive women were the most likely to be placed in the physical centre of social groups.
The Geert Wilders victory, and more | Marginal Revolution
Wilders won resoundingly in the Netherlands, and polled much stronger after October 7. Yesterday there were anti-immigrant riots in Dublin, typically a relatively open city (most likely an Algerian migrant stabbed several people). The “far right” party in Austria is very popular, AfD is doing well in Germany, and France could flip. Italy already is there, noting that actual governance has not been so different under Meloni. The Sweden Democrats are part of the ruling coalition. That is a lot of the core EU group, plus Ireland and Sweden. And maybe I have forgotten somebody.
Note to media: Since they keep winning elections, or at least placing well, you can’t call them “far right” any more! How about “deep center”?
HORSEFEATHERSES! | Slate
Scrabble’s new tournament word list adds words that lexicographers say aren’t actually words at all.