Month: July 2019

Dine-and-Dash Dater

Cass thought a ‘dine and dash’ was a fitting crime for a food-lover’s city like Pasadena. It is the birthplace of chef Julia Child, home to 500 restaurants, and one of America’s few Le Cordon Bleu culinary schools. Pasadena is known as the “City of Roses,” and it is Cass who cleans up its quirkier criminal cases. “They’re what we call the ‘X-Files’”. Recently, he captured the ‘Glass Man Burglar,’ a thief who skillfully removed window panes, and the ‘Guitar Bandit’ who delighted newspapermen by pulling off a “string” of thefts. When the detective typed “dine and dash” into Google, to brush up on the law, he was surprised to find 100s of news reports about 1 local man named Paul Gonzales. “He had, like, fans, and they were like, ‘hey, he’s not doing anything wrong. Some websites called Gonzales “scummy” and “Douchebag of the Week.” “This guy was not on any police department’s radar, yet he was one of the most wanted men in America.”

Age-Weighted Voting?

The young will experience the effects of policies passed today for the greatest length of time but this is not reflected in their voting power. Put differently, the time-horizon of (self-interested) older voters is short so perhaps this biases the political system towards short time-horizon policies such as deficit spending or kicking the can down the road on global warming. Philosopher William MacAskill offers an alternative, age-weighted voting. one way of extending political time horizons and increasing is to age-weight votes. The idea is that younger people would get more heavily weighted votes than older people, in proportion with life expectancy. A natural first pass system (though I think it could be improved upon) would be: 18–27yr olds: 6x voting weight 28–37yr olds: 5x voting weight 38–47yr olds: 4x voting weight 48–57yr olds: 3x voting weight 58–67yr olds: 2x voting weight 68+yr olds: 1x voting weight

Essay on long-term threats

On BBC Future I have an essay concluding their amazing season on long term thinking where I go really long-term: The greatest long term threats facing humanity. The approach I take there is to look at the question “if we have survived X years into the future, what problems must we have overcome before that?” It is not so much the threats (or frankly, problems – threat seems to imply a bit more active maliciousness than the universe normally brings about) that are interesting as just how radically we need to change or grow in power to meet them. The central paradox of survival is that it requires change, and long-term that means that what survives may be very alien. Not so much a problem for me, but I think many disagree. A solid state civilization powered by black holes in a starless universe close to absolute 0, planning billions of years ahead may sound like a great continuation of us, or something too alien to matter.

800 Producers

While listening back to this huge volume of material we noticed something interesting; above and beyond each track’s individual sound and overall character, we were able to make out a few trends and tendencies in the ways that people were working with the source material. And so we’ve assembled a few playlists with prime examples of some of the main approaches we were hearing.

101 Work Changes

Adaptability quotient In an ever-changing work environment, ‘AQ’, rather than IQ, might become an increasingly significant marker of success. Deep work Always being switched on means we never have the chance to think deeply. That is a problem for companies wanting to get the most out of their employees.

Quantum Darwinism

One of the most remarkable ideas in this theoretical framework is that the definite properties of objects that we associate with classical physics are selected from a menu of quantum possibilities in a process loosely analogous to natural selection in evolution: The properties that survive are in some sense the “fittest.” As in natural selection, the survivors are those that make the most copies of themselves. This means that many independent observers can make measurements of a quantum system and agree on the outcome — a hallmark of classical behavior.

Cosmic Crisp

Brooke Jarvis writes on the development and promise of the newest apple hitting store shelves this fall, and what it took to make it happen. The Cosmic Crisp is debuting on grocery stores after this fall’s harvest, and in the nervous lead-up to the launch, everyone from nursery operators to marketers wanted me to understand the crazy scope of the thing: the scale of the plantings, the speed with which mountains of commercially untested fruit would be arriving on the market, the size of the capital risk. People kept saying things like “unprecedented,” “on steroids,” “off the friggin’ charts,” and “the largest launch of a single produce item in American history.”