The Problem Everyone Worried About

There is no easy way to explain the sum of Google’s knowledge. It is ever-expanding. Endless. A growing web of hundreds of billions of websites, more data than even 100,000 of the most expensive iPhones mashed together could possibly store. But right now, I can say this: Google is confused about whether there’s an African country beginning with the letter k.

I’ve asked the search engine to name it. “What is an African country beginning with K?” In response, the site has produced a “featured snippet” answer—one of those chunks of text that you can read directly on the results page, without navigating to another website. It begins like so: “While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, none of them begin with the letter ‘K.’”    READ MORE..

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Meta reportedly punished dozens of employees for offering an inside line to account recovery

After Elon Musk’s ultimatum, Twitter employees start exiting

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Ticketmaster cancels its public sale of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour tickets



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Court filing says Sam Bankman-Fried 'moved digital assets to Bahamas’

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Twitter employees locked out of company offices until Monday as more staff resign, reports say

Models on SextPanther, a Sexting Site, Banned From Sending Sex

Apple’s iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro will reportedly have different USB-C ports

TSA Found a Double-Edged Knife Hidden in a Gaming Laptop 

Roku lays off 200 US employees

Elon Musk lays out options for remaining Twitter employees: click ‘yes’ or you’re done

Facebook reminds employees: You can’t fact check Trump now that he’s running for president

Elon Musk’s new email pushes Twitter managers to do his dirty work

What Do We Lose If We Lose Twitter?
    

Better in Britain

Yes, the roads are confusing, the food portions unambitious, the peanut butter not so good, but for this American, life in the U.K. has its compensations.   By Yasmeen Serhan

This September marks my fifth year of living in Britain, a milestone that comes with its own special reward: a test. 

Specifically, the “Life in the U.K. Test,” an examination that anyone seeking to obtain permanent residency rights in the country and ultimately British citizenship must take. 

The test covers all sorts of questions on Britain’s history—including such seeming trivia as the specific ways Henry VIII got rid of each of his six wives—its laws, its values, and its traditions.

“Comedy and satire, the ability to laugh at ourselves, are an important part of the U.K. character,” reads one passage from the official study handbook. In another, pubs are described as “an important part of U.K. social culture.

”Self-deprecating humor and pub culture are just some of the survival skills you naturally pick up if you live here long enough. But as I prepare for this exam, I can’t help but think about all the practical things about British life that the test-prep materials leave out. 

Contrary to what Sir Elton John would have you believe, sorry really doesn’t seem to be the hardest word for Brits (even if they aren’t always using it sincerely). Talking about the weather really is a perfectly acceptable conversation starter. 

“You all right?” really is a simple greeting rather than an expression of genuine concern.  READ MORE...

Climate Change Alters Wine

Soon after the devastating Glass Fire sparked in California’s Napa Valley in September 2020, wine chemist Anita Oberholster’s inbox was brimming with hundreds of emails from panicked viticulturists. They wanted to know if they could harvest their grapes without a dreaded effect on their wine: the odious ashtray flavor known as smoke taint.

Oberholster, of UC Davis, could only tell them, “Maybe.”

Industry laboratories were slammed with grape samples to test, with wait times of up to six weeks. Growers didn’t know whether it was worth harvesting their crops. About 8 percent of California wine grapes in 2020 were left to rot.

Winemakers are no strangers to the vicissitudes wrought by climate change. Warmer temperatures have been a boon to some in traditionally cooler regions who are rejoicing over riper berries—but devastating to others. Scorching heat waves, wildfires, and other climate-driven calamities have ruined harvests in Europe, North America, Australia, and elsewhere.

And as 2020 showed, climate change can take its toll on grapes without directly destroying them. Wildfires and warmer temperatures can transform the flavor of wine, whose quality and very identity depends on the delicate chemistry of grapes and the conditions they’re grown in. Many growers and winemakers are increasingly concerned that climate change is robbing wines of their defining flavors, even spoiling vintages entirely.

“That’s the big worry,” says Karen MacNeil, a wine expert living in Napa Valley and author of The Wine Bible. “That’s the heartbeat of wine—it’s connected to its place.”

The greatest challenge that climate change brings to winemaking is unpredictability, MacNeil says. Producers used to know which varieties to grow, how to grow them, when to harvest the berries, and how to ferment them to produce a consistent, quality wine—but today, every step is up in the air. This growing recognition is spurring researchers and winemakers to find ways to preserve beloved grape varieties and their unique qualities under the shifting and capricious conditions of today’s warming world.  READ MORE...

What is Putin's ENDGAME?

Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a long speech full of heavy sighs and dark grievances, made clear today that he has chosen war. He went to war against Ukraine in 2014; now he has declared war against the international order of the past 30 years.

Putin’s slumped posture and deadened affect led me to suspect that he is not as stable as we would hope. He had the presence not of a confident president, but of a surly adolescent caught in a misadventure, rolling his eyes at the stupid adults who do not understand how cruel the world has been to him. Teenagers, of course, do not have hundreds of thousands of troops and nuclear weapons.

Even discounting Putin’s delivery, the speech was, in many places, simply unhinged. Putin began with a history lesson about how and why Ukraine even exists. For all his Soviet nostalgia, the Russian president is right that his Soviet predecessors intentionally created a demographic nightmare when drawing the internal borders of the U.S.S.R., a subject I’ve explained at length here.

But Putin’s point wasn’t that the former subjects of the Soviet Union needed to iron out their differences. Rather, he was suggesting that none of the new states that emerged from the Soviet collapse—except for Russia—were real countries. “As a result of Bolshevik policy,” Putin intoned, “Soviet Ukraine arose, which even today can with good reason be called ‘Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s Ukraine’. He is its author and architect.”

It is true that Soviet leaders created the 1991 borders. That is also true of what we now call the Russian Federation. Putin, however, went even further back in history: “Ukraine never had a tradition of genuine statehood.”

By that kind of historical reasoning, few nations in Europe, or anywhere else, are safe. Putin’s foray into history was nothing less than a demand that only Moscow—and only the Kremlin’s supreme leader—has the right to judge what is or is not a sovereign state (as I recently discussed here). Putin’s claims are hardly different from Saddam Hussein’s rewriting of Middle East history when Iraq tried to erase Kuwait from the map.  READ MORE...

About the author: Tom Nichols is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Peacefield.

A Division of the Republic

 Lee Drutman of THE ATLANTIC writes...

John Adams worried that “a division of the republic into two great parties … is to be dreaded as the great political evil.” And that’s exactly what has come to pass.

George Washington’s farewell address is often remembered for its warning against hyper-partisanship: “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.” John Adams, Washington’s successor, similarly worried that “a division of the republic into two great parties … is to be dreaded as the great political evil.”

America has now become that dreaded divided republic. The existential menace is as foretold, and it is breaking the system of government the Founders put in place with the Constitution.

Though America’s two-party system goes back centuries, the threat today is new and different because the two parties are now truly distinct, a development that I date to the 2010 midterms. Until then, the two parties contained enough overlapping multitudes within them that the sort of bargaining and coalition-building natural to multiparty democracy could work inside the two-party system. No more. America now has just two parties, and that’s it.

The theory that guided Washington and Adams was simple, and widespread at the time. If a consistent partisan majority ever united to take control of the government, it would use its power to oppress the minority. The fragile consent of the governed would break down, and violence and authoritarianism would follow. This was how previous republics had fallen into civil wars, and the Framers were intent on learning from history, not repeating its mistakes.  TO READ ENTIRE ARTICLE, Click here...

American Education

After ranking countries based on their levels of education and health, the study found that the US ranked 27th in the world on these metrics as of 2016, behind a host of top-ranking Nordic countries, including Finland, Iceland, Denmark, and the Netherlands.

This comes as little surprise, given that healthcare services in these countries are universal and publicly funded. The US, by contrast, is one of the few developed nations that lacks universal healthcare, according to The Atlantic.

When it comes to education, the nation fares even worse. The latest findings from the Pew Research Center have the US in 38th place out of 71 countries when it comes to math scores and 24th place when it comes to science.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the study is just how far the US has fallen in the rankings. In 1990, the US ranked sixth in the world for its levels of education and health — 21 spots ahead of where it is now.

So, what happened in the last 30 years?

To read the entire article, click here...