#Technology Hits on Substack

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

Technology Hits: New Submission Guidelines - 2024

Technology Join a unique publication supporting writers penning about technology to find a broad audience using the power of ILLUMINATION on Medium. Dear Writers and Readers, Coming from a technology and science background, I have a strong affinity for technology writers and tech topics on multiple platforms. I enjoy reading their stories, but I also like reviewing, curating, and promoting…

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Minor, The Pain of All The World, c. 1910

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The New Malthusianism of the Right

How the Right Repackages Malthusian Logic to Justify Exclusion, Fear, and Social Control

James B. Greenberg

Jun 17, 2025

There is an unspoken logic behind the right’s crusade to dismantle the public sphere: a modern Malthusianism, dressed in the language of efficiency and merit, but rooted in something much older and more brutal. It sees poverty not as a structural failure, but as evidence of surplus life—populations deemed unnecessary, unworthy, unfit for rescue.

This worldview doesn’t rely on overt violence. It doesn’t need to. The tools are policy, budget cuts, and selective silence. Remove access to healthcare. Undermine vaccination campaigns. Hollow out the safety net. The result is a slow culling by design—death by bureaucratic abandonment. What emerges is not the spectacle of fascism, but its quieter cousin: a soft, managed cruelty that lets nature, supposedly, take its course.

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The recent gutting of USAID under Elon Musk’s influence is a case in point. A technocrat’s dream of efficiency masks a strategic withdrawal from responsibility. Bill Gates, not often given to hyperbole, warned that this vision leaves the world’s poorest to die at the hands of the world’s richest. It’s not just a policy shift—it’s a value statement. A declaration about whose lives are worth sustaining, and whose are not.

This isn’t new. Malthusian logic has long served as moral cover for violent inequality—from colonial famine policies to eugenics programs to the gatekeeping of immigration. The targets change, but the rationale remains: some lives are worth preserving, others are simply excess. What’s changed is the mechanism. Today it’s not enacted through spectacle or coercion, but through metrics, models, and managed invisibility. The cruelty is buried in algorithms and budget lines.

Malthus imagined famine and disease as natural checks on the population of agrarian societies. But the 21st century presents the opposite challenge. Birthrates in the wealthiest countries have dropped below replacement levels. Scarcity, where it exists, is political, not demographic. Yet the Malthusian myth has endured—reshaped and redeployed as ideological cover for policies of containment and control.

Today, that logic finds new footing in national security circles. Climate change is no longer just an environmental issue—it’s portrayed as a destabilizer of poor nations and a trigger for mass migration. Droughts, floods, and crop failures become reframed not as humanitarian emergencies, but as threats to the wealth and borders of the Global North. Migrants are recast as invaders. The displaced become suspects. Fortress policies follow.

But these policies don’t just emerge from fear—they serve profit. As walls rise and aid retracts, private security firms, data contractors, and border surveillance industries step in. Crisis becomes a business model. Technologies once pitched as humanitarian tools—satellite tracking, biometric IDs, AI forecasting—are now deployed to sort, exclude, and contain. The logic remains unchanged: manage the risk, shield the center, and let the margins fall away.

What’s most revealing is how this rhetoric obscures the actual source of vulnerability. It isn’t overpopulation that drives suffering—it’s the uneven distribution of power, resources, and the means of survival. Climate change doesn’t kill indiscriminately. It amplifies existing inequalities. It hits hardest where protections have been deliberately withdrawn.

This isn’t governance. It’s triage on a planetary scale. And it reflects a profound shift in the function of the state—from protector to gatekeeper, from provider to sorter. The new Malthusianism isn’t about managing numbers. It’s about managing narratives—who belongs, who drains, who deserves.

Anthropologists have long studied how states make populations legible, governable, and expendable. What we’re witnessing now is a recalibration of that calculus under the pressures of climate, capital, and ideology. The danger is not just that certain lives are deemed unworthy—but that their abandonment becomes rational, even moralized.

We are told this is simply how the world works now. But that’s not true. It’s how power works when it no longer pretends to care. But people are not numbers. And history reminds us that even in the shadow of abandonment, solidarity can rewrite the script.

Suggested Readings

Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Biehl, João. “The Juridical Afterlife of the Poor: Brazilian Public Health and the Politics of Abandonment.” Journal of Political Ecology 15 (2008): 1–18.

Greenberg, James B., and Thomas K. Park, eds. Terrestrial Transformations: Political Ecology, Climate, and the Remaking of Planet Earth. New York: Lexington Books, 2023.

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.

Sassen, Saskia. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014.

Vélez-Ibáñez, Carlos G. The Rise of Necro/Narco-Citizenship: Belonging and Dying in the National Borderlands. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2025.

Weizman, Eyal. The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza.London: Verso, 2012.

[rjzimmerman]

"Vandalism, with a plan." (From the Substack of Bill McKibben)

It would be tempting to dismiss Trump’s many functionaries as idiots, because many of them are. But if there’s endless idiocy at work (some of it as cover—if I was taking flak for my $400 million flying bribe I’d start tweeting about Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen too), there’s also a kind of underlying feral cunning. All the stupid stuff heads in the same direction.

For example, the administration last week announced it would get rid of the Energy Star program, which rates various appliances by their efficiency so that consumers (and landlords and building owners) can make wise choices.

This is a program begun by Republicans—former EPA administrator William K. Reilly wrote a fond reminiscence yesterday for the Washington Post, who pointed out that if you were actually worried about, say, waste, then this would be the last program to cut

The program costs $32 million in annual federal outlays to administer but has saved consumers $200 billion in utility bills since 1992 — $14 billion in 2024 alone. The averted air pollution, which was the EPA’s initial objective, has been considerable, equivalent to the emissions of hundreds of thousands of cars removed from the road.

But what if you wanted to burn more fossil fuel? What if you wanted to stretch out the transition to cheap, clean renewable energy? Well then it would make a lot of sense. 

Or take yesterday’s news, from EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, vowed that he would eliminate the “start-stop” technology in cars because “everyone hates it.” This feature keeps your car from idling at stoplights—when you tap the accelerator the car turns back on. It’s not mandatory for carmakers, and drivers can turn it off with a button. But, as Fox News points out, 

The feature can improve fuel economy by between 4% and 5%, previous EPA estimates showed. It also eliminated nearly 10 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year as of 2023. The feature can improve fuel economy by between 4% and 5%, previous EPA estimates showed. It also eliminated nearly 10 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year as of 2023.

Meanwhile, energy secretary Chris Wright, according to excellent reporting in Heatmap News today, is taking federal money designed to convert a steel plant to electricity and hydrogen and instead using it to convert the steel plant to…the fossil fuel it’s already using. The company, its CEO explained, is working with the Department of Energy to “explore changes in scope to better align with the administration’s energy priorities,” and those priorities, of course, are to use more energy.

Occam’s Razor, I think, would lead us to say that many things the Trump administration does are simply designed to waste energy, because that is good for the incumbent producers, i.e. Big Oil. That’s not a particularly sophisticated rule for understanding their actions, but remember: Trump was bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry, and that industry has always wanted us to waste energy. Remember all that endless Trump nonsense about low-flow shower heads? They cut the use of hot water by about forty percent. Ditto incandescent bulbs, which use 75-90 percent more energy, and which Trump is trying to bring back. It’s strange to be pro-waste, but there you are. This administration is garbage in every way.

That all of this costs consumers money is obvious—but we don’t really pretend to care about consumers any more. Remember: two dolls and five pencils apiece. No, the ultimate customer for the Trump administration is the oil industry. And really for the GOP as a whole: it became increasingly clear this week that the Republican Congressional majority is all too willing to gut the IRA, even though that will come at a big price to consumers, in its effort to help Big Oil.

And Big Oil is in trouble. Power demand in New England hit an all time low in late April, because so many homes now have solar panels on top. In, um, Saudi Arabia solar arrays are springing up left and right. Bloomberg’s David Fickling chronicles the “relentless” switch towards spending on clean energuy, albeit too slowly to hit the most important climate targets. A new global poll of business executives found that 97 percent were eager to make the switch to renewable energy for their companies, on the grounds that

Electricity is the most efficient form of energy, and renewables-generated electricity a value-add to businesses and economies. In many countries, fossil fuels, with their exposure to imports and volatility to geopolitical shocks, are a liability. For business, this isn’t just inconvenient. It’s dangerous. Volatility drives up costs, turns strategic planning into guesswork and delays investment.

That’s how sensible people with sensible goals—like making their businesses work, think. But it’s exactly the opposite of how our government now imagines its role. The DOE put their strategy pretty plainly in a filing to the Federal Register yesterday: their goal, they said, was “bolstering American energy dominance by increasing exports and subsequently the reliance of foreign nations on American energy.” If you’re a foreign government, that about sums it up: either you can rely on the sun and wind which shine on your country, or you can rely on the incredibly unreliable U.S. China, meanwhile, is essentially exporting energy security, in the form of clean energy tech. 

So the goal for the rest of us, as we resist Trump and resist climate change, is pretty clear: do everything we can to speed up this transition to clean energy, here and everywhere. Solar works, solar is cheap, and solar is liberating.

[notwiselybuttoowell]

Vivi Armacost loves Temu. She uses the Chinese online marketplace to buy crafting supplies for her purse-making hobby. “You can get purse detailing and hardware for cents and pennies,” said Armacost, who is 24 and lives in New York. She says it seems like “basically everything” in her apartment comes from Temu

Donald Trump’s 10% tariff on China-made goods sold to the US, which went into effect early on Tuesday morning, might change her shopping habits. On top of this, the US Postal Service briefly suspended deliveries of incoming parcels from China and Hong Kong before they were later resumed.

The tariff closes off a trade loophole that allowed fast-fashion companies such as Temu and Shein to ship packages under $800 into the US duty-free; this loophole, called “de minimis” has been criticized by both political parties in recent years. On Tuesday, Reuters reported that Shein and Temu are now likely to raise prices, as is Amazon’s Haul, a new e-commerce app that imports products from China-based sellers.

Shoppers are concerned the tariff will get in the way of their retail therapy.

“Trying to get that last Temu order in before Trump puts another tariff on China,” Armacost, who works in consulting and also makes comedy videos on TikTok, captioned a post on Monday that shows her frantically typing on a computer, hacker movie-style. It was mostly a joke, but she has friends who made one final Temu run. “My friend Piper got a ton of apartment stuff during a last-minute tariff haul,” she said.

Temu – which surpassed Amazon as the most-downloaded shopping app in 2023 – and Shein are beloved by the overly trendy and the obsessively thrifty. While Shein is known primarily for clothing, Temu also sells makeup, home goods and decor. These products are cheap – just over $4 for a pair of women’s sneakers on Temu, or $1.45 for bracelet on Temu – but of dubious quality. Inevitably, many end up in landfills.

“A lot of the stuff comes actually way smaller than you expect,” Armacost said. “I bought a desk lamp, except it can fit in my hands.”

In the months before Trump took office, shoppers urged each other to stock up on Temu and Shein, in case the new administration followed through on its promise to tax US trade partners. “Kinda feeling emo bc this may be the last good Black Friday for a while because of the tariffs,” one TikTok user wrote in a clip. “Better collect your ‘vintage Shein’ because they will probably go for $100 next year.’”

Two days after the election, the fashion writer Amy Odell warned readers of price hikes in a post to her BackRow Substack titled: “Trump Won. So Shop Now.” Susan Scafidi, a lawyer and founder of Fordham’s Fashion Law Institute, told Odell: “Everything’s going to be more expensive, which is a little crazy when you realize that a lot of the Trump appeal was with regard to the economy.”

Could the tariff kill fast fashion, an industry defined by wasteful over-consumption, as we know it? No, says Margaret Bishop, a textile and apparel specialist and professor at New York’s Parsons School of Design and the Fashion Institute of Technology. “If anything, I think these tariffs will strengthen fast fashion’s hold on customers,” she said. “If everything costs more, particularly food, transportation and housing, they’re going to have to cut back somewhere.

“Americans have a real hunger for new fashion, so they will trade down to be able to continue to buy things. If a $1 pack of T-shirts at Temu becomes $2 a pack, that’s still cheaper than spending $20 for a couple of T-shirts that are better made,” she continued.

Sheng Lu, a professor of fashion and apparel studies at the University of Delaware, agreed that tariffs would not “fundamentally shift” Americans’ love of a good, if sketchy, deal. While small businesses will bear most of the pain from tariffs – due to supply chain snarls or the fact that Americans won’t be able to spend as much – larger corporations such as Shein and Temu tend to absorb costs.

“These companies are resourceful,” Lu said. “My more immediate concern is that small and medium-sized enterprises won’t survive, or will face significant challenges.”

In 2023, a US congressional report alleged that there was an “extremely high risk” that Temu used forced labor in its supply chain, and that both Shein and Temu evaded US human rights reviews. (Shein denied these claims at the time, while Temu did not comment on the report.) A recent report from the Swiss advocacy group Public Eye found that some Shein workers endure 75-hour work weeks. (Shein told the BBC it was “working hard” to address the issues raised in the report.)

The fast-fashion industry is also synonymous with high carbon emissions and pollution.

Lu fears that tariffs will exacerbate these issues. “If they have to pay more on tariff duties but at the same time make their prices competitive, that’s not good news for workers or the environmental impact, because companies will have more incentive to cut corners,” he said.

In the EU, the European Commission moved on Wednesday to tighten checks on goods sold by online retailers such as Shein and Temu, amid fears that “dangerous products” were flooding the market and that local competitors were losing out to competitors selling unsafe or counterfeit products.

Armacost knows that these e-commerce giants represent the worst of Americans’ desire for excess. “But also, at the same time, spending does stimulate the economy,” she said. “In response to the idea that it’s a good thing if people stop ordering so much random stuff, I say: ‘What’s the point of living in a country if I can’t order 100 pieces of junk for $15?’”

[mariacallous]

In his continued quest to become either the president of the United States or else a very interesting footnote to someone else’s reelection, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has enlisted a number of celebrities and influencers. On Tuesday, he expanded those ranks, confirming to The New York Times that he is “considering” NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers and former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura for his vice presidential pick; Politico reported that he’ has also “approached” Senator Rand Paul, former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, and motivational speaker Tony Robbins.

But it was Rodgers and Ventura who drew the most attention from the press, and it’s their roles in the information ecosystem who most signal what Kennedy is doing. Outside of their careers in the NFL and WWE, Rodgers and Ventura are known for, respectively, promoting anti-vaccine views in conversations with sports podcasters and Joe Rogan, and promoting politically contrarian, occasionally conspiratorial views on cable TV and Substack. By publicizing his interest in them, Kennedy is making overtures to a very specific potential voter: the highly online and politically disaffected young man.

Kennedy, an environmental activist turned anti-vaccine superstar, is already running an extremely online campaign; as WIRED noted recently, the candidate is omnipresent on Instagram, podcasts, and Substack and has used influencers as proxies who will deliver his message to his niche bases. Over the past few months, Kennedy has been seen hanging out with snowboarder Travis Rice, naming a young and persistently bleached-blonde TikToker and aspiring musician named Link Lauren as a “senior adviser” on his campaign, and appearing at a Bitcoin conference.

Online is a comfortable environment for Kennedy, a dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy theorist who has promoted anti-vaccine views since 2005. Beyond his many and virulent anti-vaccine campaigns, he’s been especially willing to engage in conspiracy theories that are likely to go viral, most notably suggesting that the CIA may have assassinated his uncle, John F. Kennedy, and promoted long-debunked and extremely dangerous junk science about AIDS not being caused by HIV. He has also tried awkwardly to engage with the conspiracy theories about dead pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, on whose private plane he rode at least twice. In December he said that Epstein’s flight logs should be released, and tweeted, “I’m not hiding anything, but they are!”

His efforts to appeal to both a conspiratorial base and a more mainstream voting bloc have been occasionally clumsy, but persistent—and by shoring up his base among young men, who will be increasingly important this election year, he appears to be figuring out how to bridge that gap. One enormous help was, of course, his own appearance on Rogan’s podcast, where the two engaged in three hours of long-winded conspiracy theories about vaccines, 5G technology, and ivermectin, among Kennedy’s other greatest-hits talking points.

Kennedy’s interest in speaking to very online, purportedly “anti-establishment” spaces also means, necessarily, that the people he’s speaking to have a demonstrable overlap with the so-called manosphere, the broad group of bloggers, podcasters, influencers, and grievance-peddlers speaking to young men. Choosing to align himself with figures like Aaron Rodgers—a mainstream football star who has promoted increasingly fringe beliefs, and declared himself to be very brave for doing so—is an excellent way to appeal to the Venn diagram of young men and the conspiracy-curious, says Derek Beres. “It completely makes sense for what he’s doing.”

Beres is an author, speaker, and podcaster who’s one of the cohosts of Conspirituality, which looks at the overlap between New Age and far-right movements. In that role, Beres has observed Kennedy at close range for years and says, “One of the things that I don’t think is talked about enough but is really smart on RFK’s part is he’s been mobilizing fringe communities since he announced his presidential run.”

Neither Rodgers nor Ventura are what you would call politically serious choices; Rodgers has never held elected office, while Ventura hasn’t in 20 years. Neither man speaks to a base that Kennedy hasn’t already hit; in that role, Paul and Gabbard would make more political sense.

Instead, Kennedy is front-loading two men who the young male voter might find in a late-night TikTok or Instagram scroll and who are known for their own fondness for indulging in conspiracy theories and misinformation. Rodgers is best known lately for making misleading claims about being "immunized for Covid,” later revealing that he was taking fake homeopathic “vaccines,” and for appearing to suggest that late-night host Jimmy Kimmel might appear on a list of Jeffrey Epstein’s associates, for which Kimmel instantly threatened to sue him. He has also become a repeat guest on Rogan’s podcast; in his most recent appearance in February, he nodded along as Rogan claimed that Covid was created in a lab. On Wednesday, it was also reported by CNN that he’d shared Sandy Hook conspiracy theories privately, including in 2013, to Pamela Brown, one of the journalists bylined on the story.

For his part, after Ventura was governor, he had a show called Conspiracy Theory on the outlet TruTV. Clips from the show still occasionally go viral, especially ones purporting to show that the pandemic was “planned.” He then had a show on Russian state-backed news outlet RT America, which focused on purported American hypocrisy wherever he could find it. In a slightly awkward fit for Kennedy, Ventura also decried people who refused to wear masks early in the pandemic. (Kennedy spent a lot of time incorrectly but predictably claiming that mask-wearing was useless and in fact harmful.) Now, Ventura has a Substack with his son, where he delivers political commentary and wrestling stories, a move he claims he made after RT America unceremoniously dumped him for decrying the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

And most importantly, both Ventura and Rodgers—as outsize and slightly eccentric sports figures—are heroes largely to young men.

Kennedy, Beres says, “is playing culture war politics,” where someone like Aaron Rodgers would make sense; it’s part of his appeal, Beres says, to the mostly male-dominated online body-optimization space. In addition to doing shirtless pushups (in jeans, for some reason), Kennedy has also made numerous appearances with Aubrey Marcus, a fitness influencer and motivational speaker who has been one of his most enthusiastic proxies. The two men are appearing together this weekend at the grandiosely named American Wellness Summit, a Kennedy campaign event just outside Austin, Texas, where the cheapest tickets are a $1,500 campaign donation.

“We’re in a cultural space where you have Donald Trump, who in the past said that exercise depletes your body,” Beres explains. “Then you have a big conversation around Biden’s age, which the right has been pushing and which has been effective in terms of their propaganda. And then you have RFK, who works out at Gold’s Gym and has been spotted there hanging out with Andrew Huberman,” an astonishingly popular neuroscience podcaster. “The optics alone are going to appeal to a young male crowd.”

For his part, Donald Trump has made his own bid for the young male vote’s affections, showing up at Sneaker Con to hawk $400 Trump-branded shoes, signaling his support for Bitcoin, getting (somewhat) into football, and showing up at a UFC match, where he mainly made headlines for appearing to ignore his own grandson. Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, meanwhile, recently got a coveted endorsement from a coalition of 15 Gen Z and millennial voting groups. But as an MSNBC opinion column noted last month, opinion polls seem to show Kennedy with a slim lead among voters 18–34. And as Gallup noted in January, Biden’s favorability ratings among young and non-white adults has fallen since he became president, while Kennedy has “majority-level favorable rating” across all major gender, race, and age groups. Gallup’s Lydia Saad noted that Kennedy could “appeal to that segment of voters who are resistant to Biden but are also not sold on Trump.”

Kennedy has enjoyed, however, some base of support among women for quite some time. The anti-vaccine movement is powered in large part at the grassroots level by mothers who wrongly believe that their choice to vaccinate their children led to them having conditions like autism; women can often be seen crying, cheering, and frankly swooning when Kennedy speaks in front of those audiences. One of his other prominent campaign proxies is an enormously popular celebrity and lifestyle blogger named Jessica Reed Kraus, better known by her online handle Houseinhabit, who is stumping somewhat equally for Kennedy and Trump. (Kraus, too, went viral for involving herself in two high-profile trials, once claiming that Johnny Depp had confided in her during his defamation trial against Amber Heard, as well as“covering” human trafficker and Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal trial in a fairly sympathetic way.)

Despite that preexisting base of support, Kennedy has done very little to speak further to women, especially young women. After speaking at a recent libertarian forum, he declined to tell The Washington Post whether he would protect abortion access and said initially that he hadn’t read a controversial Alabama IVF ruling. (He later said he had reviewed it and “wholeheartedly” rejected the ruling.) He has said he would support a 15-week abortion ban and later said he wouldn’t, and he has called abortion “a tragedy.” Amidst all this waffling over a core issue affecting young women, he found time to meet with an anti-child-support advocate who presents it as a “war on men,” which was then released as part of a Blacks for Kennedy promotional video. (In his attempt to court Black voters, Kennedy did speak with a panel of women in Atlanta. Politico reported that the meeting was coordinated by Angela Stanton King, a former Blacks for Trump proxy who was pardoned by the former president in 2020 for a previous felony conviction.)

In a way, Beres says, Kennedy is campaigning more as an influencer than as a politician, displaying his lifestyle and his connections in a way that would also appeal to an isolated, online male crowd looking for models of how—and who—to be: “He nails an image,” Beres says, “that a lot of people don’t understand they need a lot of money and connections to acquire.” In the end, promoting a controversial athlete and an ex-governor turned blogger as vice-presidential picks may not signal a coherent political vision. But it does show an enormous hunger to engage with online spaces where the young and disaffected men gather, and wait to be shown the way.

[shortformblog]

The Formula That Shaped Cable TV 📺

So, I do this thing where I publish a shorter version of Tedium on different outlets like Substack and LinkedIn. I call it Lesser Tedium, and I’m going to try it here. If you like it, subscribe to Tedium here. If you think it sucks, leave an angry comment, so I feel the depth of your anger.

A forgotten TV show from the late ’80s played a massive influence on how cable television was made—so much so that the formula it spawned is better known than the show.

In the midst of the recent Writers Guild of America strike, a lot has been said about the ways that writers are paid, particularly how the rules often end up being quite confusing.

But even when the rules work out, they can be weird as heck. My case in point: The weird case of what happened to the late-’80s show Sanchez of Bel Air.

This show, which aired during the fall of 1986, was a bit of a forgotten unicorn at the time of its release. Airing on the USA Network, the show had a lot in common with a later Bel Air-based television show, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, albeit focusing on an upwardly mobile Latino family rather than a black one. It was a sitcom when cable television was not known for airing sitcoms.

The show aired on USA at a time when representation, especially positive representation, of Latinos on television was quite limited, and the show did receive criticism for not being particularly authentic. (One potential reason for this: While its cast—with the notable exception of Bobby Sherman, for some reason—was largely Latino, its creators, Dave Hackel and April Kelly, were white.)

The show was not a hit, and disappeared after just 13 episodes. But because it appeared so early in the history of cable television, it became a bit of an unexpected landmark for completely behind-the-scenes reasons.

See, as a part of the show’s creation as one of the first sitcoms explicitly produced for the medium, it led to the development of a residual agreement about how much writers received upon re-airings of the show. The current formula breaks down as such: For the second to fifth re-airings, writers get 50 percent residuals, then it shrinks down to 6 percent on the sixth re-airing and 4 for each of the 7th and 8th re-airings. Gradually, the scale slides down until the 13th re-airing, when every future replay gets 1.5 percent each.

This formula, crazy as it sounds, is better known than Sanchez of Bel Air. It’s called the Sanchez Formula, and is generally used for scripted shows that air on cable television.

In many ways, emerging technologies shift the game for writer compensation—and the current Writers Guild of America strike highlights how, when these rates fall out of sync with the work being created, it can create serious problems. While the Sanchez formula wasn’t perfect, it worked well enough that it has stuck around for nearly 40 years.

» Wanna learn more? Check out my 2018 piece “TV’s Hidden Math,” which explains why so many shows have 13 or 65 episodes—especially if they’re syndicated.

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

We launched the After Babel Substack eleven months ago, on Feb 1, 2023. We’ll have a post next February reflecting on our first year and looking ahead to our second. In this post, we highlight a few of our 31 posts that readers seemed to enjoy most, and that we believe are the most essential readings for those following this Substack. 

The central question animating the After Babel Substack is this: Why does it feel like everything has been going haywire since the early 2010s, and what role does digital technology play in causing this social and epistemic chaos? We explore the chaos in two primary domains: adolescent mental health (which has been our focus this year, as we worked on The Anxious Generation), and liberal democracy (which will become increasingly important in late 2024, as we begin to work on the second part of the Babel project, a book tentatively titled Life After Babel: Adapting to a world we can no longer share). 

The main line of our work so far can be summarized like this: We have shown that there is an adolescent mental health crisis and it was caused primarily by the rapid rewiring of childhood in the early 2010s, from play-based to phone-based. It hit many countries at the same time and it is hitting boys as well as girls, although with substantial gender differences.

Here is that main line in five posts, with a figure from each post:

Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic. Here’s the Evidence. By Jon Haidt

This post frames the research debate and then summarizes the empirical evidence showing that heavy social media usage is a major cause, not just a correlate, of adolescent mental illness and suffering. (I also wrote a response to skeptics who critiqued this post.)

Figure 1. Percent of UK adolescents with “clinically relevant depressive symptoms” by hours per weekday of social media use. Haidt and Twenge created this graph from the data given in Table 2 of Kelly, Zilanawala, Booker, & Sacker (2019).

Here are 13 Other Explanations for the Adolescent Mental Health Crisis. None of them Work. By Jean Twenge 

Jean Twenge, who was among the first to diagnose the problem in 2017, raises 13 alternative theories that we often hear and shows why they don’t fit the facts. They certainly can’t explain why the crisis hit so many countries in the years around 2013. Figure 2 shows Twenge’s response to alternative #4, that it was caused by the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. It wasn’t:

Figure 2. Technology adoption, teen depression, and national unemployment, 2006-2019. Sources: National Survey of Drug Use and Health, Monitoring the Future, Pew Research Center, Bureau of Labor Statistics. See also Figure 6.39 in Generations.

The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic is International, Part 1: The Anglosphere. By Zach Rausch and Jon Haidt

This is Zach’s first post in a series exploring the crucial question: Did the adolescent mental health crisis just arise in the U.S., which would guide us to investigate causes within American society? Or did it happen in many other countries at the same time, which would point us to causes with transnational reach, such as digital technology? The answer so far: It hit big in countries that are wealthy and individualistic, such as all five Anglosphere nations. Part 2 shows the same trends in the five Nordic nations. A subsequent post shows that the international problems go beyond depression and anxiety—Gen Z girls’ suicide rates are up across the Anglosphere. (Zach is currently working on a post showing that the worsening trends are widespread across Western Europe).

Figure 3. Since 2010, rates of self-harm episodes have increased for adolescents in all five Anglosphere countries, especially for girls. For data on all sources, and larger versions of the graphs, see Rausch and Haidt (2023).

Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest. By Jon Haidt

This post picks up the analysis offered in The Coddling of the American Mind, whose subtitle is “How good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure.” The post shows how three very bad ideas were nurtured on Tumblr, around 2013, and then escaped into progressive online communities (and ultimately into progressive real-world communities such as university campuses), leading to a sharp rise in signs of depression, anxiety, and hopelessness that was most pronounced in young women on the left. Just as Greg Lukianoff had predicted, these ideas amounted to performing “reverse CBT” on those who embraced them.

Figure 4. Self-derogation scale, averaging four items from the Monitoring the Future study, e.g., “Sometimes I think I am no good at all,” and “I feel that my life is not very useful.” The scale runs from 1 (strongly disagree with each statement) to 5 (strongly agree). 

Why I am Increasingly Worried About Boys, Too. By Jon Haidt

If you only look at published studies on social media and mental health, you’ll conclude that this is mostly a girl problem. Girls use social media more than boys and are more affected by it. But as Zach assembled all the research we could find about boys’ mental health, we found that boys are suffering just as much as girls, though in different ways. Boys’ sense of meaning and purpose collapsed as they retreated from the ever less appealing real world into an ever more immersive and addictive virtual world of video games, porn, social media, and online forums.

Figure 5. Percent of U.S. 12th graders who agreed with the statement: “People like me don’t have much of a chance at a successful life.” Source: Monitoring the Future 1977-2021, 2-Year Buckets, Weighted).

[qualityclassroom]

ChatGPT Answer about Decline of Hollywood 2025:

Question:

Since the beginning of January 2025, for past four months, there have been so much bad news coming from Hollywood, it's budget cuts and job losses, many film companies are fleeing Hollywood for other states, can you help me understand the decline of Hollywood? What is happening? How did a thriving film industry in the 2010s decade become so desperately bleak in 2025?

ChatGPT Answer:

You're absolutely right to observe that Hollywood has entered a period of intense disruption and apparent decline by mid-2025. The once-thriving hub of global entertainment has been hit by a perfect storm of economic, cultural, technological, and labor-related shifts that have eroded its dominance. Here's a breakdown of what’s happening, why it’s happening, and how we got here from the booming 2010s.

🧨 What Is Happening in 2025?

Massive Budget Cuts & Layoffs Studios like Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Netflix, and Paramount have cut thousands of jobs in 2024–2025. Entire departments (especially in development and marketing) have been eliminated. Even streaming giants are slashing original content budgets.

Studios Leaving California Film production is fleeing Los Angeles in favor of Georgia, New Mexico, Texas, and even international hubs (like Hungary, South Korea, and Australia) because of better tax incentives and lower labor costs.

Collapse of Streaming Economics The streaming boom turned into a streaming bust. Platforms overspent chasing subscribers, then realized profitability was elusive. Now, they're focused on profit margins, not prestige content.

Consolidation and Sell-Offs Paramount is being carved up for parts. Warner Bros. Discovery is unstable. Lionsgate is splitting. Sony is treading cautiously. Mergers are stalling or being blocked. The industry is cannibalizing itself to survive.

Strike Hangover The 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes caused a deep production freeze. Even after the strikes ended, studios didn’t resume business as usual — instead, they saw an opportunity to permanently reduce overhead.

AI Threat and Hesitation The rise of AI-generated content has sparked both excitement and fear. Hollywood is hesitant to embrace it fully due to ethical and legal challenges, but investors are demanding cheaper, faster production — often at odds with human creators.

🔍 Why Did This Happen? The Deeper Causes

1. Over-Reliance on Franchise IP

The 2010s success (Marvel, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Fast & Furious) led studios to over-leverage IP. By the 2020s, audiences were fatigued. Box office returns declined sharply. New ideas were sidelined in favor of reboots, which eventually burned out audiences.

2. Streaming Disruption

Netflix’s dominance forced others to play catch-up (Disney+, Max, Peacock, etc.), creating a content arms race. Billions were spent on new shows and movies — but subscriber growth plateaued. The model proved unsustainable.

3. COVID-19’s Long Shadow

The pandemic changed consumer habits. People stopped going to theaters and got used to watching at home. Many never returned. Studios failed to adapt effectively to the hybrid future.

4. Global Competition

South Korea, India, Nigeria, and even Eastern Europe have built powerful film and TV industries. Global audiences now consume non-Hollywood content at massive scale. Hollywood lost its monopoly on cultural influence.

5. Talent Exodus

As projects shrink, many actors, writers, directors, and crew are fleeing LA or shifting to indie productions, creator-owned IP, podcasts, YouTube, TikTok, or Substack-style platforms. There’s a brain drain happening in real time.

6. Political and Cultural Polarization

Hollywood became a cultural lightning rod in American politics. Some audiences feel alienated by the industry's values. At the same time, many creators feel stifled by corporate mandates and social pressure. This has fractured trust with audiences across the spectrum.

📉 A Short Timeline of Decline

2019: Last “normal” blockbuster year (Avengers: Endgame, Joker, Frozen II).

2020: COVID shuts down theaters and productions. Mass delays and cancellations.

2021–2022: Streaming soars, but losses mount. Netflix loses subscribers for first time.

2023: Major WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. AI enters public discourse.

2024: Studios gut original content spending, layoffs begin, theatrical box office shrinks further.

2025: Paramount collapses, Warner Bros. restructures again, studios flee California, and audiences retreat further into niche, decentralized entertainment.

🔮 Is Hollywood Finished?

Not exactly. But it’s no longer the center of the entertainment universe.

What we’re witnessing is the end of the Hollywood system as we’ve known it for 100 years. The future of visual storytelling is decentralized, creator-led, and increasingly international.

That doesn’t mean Hollywood won’t continue to exist — but it will be a smaller, leaner, more cautious industry. And it may lose its cultural primacy to places like Seoul, Lagos, London, Mumbai, or TikTok.

🧠 Want to Know More?

I can break down:

Which studios are thriving vs collapsing

Where the jobs and productions are relocating

How AI and indie creators are reshaping the field

Which genres or platforms still hold promise

[liquidbird-official]

The Sun doesn’t just shine light—it also blows a constant stream of particles across the solar system.

This stream is called the solar wind. It comes from the Sun’s outer layer, the corona, where the heat is so intense that particles break free and escape into space. These particles mostly include electrons and protons moving at crazy high speeds.

There are two main types of solar wind: fast and slow. The fast one comes from holes in the corona and can zip along at over 700 km per second.

The slow wind moves at about half that speed and tends to come from around the Sun’s equator. Both kinds carry magnetic fields along with them, shaping the space weather around Earth and beyond.

When the solar wind hits Earth’s magnetic field, it can create big changes in our upper atmosphere. Sometimes it messes with satellites, GPS signals, and even power grids.

On the fun side, it’s also what causes the aurora—the beautiful northern and southern lights. The charged particles from the Sun crash into Earth’s atmosphere and light up the sky near the poles.

We’ve been studying the solar wind for decades. In the 1950s, scientists first guessed its existence, and spacecraft like NASA’s Parker Solar Probe are now flying super close to the Sun to study it up close.

The more we learn, the better we can protect our technology and understand the space around us.

Have you ever seen an aurora or read about space weather? Share your thoughts and let’s chat. Follow for more space facts and cool science content daily. Don’t forget to check the link in bio for free ebooks on the space shuttle, ISS, Falcon 9, and rocket propellants.

Check, our substack for more in-depth articles on such topics. Would love for you to be part of Liquid Bird community!

[fahrni]

Saturday Morning Coffee

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I’ve been informally working with a co-worker answering questions about building out hybrid native applications and it’s been wonderful. I also had opportunity to work on more React Native to iOS code with another developer. Total blast. It hit all my happy buttons.

All that happiness was destroyed later Friday afternoon, but that’s a story for another day. Don’t worry, I’m fine, my family is fine, everything’s fine.

Gus Mueller

Without going into details (that’s what the technote is for), Acorn’s file format is a SQLite database, with a simple three-table schema, containing TIFF or PNG bitmaps to represent bitmap layers, and a plist to represent shape layers. Acorn has kept this simple format since version 2.0 back in 2009.

At some point I’d opened an Acorn file in Base, my database editing app of choice, and realized it was actually a SQLite database. Nifty!

Given Gus is the creator and maintainer of FMDB it kind of makes sense. 😃 (I use FMDB in Stream.)

The Onion

Warning that even the slightest dent, knick, or scratch would henceforth be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Tuesday that Raymond Pratt, a 54-year-old resident of Chula Vista, CA who bumped a Tesla while parallel parking, had been sentenced to death.

The Onion’s articles, like this one, put a smile on my face.

Yahoo!Finance

Google lays off hundreds of employees in Android, Pixel group

I’m afraid we’re going to see more and more of this over the next handful of years.

I’m sure I’m living on borrowed time. Who knows, I may end up working at Starbucks?

I love being a software developer but the new world order is ready to trade craft for expediency. I hate that. I hope I can continue to be a software craftsman.

If I could retire today, I would. That would allow me to focus on Stream and [top secret project] all the time. 😀

Kate McCusker • The Guardian

Protective helmets were donned and sledgehammers wielded as Elon Musk Space Karen critics vented their frustration at the Tesla boss and billionaire by smashing up a disused Tesla bound for the scrapheap.

Oh, how much would you love to do this? I know I would.

Have you heard of the abandoned mall parking lots being used to store Tesla cars and trucks, weird, right? It would be a shame if a pack of drones flew over them and bombed them into oblivion, wouldn’t it?

[Ruben Cagnie • Toast Technology Blog]

At Toast, we believe that GraphQL is the right technology to build efficient web and mobile applications. This did not happen overnight. In this blogpost, we will cover the adoption of GraphQL at Toast, from its early days to the recent paradigm shift towards GraphQL Federation.

I love the Toast app! ❤️ It’s one of my favorite apps on my phone because it’s darned handy! There are four restaurants we love to eat at but sometimes we’d like to get takeout. That’s where Toast comes in. Their idea to build a generic ordering app was super smart. Love it! ❤️

It’s nice to see how folks build their infrastructure out. Reading articles like this is like reading about a motor rebuild. There’s always something new to learn.

I’ve always wanted to try GraphQL. Maybe one of these days I’ll get a chance at the day job? 😃

Alexander Lee • Digiday

Former Substack creators say they’re earning more on new platforms that offer larger shares of subscription revenue

Good! Nazistack needs a mass exodus of great writers.

I need to write a piece with a list of the wonderful writers I follow there, via RSS of course, so anyone who reads this can go encourage them to leave Substack. 🤬

Jason Koebler • 404 Media

This weekend, U.S. secretary of commerce Howard Lutnick went on CBS’s Face the Nation and pitched a fantasy world where iPhones are manufactured in the United States:

I’m sure Tim Cook would love to have a factory complete with worker accommodations that drives folks into the ground for pennies a day.

Maybe our new Administration plans to do away with the minimum wage too?

Mike Pearl • Mashable

It’s downright strange how little we know about the hacker or hackers who exposed the identities of over 30 million Ashley Madison users in 2015.

I watched a documentary on Netflix called [Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies, & Scandal(https://time.com/6977627/netflix-ashley-madison-documentary-true-story) a couple nights back and it was absolutely fascinating.

As far as I know the person or persons behind the hack have never been found! That is just amazing to me. Their saving grace is they did it for cultural reasons, not for money. After making their demand for the company to shut down they simply delivered on their threat to release the data they’d stolen. No money demand.

It’s worth a watch.🍿

Mitch Wagner

Mitchellaneous: Excellent protest signs

I threw this in here because I love seeing the interesting signs folks come up with for protests. There have been a lot of good ones since Marmalade Messiah took office.

Sarah Perez • TechCrunch

Tapestry, a new app designed to organize the open social web, is adding a valuable feature to help people who are keeping up with multiple social networks: It will now remove duplicate posts from your feed. That means if you follow the same person across social networking services like Bluesky and Mastodon, you won’t have to see their post appear twice in your feed if they’ve shared it in multiple places.

I remember Craig Hockenberry being asked if Twitterrific — long live Ollie! — was coming to Mastodon. He said that The Iconfactory was exploring something different. Something more for the open web.

Well, Tapestry is that app and it was brilliantly executed.

I’m looking forward to what they do with the Mac version. 😍

Oh, one more thing! Hire The Iconfactory to do your design work, I did, and the results were brilliant!

The Iconfactory is one of those wonderful companies in my list of small companies I’d work for in a heartbeat! 🥰

Matthias Endler

I have met a lot of developers in my life. Lately, I asked myself: “What does it take to be one of the best? What do they all have in common?”

Great piece. I’ve met my share of absolutely incredible developers in my time. From so many developers at Visio, too many to name, to the many excellent developers at WillowTree, hi Nish!

I like Matthias’ take on the matter.

David Eaves, Hillary Hartley • Lawfare

In March, the U.S. government shut down 18F, the digital services team tasked with modernizing government technology and services. 18F was perhaps best known for helping the IRS create a free direct-file tax website that makes it fast and free for Americans to file taxes.

This group was full of kind, caring, compassionate, designers, developers, and project managers with the goal of making world class websites for the government.

Folks like Ethan Marcotte went to work there. Yes, that Ethan Marcotte, the guy who created Responsive Web Design. Now think of an entire engineering team like that!

Phil Windley

Cory’s right, using an RSS reader will make your digital life better. I’m wasting less time scrolling past stuff I don’t care about and more time reading things I enjoy. That’s a win.

Yep, yep, yep! There are plenty of excellent RSS readers on the market, but I think you should use Stream! 😁

Aria Desires • Faultlore

C is the lingua franca of programming. We must all speak C, and therefore C is not just a programming language anymore – it’s a protocol that every general-purpose programming language needs to speak.

This piece will take a little time to read but I really appreciated the technical detail and the authors take on so many things C. Nicely done! 🙏🏼

Ghost - Building ActivityPub

Last week we explored some Threads compatibility updates, how to find and follow people across the Fediverse, and the progress of the social web beta launch. This week, we’ve got more fixes and updates to share, as well as a painful and embarrassing story that we wish had never happened.

This is Ghosts place to talk about how they’re building ActivityPub support into Ghost. It’s nice to see other blogging tools support open standards.

To my knowledge, Micro.blog, WordPress, and Ghost support ActivityPub. I’m looking forward to seeing more!👻

Cory Dransfelt

All of Apple’s services are abysmal

I’ve heard this from so many people over the years. Creating web services is hard. Especially when you’re servicing millions and millions of people, but shops like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Facebook manage to pull it off. Why can’t Apple?

https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/5176/2024/f9fe101b00.png TMNT Robatello!

[theapprof]

Pulse Check: A Year in Review & What’s Next for A&P Teaching | TAPP 153

"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future," said Yogi Berra, but that's never stopped me before! In this annual episode, we'll revisit last year's educational forecasts, explore what's popped (and what's fizzled), and check the tea leaves (and little gray cells) once again. With help from colleague Jerry Anzalone—and some cheeky assistance from AI—we'll bravely map out what's next for anatomy and physiology education, all seasoned with empathy, wit, and a cautionary look at history’s lessons. Buckle up: predicting the future is a bumpy—but fascinating—ride!

0:00 | Introduction

0:42 | Season 7 Debrief

7:32 |  Virtual Library of TAPP Episodes*

10:15 | How Did We Do Last Year?

27:29 | Manuel the AI Assistant*

33:45 | Jerry Calls in to the Podcast Hotline

34:55 | Jerry's Look at the Coming Year

42:05 | Badges and LinkedIn*

44:31 | Kevin's Look at the Coming Year

52:39 | Staying Connected

*Breaks

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📰 Get the once-or-twice-weekly TAPP Science & Education Updates theAPprofessor.org/updates

  It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future. (Yogi Berra)

  Season 7 Debrief

7 minutes Looking back at Season 7, I'm amazed (and slightly relieved) how each carefully spaced episode became a hidden gem—proving quality really does beat quantity. Time to unpack what we learned before moving forward.

Virtual Library of TAPP Episodes

2.5 minutes Brain break time—stretch those muscles, maybe shake out your fascia, and mentally recharge. Learn a bit about the huge collection of content in the TAPP podcast library—and how to conveniently access it. When we're back, we'll face the music on last year's forecasts, evaluate our hits and misses, and share some fascinating analysis that even surprised me..  

How Did We Do Last Year?

17 minutes Were last year's predictions spot-on, or just a near miss? With some helpful (and slightly intimidating) AI analysis, I'll honestly assess where we succeeded, stumbled, or soared—spoiler alert: the AI was more generous than I would've been.  

Manuel the AI Assistant

6.5 minutes Another quick breather to recover from my yearly dose of humility. Hear about Kevin's new AI assistant to help you when you visit The A&P Professor website. His name is Manuel and he's based on a semi-fictional character I've used for decades in my courses, now living a new life as my website host and troubleshooter. Up next, we welcome Jerry Anzalone's thoughtful predictions for the year ahead. Jerry always offers plenty to think about—get ready for some fresh perspectives.

Jerry Calls in to the Podcast Hotline

1 minutes Re-introducing our friend, fellow faculty, and futurist, Jerry Anzalone!  

Jerry's Look at the Coming Year

7 minutes My friend Jerry Anzalone takes the mic with his thoughtful—and sobering—predictions for the upcoming year. From shifts in federal oversight to fascinating new intersections of technology in anatomy, Jerry paints an honest, nuanced picture worth hearing.  

Badges and LinkedIn

2.5 minutes Okay, Jerry’s given us plenty to ponder. Stretch those legs, refill your beverage of choice, and return refreshed. And learn how to proudly display your badges or other digital credentials on LinkedIn. It keeps your followers up do date on your activities and it spreads the word about professional development opportunities. Coming up next: my own fearless forecast for 2025. Buckle up—this might get wild.  

Kevin's Look at the Coming Year

8 minutes Ready for my boldest predictions yet? From TikTok-inspired teaching strategies to the stealth return of overhead projectors, I'll outline surprising shifts I foresee shaping anatomy education, delivered with my usual blend of seriousness and playfulness.  

Staying Connected

5 minutes Not my usual wrap-up! In unsettling times, educators must stand together. Drawing on lessons from history, I’ll gently remind us that our strength and protection lie in awareness, unity, and mutual respect—even across differences.  

Links

★ We're in the Midst of an Authoritarian Takeover (article from The Chronicle of Higher Ed) AandP.info/183d11

★ Six Ways to find Your Courage During Challenging Times (article from Greater Good magazine) AandP.info/a0ab23

★ What Higher Ed Will Look Like in 10 Years (free report from The Chronicle of Higher Ed)

★ Assessing the Damage After the Education Department’s Mass Layoffs (from Inside Higher Ed)

★ Perplexity AI (Wikipedia article about this AI search engine) AandP.info/5fa8f8

★ StudentHelp4AP (Steve Sullivan's YouTube channel) youtube.com/@StudentHelp4AP

★ Wendy Riggs YouTube Channel youtube.com/@wendy-riggs

★ Display Badges on LinkedIn (walk-through of the simple process of displaying your digital credentials on LinkedIn—including your TAPP badges) https://aandp.info/33f950

★ Greg Crowther’s STEM songs my-ap.us/CrowtherSongs

★ Manuel My Assistant (a character Kevin is using for his AI assistant) lionden.com/manuel.htm

★ Interested in checking out Jotform? Use my affiliate link, so I can earn something jotform.com/ai/agents/?partner=kevin-patton-RXT4Sb0Slz

★TAPP episodes related to this episode's topics

Pulse of Progress: Looking Back, Moving Forward | TAPP 147

Blueprints for Learning: Justin Shaffer on Structured A&P Course Design | TAPP 148

Examining the Anatomy & Physiology Exam: Chatting with Greg Crowther and Ben Wiggins | TAPP 149

Textbooks to Slides: IP Attorney Brenda Ulrich on Legal Image Use in Anatomy & Physiology | TAPP 150

Muscling Through Barriers: The A&P Student Accommodations Handbook Unveiled | TAPP 151

Test Debriefing Boosts Student Learning | Episode 11

Playful & Serious Is the Perfect Combo for A&P | Episode 13

Test Question Templates Help Students Learn | TAPP 70

Quickly Moving to Remote Delivery—The Musical | Bonus Episode 64b

★ List of TAPP podcasts (sortable list with titles, links to episode pages, and topics) theAPprofessor.org/podcast-list.html ★TAPP Jukebox (a fun way to browse and play TAPP episodes) theAPprofessor.org/podcast-jukebox.html

  People Production: Aileen Park (announcer),  Andrés Rodriguez (theme composer,  recording artist),  Karen Turner (Executive Editor), Kevin Patton (writer, editor, producer, host). Not People Robotic (AI) audio leveling/processing by Auphonic.com, initial draft transcript by Rev.com, and the content, spelling, grammar, style, etc., of these episode notes are assisted by various bots, such as ChatGPT, Grammarly, and QuillBot.

  If the hyperlinks here are not active, go to TAPPradio.org to find the episode page.

★ More details at the episode page: theAPprofessor.org/podcast-episode-153.html

★ Transcript available in the transcript box: theAPprofessor.org/podcast-episode-153.html

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Check out notes and transcript for this episode!

[maximuswolf]

Millennials Ultimate Retirement Plan: Gaming

Millennials Ultimate Retirement Plan: Gaming Hi there! I wrote a substack Article about this topic and wanted to hear fellow gamers thoughts! In an effort to not self promote I included the full article below and will only share the link to my substack if asked. Thanks! Millennials, Gaming, and the Future of RetirementThe sun shines down on a hot summer day in a Florida community. People slide on their headbands over leathery, suntan-lotioned scalps and equip their supportive wrist straps. They check to make sure their electric golf carts are charged, then put the pedal to the plastic, letting the wind flow through their thinning hair as they approach the pickleball court. A quick glance at Facebook shows a flood of grandkid photos, which they dutifully like with a generic “so cute” comment. It’s the stereotypical image of boomer retirement.But for us Millennials? Well… we’re left wondering if we’ll even be able to enjoy retirement. Still, we’ve got big plans—for our simulated farms.The video game boom of the ’90s, which put consoles in nearly every U.S. home, stole the hearts of one generation more than any other: Millennials. We were the perfect age for it. We are the Pokémon champions. And, statistically, we haven’t stopped playing since. Nearly half of all gamers today are Millennials (49%, to be exact), and we’re the most likely generation to play online games.So, what does the future look like for us? Truthfully, it’s not much different than now. Many of us will fluctuate in our gaming habits over the years, but for a lot of us, gaming remains a top-three hobby—even if it’s not number one.We’re also the most computer-literate generation. The generations above us rely on us to fix their printers, while the ones below us may have the reflexes of a cat but zero understanding of the inner workings of their iPads. We’ll be more flexible with technology in our retirement than any generation that preceded us—including Gen X. (Sorry, but ultimately, you spent less time on AOL Instant Messenger than we did and more time playing outside. For better or worse.)The Hottest Take: We Won’t Retire in VRHere’s a take that might surprise you: I don’t think Millennials are headed toward retirement inside VR headsets. Sure, VR is amazing, but let’s face it—once you hit a certain age, your reflexes slow down. This is why most professional gamers peak in their late teens. By your 30s, learning new information becomes harder, and this speed bump affects every generation. Barring some incredible breakthrough in brain science (totally separate conversation, but hey, maybe we need age limits for public office—would you want your grandparent running the country?), our generation isn’t going to suddenly pivot to hyper-complex tech at 70.What this means is that Millennials are currently at or have already hit their peak understanding of technology. And here’s where my hottest take comes in: the types of games we’re playing now are the types of games we’ll be playing in retirement.Think about it. We already see games specifically marketed to Millennials, and it’s only going to grow. You know which generation still clings to MMORPGs? You guessed it—Millennials lead the charge. So when the hottest new game drops for VR Ray-Ban glasses, there’s a good chance we’ll still be playing our cozy farm sims (Stardew Valley) or reliving the glory days of Call of Duty with people our age.Nostalgia Over FuturismOur retirement will be one of the most tech-savvy yet, but it might look more nostalgic than futuristic. Instead of living in some Black Mirror episode, we’ll be enjoying a uniquely Millennial blend of old-school gaming and modern convenience. So, whether it’s running dungeons in World of Warcraft or harvesting crops in a digital field, our gaming retirement is bound to look a lot like the games we’ve loved all along. Submitted January 26, 2025 at 02:56AM by YouRightYouRight56 https://ift.tt/DJvn31p via /r/gaming

[rjzimmerman]

What You Want is an S Curve

Excerpt from Bill McKibben's Substack, "The Crucial Years."

Regular readers of this column know that I think we’re engaged in the most desperate race in human history—a race between a rapidly unraveling climate, and a rapid buildout of renewable energy. The outcome of that race will determine just how many people die, how many cities drown, how many species survive. Pretty much everything else—efforts to restore corals, say, or worries about how exactly we’ll power long-haul aircraft—is noise at the margins; the decisive question is how those two curves, of destruction and construction, will cross. Oh, and the relevant time frame is the next half-decade, the last five or six “crucial years.”

So even amidst all the desperate news from climate science, I have some legitimately good numbers to update you on this morning. They come from the veteran energy analyst Kingsmill Bond and colleagues at the Rocky Mountain Institute, and they demonstrate that the world has moved on to the steep part of the S curve, which will sweep us from minimal reliance on renewable energy to—we must hope and pray— minimal dependence on fossil fuel. The angle of that curve may prove to be the most significant geometry of our time on earth, competing only with the slope of the Keeling Curve which documents the growing accumulation of co2 in the atmosphere above Mauna Loa.

It seems pretty clear, according to Bond’s team, that last year or this we will hit peak fossil fuel demand on this planet—the advent of cheap solar and wind and batteries, combined with rapidly developing technologies like heat pumps and EVs, has finally caught up with the surging human demand for energy even as more Asian economies enter periods of rapid growth: the question is whether we’ll plateau out at current levels of fossil fuel use for a decade or more, or whether we can make fossil fuel use decline enough to begin to matter to the atmosphere. 

And the numbers in the new report give at least some reason for hope: sun and wind are now growing faster than any other energy sources in history, and they are coming online faster that anyone had predicted, even in the last few years. In the last decade, “solar generation has grown 12 times, battery storage by 180 times, and EV sales by 100 times.” This charge has been led by China, where “solar generation up 37 times and EV sales up 700 time.” and which as a result is “poised to be the first major electrostate.” Europe, and indeed the whole OECD group, are now seeing rapid growth too, and the best news is that there are increasing signs that countries like India and Vietnam, where growth in demand will be fastest over the rest of the decade, are figuring out how to electrify their economies. Fossil fuel for generating electricity has peaked in Thailand, South Africa, and in all of Latin America.

Solar power in particular is about to become the most common way to produce electricity on this planet, and batteries will this year pass pumped-hydro as the biggest source of energy storage; the supply chain seems to be in place to continue this kind of hectic growth, as there are enough factories under construction to produce the stuff we need, and investment capital is increasingly underwriting cleantech (though a treacherously large supply of money continues to flow to fossil fuels). Pick your metric—the number of cleantech patents, the energy density of batteries, the size of wind turbine rotors—and we’re seeing rapid and continuing progress; the price of solar power is expected to drop by half again in the course of the decade, reinforcing all these trends. The adoption curves for cleantech look like the adoption curves for color tv, or cellphones—that is to say, from nothing to ubiquitous in a matter of years. 

A big reason for the ongoing change—and for ongoing optimism—is the simple efficiency of the technologies now ascendant.

A second report from Bond’s Rocky Mountain Institute, this one published last week, focused on these numbers, and they’re equally astounding. By their calculations, we waste more than half of the energy we use:

Out of the 606 EJ (an exajoule is roughly the annual energy consumption of New York City) of primary energy that entered the global energy system in 2019, some 33% (196 EJ) was lost on the supply side due to energy production and transportation losses before it ever reached a consumer. Another 30% (183 EJ) was lost on the demand side turning final energy into useful energy. That means that of the 606 EJ we put into our energy system per annum, only 227 EJ ended up providing useful energy, like heating a home or moving a truck. That is only 37% efficient overall.

We’ve invested mostly in increasing the volume of energy we use, not its efficiency—because that was what made big money for Big Oil. But cleantech is inherently more efficient: when you burn fossil fuel to make power, you lose two-thirds of the power to heat, which simply doesn’t happen with wind and sun. An EV translates 80-90% of the power it uses into propulsion, compared with well less than half for a car that runs on gas. A gas boiler is 85 percent efficient, which isn’t bad—but a heat pump is 300% efficient, because its main “fuel source” is the ambient heat of the atmosphere, which it translates into heating and cooling for your home. That means that the higher upfront costs of these technologies quickly translate into serious savings. And these kind of numbers bend curves fast

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

Woman in Tech: Interview with Shamim Rajani

An Award Winning Business Woman, Thought Leader, and Technology / Entrepreneurship Writer Dear readers and writers, happy weekend. I couldn’t post interviews for a while as I was very busy writing a five new books, which two of them were successfully published and one of them already hit the best sellers list globally and starting the Substack Mastery pilot this month.  So, welcome to my new…

[jon-mcbrine-author]

The work that goes into producing a full-length fiction novel is enough for a full-time staff with at least a forty-hour work week. For many indie authors, including myself, it is typically a one-person operation. There are authors with teams, helpers, and roped-in family members, but even for multi-person scribe-squads, the workload can be daunting. The tasks run from the actual writing/typing, editing, marketing, and, among other things, designing the art. When it came to my debut young adult sci-go superhero novel, Unsecret Identity: Eric Icarus - Book One, I ultimately ended up tackling these assignments solo.

Simply because I wear many hats when it comes to creating this particular story does not necessarily entitle me to any special treatment or extra credit. As previously mentioned, there are numerous writers who bear the work weight on their shoulders with not much assistance. My journey so far has seen numerous learning curve-balls thrown my way as I figure out this whole author thing on the fly. I still have miles to go before I can go around boasting about my writing skill—the biggest lesson so far is that you never stop learning. Trends change, tastes differ, and technology advances. As I continue to develop my techniques, I roll with more punches than I hand out hits.

Speaking of technology, my experience as a graphic designer has proved to be greatly beneficial when creating cover art. Utilizing software programs like Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign, I am able to format the manuscripts as well as include interior art. As of this writing, Unsecret Identity is nearing its completion in transitioning from being only available as an ebook to a printed paperback edition. I was prepared to cross the finish line when I decided to insert more illustrations as part of the book. It’s an exciting concept that could help set the novel apart and further express my vision of the characters and settings, but… it also means more delay.

This is where tech comes back into play. I’ve been drawing my entire life, but as pencillers know, the sketching process can be time-consuming. Digital drawing has changed the game for me: using the Apple Pencil on an iPad while running the Procreate drawing program has drastically improved my illustration process. Don’t get me wrong, I believe I will always prefer the traditional method, but using a stylus on a smooth screen not only allows me to zoom in for meticulous detail (along with an overwhelming amount of brush choices), but the slick glass surface is much more preferable for me. I’m not sure why exactly, but I've always had a sensitivity to the feel of paper. So, naturally my greatest interests are writing and drawing—two paper-based hobbies. Thanks to the digital age, the only limit is my imagination (and battery life).

Well, there is at least one other limit - my time. Similar to other self-publishing authors, my writing time is usually whenever I can carve out a short period throughout a typical day. As quick and convenient as tablet drawing can be, it’s still a matter of how exhausted I am after tending to “real life” commitments. This leads to the reason I do not simply outsource the jobs: cheap labor! I don’t consider myself a control freak, though saying that, it is a bit of a point of pride to be able to complete these mounting tasks myself. The entire book-making process is a gauntlet but it’s something I can use all talents for (opinions on the end result may have some questioning the extent of this talent, but, hey, like I said, it’s cheap labor!). 

As if performing all these duties with a lack of downtime wasn’t enough of a challenge, I intend on recording the audiobook version of Unsecret Identity myself. I am not sure if I’m a jack of all trades or a glutton for punishment, but regardless, I’m ready to DIY.

Stay in the loop for more details by following Jonfcition Blog on Substack and be sure to check out jonmcbrine.com for more info about this and all my books.

Unsecret Identity: Eric Icarus - Book One is available now from the Amazon Kindle store.

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