tingilinde

the maga cultural revolution

Paul Krugman notes disturbing parallels with the Chinese Cultural Revolution 

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Once you’ve seen the parallel between what MAGA is trying to do and China’s Cultural Revolution, the similarities are everywhere. Maoists sent schoolteachers to do farm labor; Trumpists are talking about putting civil servants to work in factories.

The Cultural Revolution was, of course, a huge disaster for China. It inflicted vast suffering on its targets and also devastated the economy. But the Maoists didn’t care. Revenge was their priority, never mind the effects on GDP.

The Trumpists are surely the same. Their rampage will, if unchecked, have dire economic consequences. Right now we’re all focused on tariff madness, but undermining higher education and crippling scientific research will eventually have even bigger costs. But don’t expect them to care, or even to acknowledge what’s happening. Trump has already declared that the inflation everyone can see with their own eyes is fake news.

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it still mostly works

an archaic signaling system

The very manual, and nearly steampunk, signaling system of the New York subway system.

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About 85 percent of New York City’s subway system still operates with this analog signal system. The outdated equipment is no longer manufactured and has to be manually operated, around the clock.

It’s no surprise then that the system is a leading cause of delays. Over the past 15 months, it has led to an average of nearly 4,000 train delays a month, according to data from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency that runs the city’s transit system.

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They even do relay repair

 

if you're not a us citizen

and are thinking about visiting the US..  you may want to chose another destination.

 

 

the internet of animals is returning

Tracking tagged animals from space.  It operated for about a year in 2020, but then issues in an ISS module shut it down. The Russians were hosting it, but then came Ukraine.  Now it's been done independently of the ISS.

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The new system allows for greater global coverage — the ISS receiver couldn’t communicate with tags at the planet’s highest latitudes — and Wikelski’s team has used the intervening years to shrink the tags by several grams and design new ways for animals to “wear” them, vastly expanding the number of species scientists can study. The team is currently upgrading 4,000 older tags to work with the new system. The tags provide hourly accounts of the animal’s energy expenditure; measure environmental factors like air pressure, altitude, temperature, and humidity; and even use AI to help interpret the animal’s behavior.

The trove of data “will open a lot of doors for researchers,” said Ashley Lohr, who coordinates North American projects for ICARUS through the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. “How stressed was the animal? What were the environmental conditions when the animal was at this place at this time?”

Wunder’s lab group tagged 17 mountain plovers in Colorado in 2021. Native to the plains of the north-central United Staes, the species has declined by 80 percent in the past six decades. But the birds are hard to study because of their habitat and behavior. “They’re singing and vociferous but not in your face,” Wunder said, and in breeding season they like their space, living in densities of only about three birds per square kilometer. The plovers often occupy private ranchlands, which makes them hard to find without trespassing. And they breed in late March and April, while bird surveys, timed to count migratory songbirds, happen in May.

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poety of the genome

A Watson lecture by Rob Phillips

for the approaching recession

Recession memes -- imagine how rich if we have stagflation which seems likely if Trump takes over the Fed.

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Anecdotally, signs of a recession are already here. Hairdressers are reporting that their clients are ordering less expensive treatments. “I’ve been eliminated from their budget,” one aesthetician told Bloomberg. Young people are hosting home cafés, making their own cappuccinos and iced matchas in lieu of patronizing coffee shops. (The price of coffee is increasing under the new tariffs, and cafés are raising prices in turn.) In Washington, D.C., and elsewhere in the nation, applications to law school are up precipitously, a classic indicator that previously freewheeling young people are seeking more secure employment. Georgetown University reported a twenty-five-per-cent increase in the size of its applicant pool. Even if investors are slightly more confident this week, after Trump backed off most of his harshest tariff rates, the changes in people’s life-style habits serve as their own kind of affective barometer. The vibes are off; Americans are panicky and confused. In their addled state of mind, any unusual consumer behavior or trend seems like it might foretell a coming crash.

On social media, identifying “recession indicators” has become a meme. A Dunkin’ closing in downtown Boston, in the chain’s home state, is a recession indicator. As is Leslie Odom, Jr., reprising his original role in “Hamilton,” no doubt a lucrative gig. As are Coachella 2025 ticket buyers taking on debt with payment plans to afford their admission. Other recession indicators call back mordantly to the era of the 2008 financial crisis: a new album from the d.j. and producer Skrillex, a fixture of recession dance music; the return of the flash mob, an example of which was recently spotted in Los Angeles celebrating a single drop by the rapper Doechii; reinvigorated interest in “American Idol,” the peak form of two-thousands kitsch. (According to my parents, this season is better than ever.) Fresh music from OK Go and Bon Iver, who also released a co-branded tinned fish with the direct-to-consumer brand Fishwife, is a throwback, as is “The Pitt,” the latest hot streaming show, a hospital drama starring Noah Wyle, of “E.R.” fame. The retreat to comfortingly familiar entertainment might be a variation of the “hemline index,” in which skirts are supposed to become shorter when times are good and longer when they are bad.

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dating a republican

the mar-a-lago face

MAGA standards of beauty

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The lack of discretion within the current GOP might feel strange today when many—even Kim Kardashian—appear to prize confidentiality. But for the MAGA-verse, today’s tweaks seem intended to signal membership with Trump, a man notoriously obsessed with the literal pageantry of beauty, and his broader efforts to force strict gender norms onto the electorate. The aesthetic is, like Trump’s politics, ridiculously blunt.

“I read it as a sign of physical submission to Donald Trump, a statement of fealty to him and the idea that the surface of a policy is the only thing that matters,” says Anne Higonnet, a professor of art history at Barnard College. “In a way, these women are performing a key part of Donald Trump’s whole political persona.”

Take Noem. Soon after Trump said that he was considering her to be his running mate, Noem released an infomercial-style social media video debuting dental work. The new smile, one Republican strategist told the New York Times, was “all about her appeal to an audience of one.” Noem never got the VP role, and she was sued for “deceptive advertising practices.” That lawsuit was dismissed, and she denied being compensated for any advertisements. Still, Trump did appoint her to lead the Department of Homeland Security, despite the fact she had neither worked in the department nor had a background in law enforcement.

What Noem did seem to have was the face for the job. “I want you in the ads, and I want your face in the ads,” Noem recently recalled Trump saying, referring to a set of new taxpayer-funded ads celebrating the immigration crackdown. “I want you to thank me. I want you to thank me for closing the border.

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a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

resurrecting a species

Quite a bit has been written about, and venture money gone into, the proposed resurrection of extinct species of charismatic animals. Recently the sort of dire wolf was in the news. In reality it’s a sort of wolf with a few important genetic modifications that make it big and fury - it’s far from a real dire wolf. All of these attempts are just proxies rather than resurrections. But plants are a different mater. There is a large collection of seed collection and a list of 50 extinct species that might be brought back has been made. That would be the real thing. It’s technically very challenging and there’s basically no funding (for those with money it may be the cheapest way to become a famous visionary:-)

Here’s a piece on the subject