Amelia Bedelia, Meet Samuel Alito - What the Supreme Court Justice’s leaked draft opinion reveals about originalism. - link
DeafBlind Communities May Be Creating a New Language of Touch - Protactile began as a movement for autonomy and a system of tactile communication. Now, some linguists argue, it is becoming a language of its own. - link
What the “Life of the Mother” Might Mean in a Post-Roe America - “We are going to see more deaths and more injuries,” Ghazaleh Moayedi, an ob-gyn in Dallas, said. “I don’t have to speculate about that at all.” - link
Coffeezilla, the YouTuber Exposing Crypto Scams - In the golden age of con artistry, self-proclaimed finance gurus are everywhere, with few checks on their claims. - link
What Can N.F.T.s Do for Dead Artists? - Museums and estates are experimenting with putting artists’ works posthumously on the blockchain. - link
From Vox
Flight delayed? Blame a spaceship. -
Space flights are now are regular occurrence in Florida. | Marco Bello/AFP via Getty Images
In Florida, a surging number of space launches has created a new type of travel headache.
You can typically blame an airline flight delay on a handful of usual suspects, like bad weather, mechanical issues, and traffic on the tarmac. But thanks to the rise of the commercial space industry, there’s now a surprising new source of air travel disruption: rocket launches.
In recent weeks, flights in and out of Florida have seen a sharp increase in delays. Palm Beach International Airport logged more than 100 delays or cancellations on April 15 alone. (Some of these can be attributed to a surge in private and charter flights.) Things are even worse at Jacksonville International Airport, where there were nearly 9,000 flight delays in March. Last week, federal regulators met to discuss these disruptions, which reflect many of the ongoing challenges facing the aviation industry, including storms, the rising cost of jet fuel, the Covid-19 pandemic, and a shortage of airline workers. But in Florida, a growing number of space launches — particularly those in the Cape Canaveral area — is also making flight schedules more complicated.
“They close significant airspace on the east coast before and during and after a launch. That traffic has to go somewhere,” John Tiliacos, the executive vice president of finance and procurement at Tampa International Airport, told Recode. “It’s like putting 10 pounds of potatoes in a five- pound bag, so you’re further congesting an already constrained airspace on the west coast of Florida.”
While right now these delays are concentrated in Florida, this problem could get a lot worse, especially as the number of spaceflights increases and as new launch facilities, or spaceports, open in other parts of the country. The situation is also a sign that the arrival of the second space age could have an unexpected and even extremely inconvenient impact on everyday life.
The spaceship problem is relatively straightforward: Air traffic controllers currently have to ground or reroute flights during launches. In order to break through the atmosphere and reach outer space, rockets must first travel through airspace that’s monitored by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which oversees air traffic control centers and flight navigation throughout the country. While these rockets typically only spend a few minutes in this airspace, they can create debris, like spent pieces of rocket hardware, either because they’re designed to shed their payloads in several stages or because the mission has failed. Reusable boosters used by some spacecraft, like SpaceX’s Falcon 9, reenter this airspace, too.
To make sure that planes aren’t hit by this debris, the FAA typically stops flights from traveling within a rectangle-shaped block of sky that can stretch from 40 to several hundred miles long, depending on the type of launch. Typically, there’s about two weeks of advance notice before each launch, and during that time, air traffic controllers can develop alternative arrangements for the flights scheduled on that day. While a launch is taking place, aviation officials track the vehicle’s entry into space and then wait for word from experts who analyze the trajectory of debris created by the launch in real time. If there is debris, air traffic controllers stand by until it falls back to Earth, which typically takes 30 to 50 minutes. Once that happens, regular flights can return to their normal flight paths.
A single space launch can disrupt hundreds of flights. For example, a SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch in 2018 — the same flight that infamously shot Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster into space — impacted 563 flights, created 4,645 total minutes of delays, and forced planes to fly an extra 34,841 nautical miles, according to data from the FAA. That extra mileage adds up quickly, especially when you consider the extra fuel and carbon emissions involved. Researchers from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, estimate that a single space launch could cost airlines as much as $200,000 in extra fuel by 2027, and as much as $300,000 in extra fuel in the following decade.
The FAA insists it’s making improvements. Last year, the agency started using a new tool, the Space Data Integrator, that more directly shares data about spacecraft during launches and allows the agency to reopen airspace more quickly. The FAA also says it has successfully reduced the duration of launch-related airspace closures from about four to just over two hours. In some cases, the agency has been able to reduce that time to just 30 minutes.
“An end goal of the FAA efforts is to reduce delays, route deviations, fuel burn, and emissions by commercial airlines and other National Airspace System users as the frequency of commercial space operations increase,” the agency said in a statement.
Faa.gov
And the frequency of launches is picking up. There were 54 licensed space launches overseen by the FAA last year, but the agency thinks that number could grow in 2022 thanks to the rise in space tourism, growing demand for internet satellites, and upcoming space exploration missions. These launches could also become more common in other parts of the country as new spaceports, which are often built on or near existing airports, ramp up operations. The FAA has already licensed more than a dozen different spaceport locations in the United States, including Spaceport America in New Mexico, where Virgin Galactic launched its first flight last summer, as well as the Colorado Air and Space Port, a space transportation facility located just six miles from the Denver International Airport.
The FAA’s role in the rise of the commercial space industry is becoming increasingly complex. Beyond certifying and licensing launches, the FAA’s responsibilities also include studying the environmental impact of space travel and overseeing new spaceports. The agency will eventually have to monitor space passenger safety, too. This is on top of all the other new types of flying vehicles the FAA will also have to keep its eyes on, like drones, flying air taxis, supersonic jets, and even, possibly, space-faring balloons.
“Where things get contested is more on: How do all of these different types of vehicles fit in the system that the FAA is in charge of?” Ian Petchenik, who directs communications for the aircraft flight-tracking service Flightradar24, told Recode. “Things are going to get much more complicated, and having a way to figure out who has priority, how much space they need, and what the safety margins are, I think, is a much bigger long-term question.”
While we’re still in the early days of the commercial space industry, some have already expressed concern that the agency isn’t headed in the right direction. The Air Line Pilots Association warned back in 2019 that the FAA’s approach could become a “prohibitively expensive method of supporting space operations,” and has urged the agency to continue to cut down on the length of airspace shutdowns during space launches. At least one member of Congress, Rep. Peter DeFazio, is already worried that the FAA is prioritizing commercial spaceflight launches over traditional air travel, which serves significantly more people.
Beyond air flight delays, the burgeoning space travel business has already influenced everything from the reality television we can watch and the types of jobs we can get to international politics and — because of the industry’s potentially enormous carbon footprint — the threat of climate change. Now it looks as though the commercial space industry could also influence the timing of your next trip to Disney World.
The best $15 I ever spent: An audiobook subscription -
In hindsight, it is ridiculous that it took years of desperation and depression before I was finally willing to reconsider my absurd refusal to try audiobooks. | Dana Rodriguez for Vox
After losing my ability to read for nearly five years, I needed a way to ease back into books.
Not long after I gave birth to my second child at age 40, I lost my ability to read. I don’t mean literally — I could still look at a sentence and know what it meant. I could read a menu. I could, unfortunately, still suffer through The Big Book of Paw Patrol on demand.
But within the space of a year, I could no longer find my way to the end of a novel or a lengthy article. Anything more complex than a children’s book left my brain spinning in neutral. No matter the genre, no matter the time of day, the sentences I read and re-read remained fragments that I could not assemble into a comprehensible whole.
I began carrying a stack of books with me from room to room of our rowhouse, shuffling between options with growing desperation, searching for an opening in one of them. “Brain fog” — as if a light mist has temporarily settled on my brow — is too benign a phrase for the suffocating powerlessness of watching your cognition dissolve in real time. Every so often the cloud lifted to allow me a tantalizing moment of clarity. But in the main, for the first time in decades, I was no longer a reader.
This development would be unsettling for anyone. For a professional writer and editor, it was horrifying. The written word was my currency, my passion, my source of confidence. I needed words to make a living. I needed them to make a life.
In the beginning, I assumed that the change was temporary, a holdover from the hormonal stupor of pregnancy. Or maybe it was sleep deprivation — surely the fatigue inherent in raising two small children would impact any parent’s focus. Those were both pieces of the puzzle, but it would be years before I solved it.
Instead, I was lost in my head. If I’d been grappling with a stabbing pain in my abdomen or loss of sight, I would have parked myself in a medical office and refused to budge without a diagnosis and treatment plan. But it wasn’t obvious to me that I had a physical ailment. Maybe I was losing my mind. Maybe I was lazy. Maybe, as one boss suggested during a particularly tense performance review, I just couldn’t hack working and raising small children at the same time. Looking around at all the other parents who held down demanding jobs, I worried that he was right.
One year became two and then slid into more. Terror rose in my throat every time I took on new editing work or writing assignments, knowing there was a decent chance I wouldn’t be able to deliver. I couldn’t tell anyone because I didn’t know what was going on or if it would ever end. I was petrified to say the words out loud, to raise the possibility that I might never work in my field again. With each job, each promise, I needed to believe that this time it would be different.
It never was. I blew through deadlines, ghosted editors, and lost jobs. Shame and depression ganged up on me, and I dropped out of the workforce altogether.
I would ordinarily turn to books for solace and distraction in a time of crisis. With two teachers for parents, I was born into a family of readers. We unwrapped books on Christmas mornings, but any occasion was an excuse for a new book. They showed up on Easter and Valentine’s Day, birthdays and the first day of school. My sister and I spent long summer afternoons in our backyard reading books from the public library under a tent our mom set up by pinning quilts to the clothesline.
At some point before school began again, the four of us would squeeze into our Plymouth Horizon to drive from Michigan to the New England coast, stopping at the Dartmouth Bookstore in Hanover, New Hampshire, to load up on books. Once we each had a stack from that 140-year-old institution, we continued on to rocky beaches, where we read until everyone had one or two books remaining for the drive home. I looked forward to those trips like other kids dream about Disney World. Devouring my favorite authors, powered by squirt cheese and Faygo grape pop, I could not imagine a more perfect life.
By contrast, this bookless existence was my nightmare. One day I realized that whole shelves in our house were filled with titles I had never read. Having reveled in the experience of reading Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home when they came out, I bought the subsequent books in that series and now grieved the idea that I might never read them. I felt in my bones what author William Styron once wrote about his depression, that it made him fear that “I would never recapture a lucidity that was slipping away from me with terrifying speed.”
In hindsight, it is ridiculous that it took years of desperation and depression before I was finally willing to reconsider my absurd refusal to try audiobooks. I had always dismissed the format, snobbishly categorizing audiobook listeners as somehow a lesser class of book consumers. Audiobooks, my thinking went, were for people too lazy to read. They were a useful service for people who were visually impaired and they could be helpful in entertaining children on road trips. Audiobooks were emphatically not for me.
But as reading didn’t seem to be an option, it was time to get over myself. I purchased an Audible Premium subscription — which allows me one book each month — and tiptoed into the world of what I still anachronistically think of as “books on tape.”
My gateway listens were memoirs — Tara Westover’s Educated, Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, Maggie O’Farrell’s I Am, I Am, I Am — which allowed me to pretend a friend was simply telling me about her life. After a few months, I moved on to Strangers Drowning, Larissa MacFarquhar’s masterful chronicle of obsessive altruism, and felt a sense of accomplishment akin to making my way through several years’ worth of New Yorker back issues.
By the time I spent a weekend enthralled by Irish actor Andrew Scott’s reading of Dubliners — after a lifetime of avoiding James Joyce — I started to wonder why I’d ever spent much time straining my eyes with print.
Audiobooks weren’t just tolerable alternatives to wood-pulp-and-ink tomes. In many ways they actually expanded my enjoyment of books. Rather than listen curled up in an armchair, I could pop in earbuds, walk the mile from our house to Lake Michigan, and spend hours by the water with Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys playing in my ears. There is an emotional heft to hearing Trevor Noah’s memoir in his own voice as he cycles through phrases in Xhosa, Zulu, Tswana, and other tribal languages that I would have lost on the page.
Native-speaking audio readers allowed me to more fully inhabit a writers’ world, making familiar Sri Lankan and Ugandan and Ethiopian names that I would have mangled in my head while reading. (I read the first two Harry Potter books before ever hearing the name “Hermione” and realizing that way I’d been pronouncing it was very different.) Likewise, hearing read aloud Anna Burns’ Milkman, with its experimental style and long, unbroken paragraphs, made the book infinitely more accessible and pleasurable. I loved how the musicality of language often seemed heightened when words were isolated for my ears alone.
Nearly five years after reading disappeared from my life, I was pleased to finally learn that I hadn’t lost my mind. I’d just unknowingly white-knuckled my way through menopause in my mid-40s, not realizing that brain fog and exhaustion can be common symptoms. By the time a doctor actually listened to me and ran a blood panel, there was virtually no estrogen left in my system. I immediately started hormone therapy.
The speed with which my mind cleared was astonishing. I needed more time to get past the fury and resentment of knowing I’d lost years of productivity and inadvertently gaslit myself.
When I felt ready to attempt an actual physical book again, I started with Tayari Jones’ An American Marriage, which sat atop the largest stack of optimistically purchased novels — and read until dawn. Closing the cover that next morning, I exhaled. And picked up another.
Now I’m reading book after book after book, sometimes feeling like Lucy and Ethel trying to keep pace in the chocolate factory. I’d forgotten the combined pleasure and wooziness of a reading hangover that comes from staying up far too late submerged in a book. Most weeks I juggle one book in print and another in audio, so I always have an excuse to leave the house for a long pandemic walk. My family members know to give me audio credits for birthdays. In 2021, I read 67 books, just a few years after I struggled to get to the end of one or two.
Modern medicine restored my concentration and banished the brain fog, but audiobooks were the first crucial phase of a regimen to regain my confidence and sense of identity. I pray that my ability to read is back for good, but whatever happens, I know that I need never again give up on books. (I am, however, switching over to Libro.fm, an audiobook service that supports local bookstores instead of the global Amazon megatron complex.)
These days, when I find myself lost in a book, it’s not because my brain is stuck or throwing up obstacles. I’m happily lost in a world of words and images and I do not need rescuing.
Amy Sullivan is a Chicago-based journalist who covers religion, politics, and culture.
Carrick Flynn may be 2022’s unlikeliest candidate. Here’s why he’s running. -
Carrick Flynn is running for Oregon’s new congressional seat. | Courtesy of Flynn for Oregon
Meet the person who wants to bring effective altruism to Congress.
This year, Oregon gained a new congressional district, the state’s Sixth District, and the competitive race to fill it has drawn national attention. That’s largely thanks to the presence of one candidate, a previously obscure lawyer and activist named Carrick Flynn, who has a background in international development work. And that attention is largely due to the millions of dollars Flynn has drawn from a controversial source: the young cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried.
Bankman-Fried, who foundedthe FTX cryptocurrency exchange, has publicly pledged to give away 99 percent of his wealth in his lifetime and has emerged as one of the biggest donors in the effective altruism (EA) community, with a particular focus in pandemic protection. That has led to an increasing role in political funding — he was one of the biggest backers of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign — and he is the chief donor to a political action committee that has given $10 million to Flynn’s House campaign.
The outside money to Flynn’s campaign has drawn sharp criticism from his opponents in the race, though Flynn states that he hasn’t actually met or even spoken to Bankman-Fried. Their connection is mainly a shared involvement in effective altruism, a philosophical and social movement that emerged out of Oxford University in the late 2000s, one that helped drive Flynn’s decision to run for Congress and could help guide his work there should he be elected.
The basic claim of EA (which also informs the work here at Future Perfect) is that evidence-based reasoning can be used to figure out how to prioritize limited resources and find the most efficient ways to improve the lives of as many people and animals as possible. That includes finding ways to mitigate or prevent catastrophic risks to humanity’s future, an area that remains chronically underfunded and neglected by governments.
Pandemics are just such a neglected risk, and preventing them has become a major EA concern, one shared by Flynn. Pandemic preparedness is a longstanding priority for him — Flynn started working in the biosecurity community in 2015, and when Covid-19 hit, he immediately dropped his other priorities to focus on it. He was frustrated that even during a deadly pandemic, Congress gave expert proposals about prevention a lukewarm reception at best, and says that he hopes he can play a role in Congress as the champion for the issue.
If Flynn wins his Democratic primary on May 17 and then the general election later this year, it will be a test for whether EA ideas — and money — can be effective in government, and not just philanthropy. Flynn spoke with Vox’s Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg and Dylan Matthews on Zoom last week about his campaign and his priorities. (Disclosure: Miranda is a former colleague of Flynn’s spouse, Kathryn Mecrow-Flynn.) A lightly edited transcript follows.
Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg
You’ve talked about pandemic preparedness as being a major motivation for your campaign. Tell us a bit about your previous work in that area.
Carrick Flynn
I got involved in pandemic prevention as an area in about 2015, when I moved to Oxford. I was working with Andrew Snyder-Beattie, who is now the program officer in charge of biosecurity at the Open Philanthropy Project.
Then I moved on to Georgetown, where I was working on semiconductors and some AI stuff. During that time, I was still involved a little bit [in biorisk] but I basically dropped off. Then when Covid broke out, Andrew came back to me and he basically said, “Carrick, this is the time, I want my A-Team. Come in. You’ve got to do it.” So I left Georgetown and I jumped in and I took a run at [pandemic preparedness work].
There was a really good team assembled. We took the technical recommendations of about 145 of the world’s best experts on these fields, and we condensed them down into digestible policy components. We attached a budget to it. And then we went on to try and sell it to the White House and to Congress. The White House snapped it up — they loved it. This is why it’s in Biden’s pandemic prevention plan. They changed it a little bit, but the core was still there.
Then we went and shopped it to Congress. No one opposed it, but we didn’t find a champion. They were oddly unmotivated. We hired a lot of lobbyists, very serious folks who’ve done this professionally for the health care industry, and tried to push it through. It just didn’t go through.
Before I was running for Congress, a lot of people suggested I should run, for a lot of reasons. For me, though, the thing that really stood at the front of my mind was just knowing [that bill] is in there. It’s such a good bill. It probably would prevent almost any pandemic. It’s expensive, but it’s several orders of magnitude cheaper than the cost of a pandemic, not to mention the horrifying cost in lives. And it seems as though it really did need a champion.
Dylan Matthews
I’m curious how you talk about issues like pandemic preparedness, or the long-term future with voters. My experience of House races is that people are usually talking about their kids’ education, about health care, about these immediate material things. How do you make the case that this is worth your time, and part of what it means to represent them?
Carrick Flynn
My first priority is pandemic prevention. There’s a window for that that’s already closing and we need to get it through as quickly as possible. So if I am elected, the first thing I’m going to do is go all in to get that passed.
More broadly, I think economic growth, the progress studies approach — making sure that we are investing in good research, that we’re getting good jobs back, that we’re not having laws and regulations that are making people artificially poor or resulting in homelessness —these things really matter a lot.
Beyond that, a lot of the technology concerns also meld in with economic concerns in terms of automation: the unemployment from that, but also the opportunities, which is if you get these cool technologies out, there’s whole new industries. If you have good economic growth and whole new industries, then you can jump over the dangerous gap where you’re relying on fossil fuels. You can get to clean technologies; we don’t have to do any sort of degrowth thing. We can get to a point where we’re able to actually start sequestering carbon.
I’m in Oregon. We’ve had wildfires. We have floods all the time because of the environmental damage. When I was nine I was left homeless by a flood for about seven months. My mother was then left homeless 11 years later while I was in college by another flood, by the same river. Both were “500-year” floods. That’s a serious climate problem. Focusing on that stability as well as prosperity is something that everyone likes and resonates with everyone.
If you talk to people about what they care about for a while, almost everyone starts converging on something like their kids, or their grandkids. I think when they’re reflective on it for a little bit, that’s the thing they really care about. And then the issues that really flow most into that become the ones that they really hold tightly. I think respecting that and engaging with that and trying to get that right is something that’s very important to me.
Dylan Matthews
So the three of us having this conversation are all part of the effective altruism world. We all speak that vernacular. So we’ve all read cause reports over the years making the case for different kinds of interventions to make the world a better place.
What convinced you that this is the highest-impact thing you could be doing, among the many ways that you could be having an impact? Do you think it’s important to have someone with an EA sensibility in Congress?
Carrick Flynn
I think it’s really important to have people who are very committed to focusing on careful prioritization and careful evidence-based approaches. I’m not sure that necessarily means you have to be from EA, exactly.
For me in particular — it actually wasn’t my idea. I’d moved back to Oregon because I could work from home, and I didn’t want to keep living in DC. Then a new congressional district kind of opened up under me. And all sorts of people from all different areas of my life were like, “You have to run. You have to run. You have to run.” And I’m not a politician. But enough people said it to me that I started asking other people, people who I really respect, if this is something I should consider. A lot of these people are very into effective altruism reasoning.
I got such a strong, resounding “yes,” and they would have reasons why they thought this was good. So that helped a lot, talking to people with judgment I really trust.
One of the reasons why the pandemic prevention thing was useful is that I actually do think pandemic prevention is worth literally trillions of dollars in the expected value that comes if we can get this thing passed. Pandemics are so bad and there’s reason to think, with climate change and technological advances, that this is going to keep happening and get worse. The cost of it is so low. If I got elected and I had some small chance of being able to actually get this thing passed, the value of that would be everything, you know? It certainly was enough to make me overcome a personal reluctance.
Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg
The effective altruism mindset is very global: It’s trying to help all humans, all of the animals, people who are in the future and not born yet. A lot of your previous work has been on global-scale problems. But in Congress, you would also be representing 700,000 specific people and their specific concerns, and would have a responsibility to attend to them and their local issues. I’m just curious how you think about making that shift.
Carrick Flynn
It doesn’t, to me, feel like a shift. My goal is always to try and do a lot of good. And that almost always means that you have some domain in which you’re working, and to try and do a lot of good in that domain.
When I was in Kenya, I was really trying to help the kids in this school and the women at this maternity clinic. It’s not to the exclusion of everyone else, it’s just, this is my job now. When I was in India, I was trying to help rural children access health programs, get nutritional fortification, starvation re-feeding, vaccination, etc. In my mind, these people are my constituents, and I’m all in.
Now I’m in Oregon and I’m home. There’s a lot to be said for being home. I have this opportunity to help the people here and help them realize the things they care about — their children and their grandchildren’s futures — and to help the economy here, but not just here. This spills over, this is going to help all over the US, this can have great effects globally. It doesn’t feel like a tension. It feels like a continuation of the goal the whole time and the approach the whole time.
Dylan Matthews
Sam Bankman-Fried’s PAC has spent over $10 million on this race, which is more than any independent group has spent in any other congressional primary. Your critics have more or less accused him of trying to buy the race for you. I wanted to give you a chance to respond to that and give your interpretation of his involvement.
Carrick Flynn
First, I’ve never met him, I’ve never talked to him. I don’t have any information that anyone else doesn’t have. I actually don’t have any information that’s not public with, I guess, one exception, which is information I think other people think they have, which is they think I’m involved in crypto or something. That is not the case. I’m not a crypto person. I don’t know very much about it. I’ve never looked at regulations for it. I don’t think it’s a priority.
Left with that information, my take is speculative, but what I will say is it seems to me like Sam Bankman- Fried is someone who legitimately wants to prevent pandemics from happening again. I am on board. I love that, great goal. Let’s do it. I see why he would want to support me for that, since I’ve made this my first priority and I’ve got a history in this. He’s also supported other candidates and sitting congresspersons who have good pandemic prevention policies, with less money, but I can see why he’d want to give more to the person with more background in it.
Also, the race is pretty close. I’m probably winning, but not by a lot. So he might want to invest more funding in it.
In terms of the problems with campaign finance generally, I didn’t know it in great detail. I actually didn’t know how a PAC worked, and I didn’t know what was going on when suddenly there are people making ads about me. I got into the campaign without knowing how it worked.
It doesn’t look good. You go up to it close and you’re not like, “Oh this system works!” You’re like, “Oh, this is deeply flawed.” And there’s other ways [the system] is flawed as well. Individuals can self-fund. That’s a problem because it pushes poor people like myself out of the race. (That’s another myth. I made $40,000 last year. I am not the rich candidate, and I gave a lot of that away to charity.) We have things where there’s a local party machine that anoints a successor and then they have this apparatus around them. None of these things are good.
If I’m elected, I have every intention to get behind campaign finance reform. I would definitely jump on any bill like that. I am happy that within this bad system, everything that’s been said about me by myself, and by others advocating on behalf of me, has been true and has been positive. There’s been no attacks on anybody. It’s entirely been, “Here’s the policy positions, and here are the real priorities.”
As far as special interest groups go, I don’t like that as an institution. But possibly the best one I could imagine was one for “no more pandemics.”
Dylan Matthews
For the record, what are your views on crypto regulation? Do you have views on crypto regulation at all? That’s the other frequent accusation, that you’re a stalking horse for Bankman-Fried to get his preferred regulations through.
Carrick Flynn
Yeah, I hear that too. I don’t know enough about crypto to know enough about the regulations. After I got accused of this stuff, I started to go back and try and read about it. It was dense, I didn’t really care. If I’m a congressperson and this comes up, I will put my nose to the grindstone, I will learn this topic and I will actually figure out how to vote. I am not doing that on spec. I don’t want to spend my time on this, I don’t think this is that important.
As a heuristic, I would decide the way you should decide on normal financial regulations. Are you going to be ripping off working-class and middle-class people? Is this something that allows for a lot of exploitation? If it is, you have to regulate it and otherwise, you know, sure. You need financial markets. That’s about it. But in terms of what that actually means in crypto, I have no idea.
From The Hindu: Sports
TN, AICF sign MoU on Chess Olympiad -
McLaren to compete in Formula E from next season -
Pakistan will go ahead with tour of Sri Lanka: Cricket Board - “We are always ready to support Sri Lanka Cricket even in difficult times and we have no issues touring the country for the test series,” a PCB official said
My Opinion claims Dr. M.A.M. Ramaswamy Memorial Trophy -
Arrowette, Forseti, Winmylove, Angel Bliss, Philosophy, Tranquilo and Royal Glory please -
From The Hindu: National News
Punjab govt. will soon end VIP culture in jail: CM Mann - The Chief Minister said the State government has so far confiscated 710 mobile phones from jails in a special drive.
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35% reservation for women in Jacobite parish, diocesan committees -
Inter-State gang held, 530 kg ganja seized in Chintoor Agency - The gang was transporting the contraband in a lorry laden with pumpkins
Andhra Pradesh: Probe begins into suicide of SI - He allegedly shot himself dead in Kakinada
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Ukraine begins first war crimes trial of Russian soldier - In the first such trial of the war, the defendant, 21, is accused of killing an unarmed civilian.
Bloody river battle was third in three days - Ukraine official - Ukraine claims to have attacked Russian troops as they attempted to cross the Siversky Donets river.
Russian operator to suspend electricity supply to Finland - Russian operator RAO Nordic says it will cease deliveries from Saturday, citing payment problems.
Brittney Griner: US basketball star has Russian detention extended - Russian media says Moscow wishes to “swap” Griner for the arms trafficker Viktor Bout.
Spain plans menstrual leave in new law for those with severe pain - Spain could become the first European country with menstrual pain leave under a proposed law.
From Ars Technica
How a French satellite operator helps keep Russia’s TV propaganda online - Eutelsat refused to stop Russia from broadcasting state-run programming. - link
McLaren is joining Formula E next season - McLaren will take over Mercedes’ Formula E team for the start of Gen3. - link
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From Jokes Subreddit
Maybe Jesus didn’t like your chocolate? -
So aliens come to earth and they’re Sooo nice. There’s a huge televised event with all the world leaders in attendance.
The Pope asks, “Do you know of Jesus Christ?”
The aliens say, “Do we Ever? Awesome guy!! Swings by the planet every couple of years to say Hi!”
The Pope exclaims, “Every couple of years?? What!!?? We’re still waiting for his second coming!”
The alien replies, “Maybe he didn’t like your chocolate?”
The Pope is flabbergasted, “What does chocolate have to do with anything?”
The alien says, "Well when he came the first time, we gave him a huge box of chocolates! Why? What did you guys give him?
Edit thank you all for letting everyone know you saw this on YouTube or an internet cartoon 5-10 years ago. I read this first in the Readers Digest back in 1988 ish and I’m sure that if you picked up the 1847 microfiche of the London Times, you’d probably find it there as well. Actually, Jimmy Stamos was the first recorded individual to tell this joke back in January 1692. Unfortunately for him, he was put on trial the next month. He made so many people laugh, he was tried as a witch.
A man walks into a restaurant with an emu by his side. -
The waitress asks for their orders. The man says: “A burger, chips and a coke, please.”
He then turns to the emu and nods. “I’ll have the same,” says the emu.
A short time later the waitress returns with the order and says: “That will be £14.40 please.” The man reaches into his pocket and, without looking, pulls out the exact change for payment.
The next day, the man and the emu go to the restaurant again and the man says: “A burger, chips and a coke, please.”
The emu says: “I’ll have the same.”
Again the man reaches into his pocket and pays with exact change.
This becomes routine until one night they enter the restaurant and the waitress asks: “The usual?”
“No, this is Friday night, so I will have a ribeye steak, baked potato and salad,” says the man. “Me too,” says the emu.
The waitress brings the order and says “That will be £32.60.”
Once again the man pulls the exact change out of his pocket and places it on the table.
The waitress can’t hold back her curiosity any longer and says:
“Excuse me, sir. How do you manage to always come up with the exact change out of your pocket every time?”
“Well,” says the man, “Several years ago I was cleaning my house and found an old lamp. When I rubbed it a genie appeared and offered me two wishes.
My first wish was that if I ever had to pay for anything, I would just put my hand in my pocket and the right amount of money would always be there.”
“That’s brilliant!” says the waitress. “Most people would wish for a million pounds or something, but you’ll always be as rich as you want for as long as you live!”
“That’s right. Whether it’s a litre of milk or a Rolls Royce, the exact money is always there,” says the man.
The waitress asks: “But, sir, what’s with the emu?”
The man sighs and answers: “My second wish was for a tall bird with long legs who agrees with everything I say.”
His wife screams,“You fucking dickhead, my hair and make-up are a mess, the house is a tip, the dishes aren’t done, I’m still in my night clothes, I can’t be bothered to cook and it’s my time of the month!. Why the fuck did you bring him home?. The husband replies”Because he is thinking of getting married"…
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