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Images from Toronto Harbour
Author: Christopher Parsons
Policy wonk. Torontonian. Photographer. Not necessarily in that order.
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Links for November 9-13, 2020
- Last hundred days?. “The last hundred days of the Trump presidency—if that’s the period we’re in—thus gives rise to a number of distinct concerns about the excesses of an involuntarily lame-duck president of, shall we say, an unconventional disposition. These concerns often get blended together, but they are worth separating into four broad categories. The most alarming of the set, but probably the least likely, relate to the possibility of a contested election. A far more likely possibility involves the president’s delegitimization of an election that he cannot fruitfully contest. A third set of concerns involve self-dealing and other abuses of power during the transition. The final category involves simple mishandling of the transition itself.” // Here’s hoping that things don’t turn as badly under that last dregs of the Trump presidency as some fear. But I wouldn’t personally bet a lot on hope right now.
- The trump presidency is ending. So is Maggie Haberman’s wild ride. // A great contemporaneous profile of Maggie Haberman, one of the best journalists who’s covered Trump to date.
- Deep-freeze challenge makes pfizer’s shot a vaccine for the rich. “Even for rich countries that have pre-ordered doses, including Japan, the U.S. and the U.K., delivering Pfizer’s vaccine will involve considerable hurdles as long as trucks break down, electricity cuts out, essential workers get sick and ice melts.” // It’s going to be miserable to keep hearing about possible vaccines and then, after the initial euphoria of media, realize just how incredibly hard it is going to be to distribute them. Hopefully with a competent America returning to the world scene we’ll see the various superpowers of the world work together on this issue to coordinate probably the most significant logistics campaign in humanity’s history.
- The brouhaha over google photos. “[Google] has decided that the photos uploaded to its system have trained its visual algorithms enough that it doesn’t have to eat the cost of “free storage.” // Om definitely has one of the best assessments for why Google is no longer offering unlimited (non-premium) photo storage. The company has done the training it needed to do, and now it’s time to monetize what it’s learned from the data which was entrusted to it.
- ‘Are we getting invaded?’ U.S. Boats faced Russian aggression near Alaska. “As Russia has ramped up its presence in the region, U.S. officials have accelerated their own efforts. The Coast Guard has long complained that its lone pair of aging icebreakers are struggling to stay in service but may now have the opportunity to build six new ones. (Russia has dozens.) The United States is also discussing a northern deepwater port, perhaps around Nome. Currently, the nearest strategic port is 1,300 nautical miles away in Anchorage.” // It’s increasingly becoming evident that the Arctic, long a place where ice kept the different major powers from seriously competing for territory and resources, is going to heat up as a result of a warming climate. It’s truly worrying that Canada and the United States seem to be utterly lacking in preparation for what is coming.
While all the attention for tomorrow’s Apple event is, understandably, on the release of Apple Silicon (and the associated devices running it) I really, really wish that the company will announce either its long-rumoured new headphones or the refreshed Apple TV.
Really appreciated this interview with Eno. Two select quotations that stuck with me:
Something that kind of disappoints me is that most of the new technology from the ’80s onwards has been about the atomization of society. It’s been about you being able to be more and more separate from everybody else. That’s why I don’t like the headphones thing. I don’t want to be separate in that way.
I can’t say that I agree with this assessment, but understand that technology is wrapped up in a very particular culture of neoliberal capitalism that can be harmful for communities writ large. His subsequent reflections more broadly about social media—that it can create the almost total self-enclosure of micro-communities—is definitely something that raises prominent concerns, though frankly I wish that there was more scholarship that dug into this as an issue as took place about 15 or so years ago. Obviously there is new scholarship but little of it seems methodologically satisfactory with focuses on quantitative rather than qualitative and quantitative approaches.
Quite a few of the films I’ve made music for, I never saw the picture before I finished all the music. And I like that, because I don’t want the music to map totally onto the film. I want the music to suggest — to increase the ambiguity, basically. To expand the film a bit. Not to underline it. Often, and especially with Hollywood soundtracks, the whole point of the soundtrack is to tell you, the dumb sod watching it, “Now you’re supposed to feel sad. Now it’s funny. Laugh! Go on!” And I just don’t want to be in that business of underlining things.
This seems like a pretty stellar way of thinking through what he wants his work to do, and not do. Though in a contemporary era I’m surprised that producers or directors are willing to leave the music so out of their control.
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Links for November 2-6, 2020
- An (app-agnostic) iOS shortcut for link-blogging. // I’ve been trying this and, on the whole, I’m pretty happy with it so far. It took me a bit to realize that I had to copy text I wanted to automatically include in the text from the article the shortcut can paste, but beyond that has been working really well!
- Woman ordered to stop smoking at home in ontario ruling. “If you smoke and you live in a condominium in Ontario, a little-noticed ruling may have stubbed out your ability to light up inside your own home. At the very least, it has given new legal heft to a condominium corporation’s ability to ban all smoking indoors if it so chooses … In what is seen as a first in Ontario, Justice Jana Steele ruled in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice on Oct. 15 against Ms. Linhart and ordered her to stop smoking in her own home.” // Not going to lie: as someone who lives in a shared building this is pretty exciting news, though also reveals just how much power condo rules have over how individuals can enjoy the space they rent or own.
- To report on tech, journalists must also learn to report on china. “Two years ago, Sean McDonald, cofounder of Digital Public, and I described a global internet landscape fractured by what we called digitalpolitik, or the political, regulatory, military, and commercial strategies employed by governments to project influence in global markets. Now technology stories are just as much about policy, diplomacy, and power as they are about society, engineering, and business.” // This is definitely one of the most succinct, and well sourced, pieces I’ve come across recently that warns of how China needs to be covered by technology journalists. I would just hasten to affirm that similar warnings should apply to scholars and policy makers as well.
- Chinese-style censorship is no fix for the covid-19 infodemic. “Rather than creating an efficient information curation model, regulator and company wars against ‘rumours’ and ‘harmful content’ have allowed misinformation and extreme content to thrive on the Chinese internet.”
- The Huawei war. “Whatever happens to Huawei in the near future, China, Russia and other countries have received the message loud and clear: achieving technological sovereignty is imperative. China had grasped the importance of this even before Trump launched his attack, which only strengthened the sense of urgency. It would be ironic if the ultimate effect of the US’s war on Huawei was a much more technologically advanced and independent China, with a completely different supply chain that included no American companies.” // Definitely one of the better summations of where things are with Huawei as it stands today.
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Closing Time
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Pop Goes the Toronto Housing Bubble
Toronto’s condo market is in more trouble than you think.
“For a while, Toronto’s booming condo market seemed unstoppable: the average price almost doubled in just 12 years. This appetite for condos meant that proper planning, both at the design and urban levels, was farther down on the priority list, leading to problems that still couldn’t stop this runaway market. It took the one-two punch of regulating the short-term rental market and the pandemic to finally slow it down. They say that the bigger the bubble, the bigger the bust — based on the concerns being expressed by real-estate agents and investors alike, I’d wager that we are due for a massive correction.
It’s about damn time.
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Hard(ly) at Work
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Diamond in the Rough
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Apple and a Deep Dive into LIDAR
Timothy B. Lee has a good deep dive into how Apple has managed to get LIDAR into the newest version of the company’s phones and high-end iPads, and more broadly what the advances in the technology mean for integrating LIDAR into cars.
Lee notes that while it may take another 2-4 years, we can expect to see such sensors more prominently featured in motor vehicles so as to improve on existing driving assistance systems. Left unstated, however, is how more advanced LIDAR sensors will enable next-generation content experiences of the type that Apple (and other technology companies) have been promising are in the wings for the past few years.
Excited Pixels 