The Verge: “I went to Australia to test out Tesla’s vision of the future”

Besides the electric charger, the mansion is also fitted with solar panels and a Tesla Powerwall, a battery for storing the energy they generate. While I live for dumb thrills like driving an expensive car I don’t own on the wrong side of the road, I am, in fact, at the mansion to experience the clean energy lifestyle Tesla is selling.

The Model X and mansion are, in some ways, emblematic of the Tesla lifestyle and approach. The dream of this lifestyle is that you can have everything you already have but without fossil fuels. You can keep on driving a car. You can live in your porn mansion entirely on renewable energy and sell any extra power you harvest to the grid. But best of all, you don’t have to think about any of it.

---

It’s true that this is a story about Tesla energy, but it’s also true that we all use energy all the time. The mundane tasks I engage in as I settle into the mansion — the bath, cooking dinner — of course, require energy. I can watch the little jiggles of energy required on the Tesla app. All day long, the mansion has been running on solar energy, and it continues to do so right up until I plug in the Model X to charge. That battery draws so much energy that the house switches to the grid.

Elizabeth Lopatto

A good vision for a future where individual homes are less dependent on grid power – but if your local energy generation can’t charge a Tesla, I would argue the vision has a long way ahead before becoming reality.

The Guardian: “Paris, city of romance, rues new image as the dirty man of Europe”

The city of light and of romance has become a dirty old town, or as locals have nicknamed it, Paris poubelle (dustbin Paris).

On Saturday, World Cleanup Day, Parisians were urged to pick up the mess they and visitors have made. Paris is definitely getting dirtier. It’s filthy everywhere. The city needs an aggressive policy to make the streets cleaner and safer, said Matthew Fraser, professor of communications at the American University of Paris, who has lived in the city for the best part of 30 years.

Paris thrives on its own moral chaos. Nothing is organised, everything is urban anarchy. I don’t think Parisians notice it, because it’s their chaotic energy. But if you’re from the outside, or from another culture, the city is a mess.

Kim Willsher

Despite its reputation as city of romance, Paris has never been the cleanest city, but apparently that problem has grown out of proportion in recent years. Though I would dispute the idea that it’s the dirtiest city in Europe – people who think that clearly haven’t seen Bucharest. I’ve been wanting to return to Paris for some time, and maybe this will be the year to finally do it. If so, I must remember to compare them and report back with a longer article on the blog.

Time: “How Amsterdam’s Mayor wants to remake the Red Light District”

Named “De Wallen” (The Walls) in Dutch for its position inside the old city walls, the red light district’s medieval buildings have been a hub for sex workers since the 15th century—long before the Netherlands legalized brothels and began regulating and taxing prostitution in October 2000. Today, escort services and sex clubs make up a significant part of Amsterdam’s sex work sector. But De Wallen’s window brothels—popularized in the 1960s as authorities grew more tolerant of women opening their curtains to attract clients—remain iconic: the literal manifestation of the clear-eyed Dutch approach to activities that other countries would rather sweep under the rug.

---

Relocating or replacing the red light district with a purpose-built prostitution hotel would also mean the end of an international landmark—even if it’s a controversial one. To have the sex industry integrated with so called ‘normal life’, among churches and restaurants and a kindergarten and the Salvation Army shop – that’s pretty special, Majoor says, noting that the red light district developed over centuries. You can’t just create that atmosphere somewhere else. If we get rid of the sex work, Amsterdam’s city center will be like any other old European capital.

Ciara Nugent

I’ve visited Amsterdam last fall on my way to Iceland, but I haven’t made it to the Red Light District in the three days I was there – it was pouring rain for half the time, so there’s half my excuse. I must admit I wasn’t terribly impressed with the city – the center is just an endless collection of canals and houses that looked more or less the same to me – so I have to agree with the last statement. The open attitude towards sex and drugs makes the city unique and therefore attractive to tourists, so forcing prostitution out of the way would damage the city’s personality – like Paris closing down Moulin Rouge. In a sense I regret not having visited the Red Light District, now that it’s possible it may not be there next time.

Chris Zacharias: “A Conspiracy to Kill IE6”

The first person to come by our desks was the PR team lead. He was a smart, dapper man who was always bubbling with energy and enthusiasm. Except this time. This time he was uncharacteristically prickly. He had come in on an otherwise normal day to find email from every major tech news publication asking why the second largest website on the planet was threatening to cut off access to nearly a fifth of its user base. Fortunately for us, the publications had already settled on a narrative that this was a major benefit to the Internet. By their call, YouTube was leading the charge towards making the web a faster, safer experience for all of its users. The entire PR team had Macs running Chrome and could not even see what we had done, let alone issue comments to the press on any of it. They were caught completely unaware. We eagerly told them everything about what we had launched and helped them craft the necessary talking points to expand on the narrative already established by the media. Satisfied that he could get back in front of the story, the PR team lead turned and warned us to never do anything like this without telling him first. He did not want to let great public relations opportunities like this slip by ever again.

Chris Zacharias

Speaking of dirty tactics used by Google to undermine Microsoft, the above article is a good example – admittedly focused on IE6, but I’m sure over time many more similar stories will surface. What’s insidious and concerning about this is how engineers simply decided to do this on their own, how the tech press then mindlessly applauded the move – see also the excited replies to the author’s tweet linking to the blog post – and the lack of corrective action inside Google, because it benefited them to hurt a competitor. This is the perfect reflection of tech giant culture: move fast and break things – no pause to consider external consequences, only personal and corporate gain – and one of the main reasons why tech monopolies need to be closely scrutinized and more heavily regulated.

The Verge: “Inside Microsoft’s surprise decision to work with Google on its Edge browser”

Shortly after that meeting with Nadella, Microsoft’s browser team started to analyze everything that was wrong with Edge. It was a way to spark a discussion internally about the changes needed.

“We wrote a paper. We wrote the paper for the purpose of having a discussion at an offsite that Terry Myerson [former Windows chief] had in October of 2017”, says Belfiore.

This paper included a bunch of the benefits and drawbacks of Edge. Microsoft picked a different term for the drawbacks, though. It called them “headwinds”. It was a signal that, in 2017, the problems with Edge weren’t just technical, nor were they necessarily insurmountable. They were just — theoretically — the things that were slowing down its adoption.

Tom Warren

Yet another article I have been planning for many months; this seems like an appropriate moment to finally write it, as Microsoft announced two weeks ago that the Chromium-based version of Edge is ready for release. I have been using the dev version of the new browser since it’s been available for testing, and I am pleased to say it’s been very stable and fast. After I upgraded to Windows 10 and started using original Edge, the only reason I kept Chrome around on my main laptop has been the Send-to-Kindle extension. Because the new Edge browser can install Chrome extensions, I was able to use it almost exclusively since. Edge ships with better tracking protection built-in, another reason to prefer it to Chrome.

The Washington Post: “The dog is one of the world’s most destructive mammals. Brazil proves it”

“The global impacts of domestic dogs on wildlife are grossly underestimated”, researchers concluded in a 2017 study published in the journal Biological Conservation. The researchers, based in Australia, convicted dogs in the extinction of 11 species and declared them the third-most-damaging mammal, behind only cats and rodents.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature maintains a list of animals whose numbers dogs are culling. There are 191, and more than half are classified as either endangered or vulnerable. They range from lowly iguanas to the famed Tasmanian devil, from doves to monkeys, a diversity of animals with nothing in common beyond the fact that dogs enjoy killing them. In New Zealand, the organization reported, a single German shepherd once did in as many as 500 kiwis — and that was the conservative estimate.

“Unfortunately, we have a big problem”, said Piero Genovesi, chair of the agency’s invasive species unit. “There is a growing number of dogs.”

Terrence McCoy

Another example of disruption of the environment caused by invasive species introduced by humans – this time on a larger scale, because the number of pets is much higher and they are present basically everywhere alongside people. Keeping cats and dogs around the house was good practice in rural societies, where they would cull rodents and help shepherding livestock, but it makes little sense in an urban environment. I find it fascinating that so many of us are still attached to the notion of keeping predators around as pets.

The Atlantic: “Jeff Bezos’s Master Plan”

Bezos is unabashed in his fanaticism for Star Trek and its many spin-offs. He has a holding company called Zefram, which honors the character who invented warp drive. He persuaded the makers of the film Star Trek Beyond to give him a cameo as a Starfleet official. He named his dog Kamala, after a woman who appears in an episode as Picard’s “perfect” but unattainable mate. As time has passed, Bezos and Picard have physically converged. Like the interstellar explorer, portrayed by Patrick Stewart, Bezos shaved the remnant strands on his high-gloss pate and acquired a cast-iron physique. A friend once said that Bezos adopted his strenuous fitness regimen in anticipation of the day that he, too, would journey to the heavens.

When reporters tracked down Bezos’s high-school girlfriend, she said, The reason he’s earning so much money is to get to outer space. This assessment hardly required a leap of imagination. As the valedictorian of Miami Palmetto Senior High School’s class of 1982, Bezos used his graduation speech to unfurl his vision for humanity. He dreamed aloud of the day when millions of his fellow earthlings would relocate to colonies in space. A local newspaper reported that his intention was to get all people off the Earth and see it turned into a huge national park.

Franklin Foer

Speaking of Jeff Bezos, I’ve read this fascinating profile on him a while back, covering many of his passions and projects, from the early start with book selling to the juggernaut e-commerce business of Amazon, from the Clock of the Long Now to his ultimate plan, conquering the final frontier. While there are many concerns about his business practices, I cannot help but admire him for his ultimate goals and long-term vision. At the same time I wonder, as a man with foresight, has he ever considered who will replace him at the top of Amazon – or, more importantly, who will carry out his vision of space exploration after his passing?

by the way, that story about his phone being hacked by the Saudi crown prince hasn’t aged well, as other news sources claim it was Bezos’ girlfriend Lauren Sanchez who shared his text messages with her brother, who then leaked their contents to the National Enquirer.