This morning I changed racism in the title of yesterday's post to white supremacy. I think that’s what we’re going through now in the US. Totally unanticipated that the joy of 2008 would be followed by such upheaval. The US wants to shed racism, or does it? I didn’t realize we were still having this argument until recently.

Xwing envisions a fleet of retrofitted Cessna cargo planes flying without a human onboard, performing automated takeoffs and landing while being controlled by pilots on the ground (who might even be juggling a few aircraft at a time). They've logged "dozens" of hours of flight time — though because of FAA guidelines the future "ground" pilot has always been esconced on-board the plane. Long-time Slashdot reader PuceBaboon shares this report from Wired (alternate URL here): The conditions are not ideal for our landing. A hard wind is blowing over the low hills east of San Francisco, and at just the wrong angle — straight across the runway where we're set to touch down. But as we ease into our final approach, our two-winged shadow clipping the suburban homes below, the veteran pilot sitting beside me makes a gentle suggestion. "I like to do it hands up. Like a roller coaster," he says. He removes his hands from the wheel of our aircraft, a 27-year-old Cessna Caravan that once shuttled United Nations dignitaries in southern Africa. It's nothing especially fancy, with aspects that feel more go-kart than airliner. The cockpit is filled with manual toggles and analog dials; pulleys connect the pedal directly to the rudder at the tail. But recently, this plane underwent some modifications. As we descend past 500 feet, the 15-knot gusts hitting our side and the pilot's hands still hovering, the wheel and pedals begin to jostle, compensating for the wind with inhuman precision. The descent remains smooth — serene, even, as we touch down. "It will be very uneventful, almost boring," Maxime Gariel, the chief technology officer of Xwing, had assured me shortly before our fully autonomous takeoff, flight, and landing. "That's what we're aiming for."

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A new cluster of Covid-19 cases in New Zealand prompted a widespread investigation to identify where they're coming from. The New Zealand Herald reports: Nearly 90 new cases of Covid-19 have now been linked back to the new cluster, which itself stemmed from an "index case" — a 50-year-old man working at Mt Wellington's Americold coolstore, with no history or link to overseas travel. Contact tracers have been trying to work backwards from that index case, who tested positive on August 11, in hopes of finding the "primary case" — or the person who brought the virus into the country in the first place. Friday — more than a week and 175,000 tests since the start of the outbreak — Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern shared some details on how exhaustive that process had been. Virtually all of the country's border and managed isolation staff have been tested in the past 10 days, and so far there had been no additional cases, outside the mystery infection of a maintenance worker at Auckland's Rydges hotel... University of Auckland microbiologist Associate Professor Siouxsie Wiles says it's quite possible we'll never get any further. "Is that a big deal? From the testing we've done so far, it looks like this is a pretty tight cluster — so I would say, no," she said. "What we have lost is the opportunity to know how it happened, or what gaps need plugging. But at the same time, we have to remember that nothing is 100 per cent guaranteed to work all of the time."

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I'm working through the Nice White Parents podcast from the NYT. In episode 2 they're talking about efforts to integrate schools in NYC. They say it never happened. But, I remember, my family was part of a pairing of two schools in white Jackson Heights and in black Corona. My brother went to the Corona school, and I stayed in the Jackson Heights school. Of course I was a kid, so I wasn't really aware of what was going on beyond there were more black kids in our class. It also occurs to me that we moved not long after this happened, further east, to an area where there were no black neighborhoods to pair with. I don't know what motivated my parents to move, and it's too late to ask them.

Last month Intel's stock lost $50 billion in valuation — while the valuation for Taiwan-based TSMC jumped by over 50%. The former chief of staff to Intel CEO Andrew Grove (and later general manager of Intel China) explains why this moment was 15 years in the making: Learning curve theory says that the cost of manufacturing a product declines as the volume increases. Manufacturing chips for the whole computer industry gave Intel huge advantages of scale over any other semiconductor manufacturer and resulted in the company becoming the world's largest chip manufacturer with enviable profit margins. Chaos theory says that a small change in one state of a system can cause a large change in a later stage. In Intel's case, this was not getting selected by Apple for its iPhones. Each successive era of computing was 10x the size of the previous era, so while Intel produced hundreds of millions of microprocessors per year, the mobile phone industry sells billions of units per year. Apple's decision in 2005 to use the ARM architecture instead of Intel's gave Taiwan-based TSMC, the foundry chosen to manufacture the processor chips for the iPhone, the learning curve advantage which over time enabled it to pull ahead of Intel in manufacturing process technology. Intel's integrated model, its competitive advantage for decades, became its vulnerability. TSMC and ARM created a tectonic shift in the semiconductor industry by enabling a large number of "fabless" chip companies such as Apple, AMD, Nvidia and Qualcomm, to name a few. These fabless companies began to out-design Intel in the mobile phone industry and accelerated TSMC's lead over Intel in high volume manufacturing of the most advanced chips. Samsung, which also operates a foundry business, has been another beneficiary of this trend.

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"SpaceX, the Elon Musk-led company that recently became the first business in history to send astronauts into Earth's orbit, is parlaying its successes into big money," reports CNN Business: The company recently finished a $1.9 billion funding round, one of the largest single fundraising pushes by any privately held company, according to public filings and data aggregated by venture capital data firm Crunchbase. That brings SpaceX's overall valuation to $46 billion... SpaceX now ranks third on a list of so-called "unicorns," which are privately held startups with valuations topping $1 billion, according to data from the venture capital analysis firm CB Insights. The only two startups valued higher than SpaceX are two Chinese tech giants — rideshare company Didi Chuxing and TikTok parent company ByteDance... But even at SpaceX's eye-popping valuation, some Wall Street analysts and investors argue the company is still undervalued. Morgan Stanley analysts, for example, wrote in a report last month that SpaceX could be worth as much as $200 billion if its experimental satellite-internet project, Starlink, works as intended. Morgan Stanley said its low-end estimate for SpaceX's value is about $50 billion. And SpaceX's other ventures — including launching astronauts and cargo for NASA, building massive prototypes for a would-be Mars rocket, and launching satellites for the US military — all give investors plenty of reason to clamor for a chance to own a piece of SpaceX, according to Chad Anderson, a SpaceX investor and the CEO of investment firm Space Angels... Anderson added that SpaceX still isn't turning a profit, but that's mostly because it's still spending large sums of money investing in new arms of its business, including the Starlink internet business and its Mars rocket prototypes, dubbed Starship. And that does leave some room for debate when it comes to the question of whether SpaceX's valuation is too high. "I think there would probably be an argument both ways," he said. "I think there's definitely a lot of SpaceX haters or naysayers."

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To address the possibility of drone-flying near airports, America's Federal Aviation Administration "will be testing at least 10 technologies and systems," reports Engadget, "developed not just to detect unmanned aerial systems, but also to mitigate the potential safety risks they pose." The first tests will be conducted at FAA's William J. Hughes Technical Center, which is right next to the Atlantic City International Airport in New Jersey. After that, the agency expects to expand its tests to four additional airports in the U.S. It has yet to choose those airports, and it may also still be finalizing the list of technologies it's testing: The FAA is asking interested companies working on drone detection systems to respond to its announcement within 45 days.

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To address the possibility of drone-flying near airports, America's Federal Aviation Administration "will be testing at least 10 technologies and systems," reports Engadget, "developed not just to detect unmanned aerial systems, but also to mitigate the potential safety risks they pose." The first tests will be conducted at FAA's William J. Hughes Technical Center, which is right next to the Atlantic City International Airport in New Jersey. After that, the agency expects to expand its tests to four additional airports in the U.S. It has yet to choose those airports, and it may also still be finalizing the list of technologies it's testing: The FAA is asking interested companies working on drone detection systems to respond to its announcement within 45 days.

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UPI reports: The links between rising carbon dioxide levels, global warming and greening trends have been confirmed by fossilized leaves from a 23 million-year-old forest... Scientists previously postulated that ancient increases in atmospheric CO2 during the early Miocene allowed plants to perform photosynthesis more efficiently. But the latest research, published Thursday in the journal Climate of the Past, is the first to confirm the link between CO2 and greening in the fossil record... Lab experiments have shown increases in CO2 can boost photosynthesis, and recent satellite surveys suggest rising CO2 levels are responsible for greening patterns across the planet, including Arctic and drylands ecosystems. The latest research suggests that greening trends are likely to continue as CO2 levels approach those recorded during ancient period of warming... According to the new study, increases in photosynthesis rates won't be able to keep up with current rates of human-caused carbon emissions. In addition, previous studies suggest increases in rates of photosynthesis can prevent staple crops from absorbing calcium, iron, zinc and other minerals important for human health.... By comparing the fossilized leaf structures, including microscopic veins, stomata and pores, to those of modern leaves, researchers designed a model to more accurately predict CO2 levels... "It all fits together, it all makes sense," said study co-author William D'Andrea, a paleoclimate scientist at Lamont-Doherty. "This should give us more confidence about how temperatures will change with CO2 levels."

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Pictures taken with my newly acquired Pixel 4a. Two taken on yesterday's bike ride, and the third of a local fresh peach roughly the size of a melon.

Listening to the Lincoln Project podcast. Steve Schmidt let slip that DC insiders knew Manafort was a Russian spy in 2016. So, why didn’t they say so? Did the journalists know too?

Biden is too sweet. When Trump says he's somehow intellectually impaired, Biden could say all that he says, and add a bit of morality. "People in glass houses, Mr President."

Dear journalism people. If you had to subscribe to Starbucks to get a single latte, they wouldn't have a lot of customers. They unbundled. You pay for what you use. That's what journalism should do too.

Heard a report this morning on NPR, interviewing older Trump voters, and while they say his behavior is awful and he lies, and he's botched the virus response, they're still voting for him. Why? They don't like #BLM. In other words, white supremacy. I don't think the Democrats are going to say this but it needs to be said. White supremacy is on the ballot this year. It may be the single decisive issue. Not the virus, not the Constitution. But the right of whites to dominate. I wrote about it yesterday. The idea is hard to explain, but imho important. I'm going to work on better ways to explain, but for now you have to read slowly, carefully.

41-year-old Rudy Ferretti "was known in the male-dominated retro gaming community as a champion gamer — and as a raging misogynist who ferociously harassed women," writes blogger David Futrelle. "He once made a homebrew game in which the goal was to kill women. "Last week, he allegedly gunned down his former girlfriend Amy Molter before turning his gun on himself." Wired reports: Longtime members of the retro and arcade gaming scene say they warned community leaders and even police about Ferretti's threatening behavior for years. For close to a decade, they say, Ferretti had harassed, stalked, and threatened gamers, particularly women, pushing some out of the niche gaming scene entirely... Arcade game collector and researcher Catherine DeSpira and video game historian and storage auction buyer Patrick Scott Patterson — two of Ferretti's most public targets — say they collectively contacted police in different states a half-dozen times to report Ferretti's threats against themselves and others. They say those attempts ultimately had no effect. All the while, clusters of retro gamers across the country egged Ferretti on in private messages and on forums, leveraging his apparent instability and misogynist inclinations against women they didn't want in the scene... "They were emboldening it, pushing him, giving him a support system," says Patterson.... The rise of the GamerGate campaign in 2014 gave Ferretti new fodder to fuel his idea that women — specifically "radical feminists," as he wrote in multiple blog posts and said in YouTube videos — were out to destroy the purity of the arcade gaming scene... Ferretti believed that his gaming acumen justified his stewardship of the community. "I can be an asshole. You know why? Because I'm a world champion. I'm a gamer," he once said in a video. As recently as April 2020, Ferretti described himself in a YouTube video as "the savior of the community..." [I]t was a network of institutional failures — from forums to expos to law enforcement — that allowed Ferretti to continue his campaigns for over a decade. "I was trying to tell people this guy Rudy was dangerous and capable of doing exactly what he ended up doing," says Patrick Scott Patterson.

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