Here’s another holiday open thread for fun, but first I want to kick off with a rant about Twitter and just how hamstrung we—and most of the media—are by what Elon Musk has done and continues to do.
As a news source, Twitter was invaluable—the quickest way to get and share breaking news, and the best place to get primary source quotes from lawmakers and other newsmakers. It’s replaced RSS feeds as the best place for news. It’s a one-stop shop for access to the reporters and sources in various beats. That’s particularly true for international news—ask Mark Sumner or Markos if they would be able to continue their remarkably in-depth coverage of the war in Ukraine without it.
It’s also great place to share and develop ideas with peers, and a great place to connect with friends that isn’t Facebook, which is objectively the worst social network in the world. I’ve seen complaints in the comments about our reliance on Twitter in staff stories and I hear that and share the frustration. It’s awful and doing anything that promotes anything of Elon Musk’s makes me want to vomit. As of right now, though, there isn’t a viable alternative for the work we’re doing. So please bear with us while we try to figure this out.
Now to the fun stuff.
- We’ve been talking a lot about the “motion to vacate the chair,” one of the things the Freedom Caucus maniacs extracted from Kevin McCarthy in his pathetic bid to be speaker of the House. Here’s some background on how it all works. Important to note because it shows how historically awful this crop of House Republicans is: In all of Congress’s history so far, one member could call this motion at any time and that was fine because everything used to work and mostly deserving and capable people who did the work and had the good relationships with members got the job. (Not counting Newt Gingrich, but that’s a whole different rant.)
- Ever wonder what Times Square or the Las Vegas Strip or Delhi would look like without all the lights and billboards and visual pollution? Take a look at some of the world’s most iconic streets without the clutter.
- If you’re on the west coast and have been subject to the atmospheric rivers pummeling us, stay safe and stay dry. If you’re curious, here’s some background on what you’ve been subject to, like systems that “can carry an amount of water roughly equivalent to the average flow (in cubic feet per second) at the mouth of the Mississippi.”
- Here’s a fantastic profile of Ashley Smith, founder of Black Soil in Kentucky. Her mission is to empower and grow the community of Black farmers in the state, and which has had remarkable success in just five years. She’s linked farmers to communities in the state’s cities, helped bring produce to food deserts, and grown the market share of the Black farmers she’s working with. She’s also telling the history of agriculture in the state: that it was built on the backs of enslaved people. “This is a history that allows us to explore what makes us unique and see everyone represented at the same time–Black, white, rural, urban–across the spectrum of identity,” says Smith. “And it helps us tell that modern story.”
- Don’t be too quick to volunteer as a product tester for electronic devices at home—your new smart vacuum could end up betraying you in the most embarrassing of ways.
- Could rewriting the algorithms that drive social media turn them from polarized cesspools to nice places to hang around in? Researcher Aviv Ovadya thinks so. “Social media doesn’t have to divide us,” said Ovadya, an affiliate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. “It doesn’t have to incentivize outrage and hate.” He argues for “algorithms designed to elevate posts that resonate with diverse audiences.” It’s worth a try.
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There is something new under the sun: a new solar project in Texas, a 100-megawatt utility-scale solar farm that is forgoing steel racks and trackers by installing panels directly on the ground. The company Erthos has worked with project developer Industrial Sun to devise the system that they say allows them to “build a solar power plant in half the time on one-third of the land, all while using 70 percent less cable and trenching.” That could cut the cost of installing large, utility-scale solar farms by 20%.