Category Archives: Web Article Review

works entering the public domain on January 1, 2019

I’m having some trouble with the math on this one.

We will all, as of January 1, 2019, have free, unfettered access to Williams’ metafictional shake-up of the formulaic status quo, when “hundreds of thousands of… books, musical scores, and films first published in the United States during 1923” enter the public domain, as Glenn Fleishman writes at The Atlantic. Because of the complicated history of U.S. copyright law—especially the 1998 “Sonny Bono Act” that successfully extended a copyright law from 50 to 70 years (for the sake, it’s said, of Mickey Mouse)—it has been twenty years since such a massive trove of material has become available all at once. But now, and “for several decades from 2019 onward,” Fleishman points out, “each New Year’s Day will unleash a full year’s worth of works published 95 years earlier.”

So is it 70 years or 95 years, or does it depend on the type of work? Why can’t I read novels from the 1940s right now? Anyway, the excerpt above is from Open Culture, and has links to many other lists. A couple that catch my eye are one of Agatha Christie’s first novels and some short stories by H.P. Lovecraft.

December 2018 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • The Fourth National Climate Assessment produced by the U.S. government is not an uplifting publication. In addition to the impacts of droughts, storms, and fires, it casts some doubt on the long-term security of the food supply.
  • An article in Nature was also not uplifting, arguing that climate change is happening faster than expected due to a combination of manmade and natural trends.
  • Air pollution is taking an average of two years of people’s lives worldwide, although progress is being made in some of the worst cases which tend to skew the average.

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • The Solarpunk genre takes a somewhat optimistic view of technology and climate change adaptation.
  • Rich people are starting to think they may be able to cheat death.
  • New Zealand is trying to use gene drives to completely wipe out rats in short order. Google is trying to do something similar with mosquitoes, only for the entire earth.

George McGovern’s Green New Deal

George McGovern proposed something similar to the current idea of a Green New Deal in the 1960s. A Yale historian says it had some momentum but was derailed when the Vietnam War broke out.


In 1964, McGovern sponsored legislation for the creation of a National Economic Conversion Commission (NECC) to transfer jobs in defense to peacetime work, for example, civil engineering and commercial manufacturing. On the surface, the NECC’s purpose was rather simple: to help unemployed defense workers find jobs. But McGovern’s ulterior motive for the commission was to reallocate military spending to fight environmental problems, to give defense workers “green jobs,” to use an anachronistic term…

But then came Vietnam. President Lyndon Johnson’s decision to escalate the war in Southeast Asia derailed McGovern’s vision. Whereas in 1963 the world seemed at the precipice of a new era in the Cold War, Vietnam revived ideological tensions between Democratic proponents and opponents of Cold War foreign policy. Hawkish Democrats became enemies to the NECC, afraid of diverting monies away from the war. The stiffest opposition to the plan came from the Johnson administration, which criticized McGovern’s idea for a 10 percent cut to a $300 billion-dollar defense budget as “radical.” Moreover, defense contractors failed to see the utility of McGovern’s commission as they were now awash in new, albeit temporary, defense contracts to fight the war. When the NECC would be revived over two decades later as the Cold War was finally coming to an end, it would be a smaller, private endeavor focused on public education about economic conversion and disarmament and stripped of its earlier environmentalist goals.

I’m sensing some urgency this time around over climate change, which is good, but military and national security spending seems to be largely unquestioned. For that to change, I suspect it would take some bold action in Congress like a war tax and/or an insistence that war must be declared before American troops or equipment are committed abroad. Ironically, I think maybe a compromise could be based on stepped-up border security in exchange for closing foreign military bases. That would seem to have something for everyone.

(U.S.) national security stories of 2018 (The Intercept)

The Intercept, which doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a left-leaning investigative news organization, has a round-up of national security stories from 2018. The biggest bombshell is a well-sourced claim that Saudi Arabia and UAE were on the verge of launching a military invasion of Qatar and were talked out of it by Rex Tillerson, who was then fired under pressure for Saudi and UAE lobbyists in Washington. Another interesting one claims that large AT&T buildings in major cities are hubs for NSA surveillance, including domestic surveillance. That’s just the tip of an iceberg consisting of allegations of lots of war crimes and torture, all backed up by a fair amount of evidence.

service jobs and automation

Gizmodo says automation of service jobs took great leaps forward in 2018, citing things like automated ordering kiosks in fast food restaurants. I have to admit, I kind of like it because I don’t feel guilty about making a special order, and I feel like I am much more likely to get what I want. And ordering and paying by mobile app has those advantages, plus cuts the wait time to zero and greatly decreases germ transmission.

The article talks about how Las Vegas unions have negotiated early notification and retraining programs to help deal with automation. And this is how we have to try to deal with at the level of the economy as a whole. Educate and train people for jobs where they can add value in the near future. teach them to think flexibly and creatively so they can come up with new ways to add value in jobs and roles nobody has even thought about yet, reduce barriers to starting a business or taking risks on a new idea, and share the wealth a bit more when all else fails.

ultrasound treatment for dementia

This article in New Atlas (which I don’t know anything about) reports on an ultrasound-based treatment for dementia and Alzheimer’s that has been successful in mice and is moving to human trials next year.

The ultrasound treatment was first developed back in 2015 at the University of Queensland. The initial research was working to find a way to use ultrasound to temporarily open the blood-brain barrier with the goal of helping dementia-battling antibodies better reach their target in the brain. However, early experiments with mice surprisingly revealed the targeted ultrasound waves worked to clear toxic amyloid protein plaques from the brain without any additional therapeutic drugs.

“The ultrasound waves oscillate tremendously quickly, activating microglial cells that digest and remove the amyloid plaques that destroy brain synapses,” explained Jürgen Götz, one of the researchers on the project back in 2015. “The word ‘breakthrough’ is often mis-used, but in this case I think this really does fundamentally change our understanding of how to treat this disease, and I foresee a great future for this approach.”

Top 10 Energy Charts of 2018

This is from something called the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. A few things they have concluded are that particulate air pollution is taking two years off people’s lives on average worldwide, and much more in some developing countries, climate change will impact the economy, U.S. fuel efficiency policy incentivizes the auto industry to make inefficient types of vehicles (although it still takes human beings making cynical, unethical choices to actually do this), nuclear energy could be competitive if a carbon tax were to be introduced, and peak pricing for electricity actually works to reduce and shift demand.

best business stories of 2018 (Longreads)

A couple stories caught my eye. Once is about the collapse of Toys ‘R Us, and the other about what it would actually take to bring manufacturing back to the U.S., if we decided we want to do that.

I don’t see why pop-up urban toy stores, similar to the pop-up Halloween stores that set up shop temporarily in underused retail spaces, couldn’t work. You could have a curated collection of the coolest toys of the year set up in a very entertaining way, let kids actually play with them, and have roving salespeople and interactive displays where people can order the toys to be delivered to their homes, say with free 2-day shipping. You could use whatever existing low-cost retailer you want (Amazon, Walmart, whatever) while recreating some of the holiday magic of F.A.O. Schwartz and small town Main Streets of yesteryear.

the north pole

The Week has a fun feature about the North Pole. It reminds us that the fictional St. Nicholas lived in modern day Turkey, and it was an American cartoonist in 1866 who came up with the idea of a fat elf-like Santa (not the Coca-Cola corporation as your know-it-all uncle might tell you) living at the North Pole. Supposedly, nobody saw the North Pole in person until 1908. And on the less fun side, the article covers thawing permafrost, melting ice, and enormous fossil fuel reserves that are believed to exist under the Arctic ice cap, which on addition to their planet-poisoning potential just may be worth fighting for.