Five Things: Silicon Valley Cowards, Black Fungus, Democracy, Galaxy Brain, Shopping Carts
It's Sunday. Read this now.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
It’s the middle of November and it is raining. Ok, this is not really a surprise and it also doesn’t bother me. Here in Northern Germany we pride ourselves with being used to bad weather and having some sort of magical resistance against the weather. Also, we around here we say that it isn’t windy until the sheep have no curls anymore.
Anyhow, what really annoys me about the rain is all the people with their stupid umbrellas. Especially those who have an gigantic umbrella that can fit a whole football team underneath it. What’s with that? When it rains, we also have wind and you get wet no matter what. Those people always take up too much space on the sidewalk and poke me in the face with their stupid umbrellas. Buy a raincoat instead! Or something else that is water-repellent. I’m wearing a waxed Barbour jacket, which keeps me dry and even though I get comments that I look like a forest ranger voting for Conservatives, I accept all that, because I am staying dry. Also, the Barbour jacket has a large pocket on the back, which is really meant for storing rabbits shot while hunting, and I can store my dad cap there, so my glasses don’t get all wet. I know, this is turning into a life hack text, but every once in a while I’d like to overshare a bit here.
I am happy about every umbrella that gets destroyed by the wind and ends up in a trash can.
Here are this Sunday’s very dry Five Things - enjoy!
I Worked All Over Silicon Valley. This Is How It Lost Its Spine.
The surrender is now routine. In April, Amazon publicly quashed reports that it would display the cost of Mr. Trump’s tariffs on product pages. Apple recently caved to pressure from Attorney General Pam Bondi and pulled an app that alerted users to nearby ICE agents. This is the same Apple whose chief executive, Tim Cook, in 2017 said, “Apple would not exist without immigration,” and quoted Martin Luther King Jr. in criticizing Mr. Trump’s Muslim ban.
What happened?
The answer is simple, if dispiriting: For tech companies, courage doesn’t scale.
I do remember when Tech execs still had a spine. Not anymore. They have so much power, but instead of fighting a good cause, they just do what the orange wannabe emperor wants.
This Black Fungus Might Be Healing Chernobyl By Drinking Radiation—A Biologist Explains
In radioactive sites like Chernobyl, where conventional cleanup methods are challenging and hazardous, radiotrophic fungi can provide a safer, natural alternative, according to an April 2008 article published in FEMS Microbiology Letters. Since C. sphaerospermum can absorb radiation and use it as fuel, scientists are exploring the feasibility of deploying these fungi to contain and potentially reduce radiation levels in contaminated areas.
Beyond the borders of the exclusion zone, scientists are investigating other applications, especially in the field of space exploration. The harsh, radiation-heavy environment of space is one of the most significant challenges facing long-term missions to Mars and beyond.
Just the other day I said to my wife that I find fungi extremely fascinating. I don’t recall the occasion anymore and no, we don’t normally talk about fascinating fungi. Little did I know that only a few days later I would read an article about radiation and fungi.
The Left Must Build Its Infrastructure
It is not a hot take at this point, but simply a statement of fact: The Democratic Party and the broader pro-democracy movement have failed to build a sustained infrastructure that can turn meaningful mobilizations like No Kings into long-term power. We have no civic-engagement infrastructure that connects the dots between the marches on Saturday and the nuts-and-bolts local engagement that must happen every other day in order to sustain a win.
Democracy thrives on participation. And that is not always easy, but always time-consuming. If we want resilient democracies, we need to increase our level of engagement, not just during campaigns. It’s not just an American phenomenon, we all got too lazy and took democracy for granted, giving the enemies of democracy too much room.
Galaxy brain resistance
How do we get the benefits of long-term thinking without getting disconnected from reality? First of all, I would say it’s a really hard problem. But getting beyond that, I do think there are some basic rules of thumb. The easiest is: does the thing you are doing in the name of long-term benefits actually have a solid long-term track record of achieving those benefits? Economic growth is like this. Not making species go extinct is also like this. Trying to install a one-world government does not - in fact, it’s one of many examples of something that has a solid long-term track record of failing and causing lots of harm in the process. If an action you’re considering has speculative long-term benefits but reliable known long-term harms, then... don’t do it. This rule doesn’t always apply, because sometimes we really are living in unprecedented times. But it’s also important to keep in mind that “we really are living in unprecedented times” has very low galaxy brain resistance.
As someone who has been working on innovation for the last couple of decades, I often think about how we can think about the really cool new stuff without forgetting about how we can get there.
Why Don’t People Return Their Shopping Carts? A (Somewhat) Scientific Investigation
I watched a total of 564 encounters between Cart Narcs and cart abandoners. These don’t represent a perfectly random sample of interactions, but together they capture a broad cross-section of everyday behavior. (And, as far as I know, it’s the largest archive of shopping cart behavior available.) Most interactions begin the same way: Someone leaves their cart and a Cart Narc requests they return it. At this point I documented what happened next, transcribing parking lot reactions word for unhinged word. To be clear, this was not a quick process. I spent dozens of weekend hours hunched over my computer pausing and replaying YouTube videos. People in my life called this “concerning” and a “waste of time.” I called it research.
Finally somebody tackled this issue. I wish people would just put back the shopping carts, because I usually don’t have any coins on me and also always misplace those little plastic tokens to put into the cart instead.
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico