“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor”*…
We’ve become a nation of credit and debit card users. As of this year, Pew reports, 42% of Americans don’t use cash for purchases in a typical week (up from 24% in 2015); another 46% use a mix of cash and plastic; only 12% use mostly (or entirely) cash. The Federal Reserve reports, unsuprisingly, that cash remains the dominant mode for the elderly and the poor; debit cards, for lower-to-middle-income households.
NBER unpacks one little-understood consequence of this shift…
Every time a consumer swipes a credit card, the merchant pays an interchange fee—typically around 1.9 percent of the transaction value—most of which funds the rewards that cardholders receive. Because merchants generally charge the same prices regardless of how customers pay, consumers who use cash or debit cards effectively help finance the rewards enjoyed by credit card users. In Who Pays for Payments? (NBER Working Paper 35067), Mark L. Egan, Gregor Matvos, Amit Seru, Lulu Wang, and Vincent Yao use novel merchant-level data from Fiserv—one of the largest US merchant acquirers—to measure how the payment system redistributes resources.
The primary dataset contains establishment-level payment data from 2006 to 2022, including total payment values, transaction counts, and interchange fees paid for different card types…
… The researchers’ analysis using these datasets suggests that interchange fees transfer approximately $30 billion annually from cash and debit card users to credit card users. Cash users lose about 96 basis points of purchasing power, and regulated debit card users lose roughly 47 basis points, while basic and premium credit card users gain approximately 48 and 59 basis points, respectively. Because credit card use rises with income, the system generates an estimated $9.2 billion annual transfer from households earning less than $150,000 to those earning more.
Two forces moderate this redistribution. First, the tendency for cash, debit, and credit card users to shop at different merchants limits the overlap necessary for cross-subsidization. Second, where overlap does occur, such as at large grocery stores and gas stations, interchange fees tend to be lower due to sector discounts and negotiated rates. Together, these forces reduce the transfer by approximately 25 percent relative to the transfer that would occur with homogeneous consumers and merchants.
The researchers also examine the redistributive consequences of two specific developments in the payment system. The first is the Durbin Amendment, which capped interchange fees on debit cards issued by large banks. The authors show that one perhaps unintended consequence of the amendment was that it primarily benefited credit card users through lower retail prices at the expense of regulated debit card users, who lost approximately $9.6 billion in rewards and free checking benefits. This was a net transfer from middle-income to higher-income households. The second development is the rise of premium credit cards, which grew from 15 percent of credit card volume in 2006 to 60 percent by 2022. This has also been a regressive development. While premium cardholders gained about $7.9 billion, debit card users—not cash users—bore the largest dollar losses because they shop most frequently alongside premium card users…
The rich getting richer: “Who Ultimately Pays Credit Card Interchange Fees?” from @nber.org.
Pair with Annie Lowrey on another burden– a “time tax”– that falls disportionately on the neediest: “How American Bureaucracy (Literally) Steals Years From Your Life“:
Washington currently estimates that Americans spend 12 billion hours a year filling out government forms, meaning the average person spends six 8-hour workdays filing their taxes, signing up for Medicaid, renewing their driver’s licenses, and applying for government loans. At prevailing wages, this uncompensated labor is worth $430 billion a year. If Washington were to create a Department of Bureaucracy to take on the paperwork it shunts to citizens, the agency would require 5.9 million employees, making it four times the size of the active-duty military. The DOB’s payroll would be larger than that of every other federal department combined.
The nation’s paperwork regime frustrates every resident, and particularly lower-income residents who use more government programs and interact more frequently with public officials. The political scientist Elizabeth Cohen has done seminal work exploring time as a potent, if obscure, form of political currency. “The devaluation of a person or group’s political time is a structural obstacle to equality,” she writes. Yet we can’t measure time and effort as easily as we measure dollars, and we don’t even try. The 12-billion-hour estimate is an undercount, and an egregious one…
* James Baldwin (see also Terry Pratchett’s “Boots theory“)
###
As we second-guess secreted subventions, we might spare a thought for Jean-Baptiste Colbert; he died on this date in 1683. A French statesman who served as First Minister of State under the rule of King Louis XIV from 1661 until his death. His lasting impact on the organization of the country’s politics and markets, known as Colbertism, a form of the mercantilism so popular in the Trump Administration today. Colbert also helped craft the Code Noir, a legal instrument that sanctioned an intentionally brutal system of torture and repression to enforce institutional slavery in the French colonial empire and restrict the enterprise of free Black people.
Though Colbert was more competent and less crony-ish than the crew at “work” in D.C. over the last couple of years, his goal of a healthy economy was frustrated by a King whose spending out-ran (and whose favoritism undermined) Colbert’s efforts. In the longer run, many economists suggest that “Colbertism” has contributed to contributed to a lack of adaptability in French industry and a hostility to technological innovation.
“Reality is a very subjective affair”*…
As Nathan Gardels reports, the Berggruen Institute recently gathered religious scholars, philosophers, quantum physicists, AI technologists, neuroscientists and science fiction novelists at Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice to ponder the nature of consciousness. Noting that “it is fascinating to see how their ideas correspond to the long-ago musings of Medieval mystics and even the “pagan masters” of antiquity'” Gardels observes that “the great question then, as now, and probably forever, is whether there is a metaphysical gap between the body and the soul, or if they are made of the same substance, symbiotic aspects of a singular reality that entail each other.” He concludes…
…The quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli argues that the much-discussed metaphysical gap between body and soul, subjective and objective, doesn’t exist.
As he has written in Noema, “We, subjects of knowledge and understanding, are not outside the world. We are part of it. Our theories and knowledge are embodied tools to help us navigate the real world, not disembodied views on reality from the outside. They are themselves aspects of the very world they describe. Our understanding, like our feelings, perceptions and experience, is a natural phenomenon.”
For Rovelli, the notion of a metaphysical gap “contradicts everything we have learned about nature in the last centuries. The mind is the behavior of the brain, properly described in a high-level language. Neither my own experience of myself nor an external experience of me is primary: They are two distinct perspectives on the same events. We do not need to assume that the circle between epistemology (how we get knowledge) and ontology (what exists) requires a starting point. There is nothing wrong with its circularity: The world I access is the information I have about it, and I am part of that world.
“Nor do we need to require that there is any ultimate or fundamental account of reality. Any account is approximate, has blind spots and is realized within reality, so it is embodied in a part of that same reality.
“If we do not fall into the error of dualism upfront, we can safely speak of soul and emotions just as we speak of a kitchen table, even if the table is also a collection of atoms. It is time to give up the pernicious dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness and embrace the reality that our soul, or our spiritual life, is consistent with our fundamental physics.
“Earth is not metaphysically different from the heavens, living beings are not metaphysically different from inanimate matter, humans are not metaphysically different from other animals. The soul is not metaphysically different from the body. We are all parts of nature.”
Rovelli’s scientific case that we humans are not outside the world of reality, but constitutive participants in it and constructors of it, tracks with the intuition of Medieval thinkers like the 14th-century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart.
For Eckhart, consciousness was being aware we are not apart from, but both inhabit and are inhabited by, the mind of God — that is, “objective reality.”
As stated in the New Testament’s Gospel of John, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.” In biblical terms, the Word, or Logos, is divine reason. Eckhart interpreted this passage as meaning that the incarnation of the divine in man was not a one-time event of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem, but takes place through continuous human participation in the unfolding Logos of the Word, making us part of and conjoining with the mind of God; co-essences, so to speak.” If God is the pure thought of divine reason, then, as Sloterdijk has put it, ‘To think is to give birth to God.’”
That Medieval insight is another way of saying, in Rovelli’s words, that “objectivity without a subject is an abstract construct, of little relevance — it is the illusion of a science now belonging to the past.”
Consciousness, then, can be said to be the perspective of the aware self in a world where there is no outside. The “I” is not detached from some order of objective reality, but in all the diversity of personal experience, part of what makes it “everywhere whole.” Not only is “the universe disclosed by a knowing subject;” the knowing subject is its co-creator from within…
Eminently worth reading in full.
Striving to understand the nature of consciousness: “Subjective Perspective Makes Objective Reality ‘Everywhere Whole’,” from @noemamag.com.
Pair with: “Everything is not itself.”
* Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
###
As we muse on our minds, we might spare a thought for a man who wrestled with these same issues, Auguste Comte; he died on this date in 1857. A philosopher (and mathematician), he is remembered as the father of the doctrine of positivism. He developed the Law of Three Stages to describe the historical evolution of human thought and consciousness, arguing that the human mind, in its search for understanding, progresses through three distinct intellectual phases (the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive (or scientific), each with a different method of explaining reality.
Comte is widely regarded as the first “philosopher of science” in the modern sense, and as the forebearer of sociology (the name of which he coined, as he did the word “altruism”). He had a major impact on 19th-century thought, influencing the work of social thinkers like John Stuart Mill and George Eliot. His concepts of “sociology” and social evolutionism set the tone for early social theorists and anthropologists including Harriet Martineau and Herbert Spencer, evolving into modern academic sociology (a la Émile Durkheim) as practical and objective social research.
“I wisely started with a map”*…
From Daniel O’Donohue, 29 print-ready folding globe templates (the one above is “Earth Today”; there are also globes of the sun, the moon, the planets, and lots of different “views” of Earth) — every one free to download, print, and fold, and every one customizable into other shapes or create your own, with your own pinned places. via the custom globe builder…
… This project started with a simple observation: we look at maps on screens all day, but almost nobody gets to hold a planet. A paper globe is the cheapest possible spacecraft — print a sheet, cut along the lines, fold, glue, and you are turning the actual shape of the world over in your hands.
Nothing here is decoration. Every globe is built from openly licensed scientific data — NASA satellite imagery, USGS planetary mosaics, Natural Earth cartography, NOAA ocean data, the Smithsonian’s volcano inventory — rendered through real map projections into print-quality PDFs. Each globe credits its source, and the source is always one click away.
The fold shapes are the classics of mathematical cartography: icosahedra, dodecahedra, gores like a 17th-century globemaker would cut, even the Airocean projection that unfolds the world onto twenty triangles with barely any distortion.
The curated globes are free — print as many as you like. When you want a globe that is yours alone — your places pinned, your countries highlighted, your choice of shape — the builder is where it happens…
Getting our minds– and out hands– around the places we are: “Folding Globes.”
Harmonic: “24 Times,” from Gysin-Vanetti: “A collection of twentyfour variations on the theme “clock” created for HeK… Each of these clocks shows time in a distinct form. The result is a sequence of numbers, letters or punctuation marks animated in different ways….”
* J. R. R. Tolkien
###
As we orient ourselves, we might spare a thought for William John McGee (or “WJ McGee, without the periods, as he referred to himself); he died on this date in 1912. An inventor, geologist, anthropologist, and ethnologist, he is remembered for his pioneering studies documenting the occurrence of waves of invasions and recessions of ice sheets in North America (thus establishing the complexity of the Great Ice Age). But he worked in a number of governmental and organizational capacities that contributed to teh development of geography as a discipline: e.g., as a director in the U.S. Geological Survey, and as a founder and president of the National Geographic Society. While on the staff of the Bureau of Soils, in 1918, he organized the landmark Conference of Governors on Conservation of Natural Resources, for whihc he has been called the “chief theorist of the conservation movement.”
“It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently”*…
It can feel, as we’re awash in the wave of “news” and “dialogue” about AI that dominates discourse these days, as though artificial intelligence sprang onto the scene with more development up its sleeve but, Athena-like, essentially fully grown.
Writing on the Internet Archive’s blog, Jason Scott introduces a new collection at the Archive that reminds us that AI’s had a childhood (e.g., ELIZA) and an adolescence (e.g., work by and inspired by Seymour Papert), and that we can learn from it…
Long before the current kerfuffle about LLMs, Generative AI Artwork, and asking your tax preparation chatbot for a cookie recipe, the concept of artificial intelligence and synthetic life was a pervasive theme in creative and engineering works. We have the ground-breaking appearance of Rossum’s Universal Robots [and here] (or Tik-Tok, the Royal Army of Oz), through countless science-fiction properties and incredibly positive futurist home-making advertisements, and into the inevitable portrayal of dark and dystopian empires providing humans with nothing but a clear and present ending to their story arc. Artificial Intelligence has been riding along with humanity’s storytelling and expressiveness for many generations – and, one might argue, it is this ever-present influence and inspiration that has driven a lot of the modern phrasing and design in our most contemporary toys and tools wearing the vestments of consciousness.
The motivations are clear: our endless curiosity of the nature of our minds and humanity, the twists and turns that come when the synthetic mirror-images of people betray unintended consequences, and the fact that human beings look amazing when rendered in chrome.
But before we get swept up too much into the echoes of the past and see patterns of AI-like entities into the distant generations (golems, anyone?) let us instead zoom into a very specific family of projects and products that are presented at the Internet Archive for the research, education, and enjoyment of all: The newly-minted Vintage Artificial Intelligence collection.
Dating roughly from the 1970s through the 1990s, these emulated software packages have come from many sources, and with many motivations, but have been curated together for a very subtle and occasionally imperceptible theme: the adventure of experiencing a machine that thinks.
To be clear, and without taking too much time for a press conference announcing so or claiming such for a future IPO, none of the programs in this collection come within a solar system of thinking in any actual sense. They are, instead, portrayals on microcomputers and game consoles of the idea of thinking machines, the experience of creating autonomous or semi-autonomous virtual entities, and playing games with the illusion of a contemplative and improvisational opponent…
Eminently worth reading in full. The early days of AI: “Vintage Artificial Intelligence: Before It Got Awkward,” from @textfiles.com and @archive.org.
Given that the original users of/audiences for most those vintage programs presumably skewed young (in keeping with the demographics of recreational pc use), it’s fascinating to note, in the results of a recent Pew survey, that “for the first time, a majority of adults under 30 (55%) now say they’re more concerned than excited about AI,” a rate on par with adults 65+ and (for the time) higher than that level of concern adults 30-49 (51%) or adults 50-64 (47%). As to why…
Even in 2021, job loss was one of the top reasons behind Americans’ concern about AI. Today, Americans largely – and increasingly – think AI-related job loss is on the horizon.
In our new survey, 71% of adults think AI will lead to fewer jobs in the United States over the next two decades, up from 64% in 2024. Few (5%) say AI will lead to more jobs. One-in-ten say it won’t make much difference, and a slightly larger share are unsure…
… Adults under 30 are most likely to think AI will be bad for society – and for them. They largely think it will make connection and creativity harder to come by. And though most say they use chatbots, they’re just as likely to say these tools hurt their own creativity as help it… – source
* Fyodor Dostoevsky
###
As we reminisce, we might recall that it was on this date in 1833 that The Sun began publication in New York City. It was the first successful penny daily newspaper in the United States; and for a time, the most successful newspaper in the U.S.
[The Sun was] popular with the city’s less affluent, working classes. Its publisher, Benjamin H. Day, emphasized local events, police court reports, and sports in his four-page morning newspaper. Advertisements, notably help-wanted ads, were plentiful. By 1834, the Sun had the largest circulation in the United States. Its rising popularity was attributed to its readers’ passion for the Sun‘s sensational and sometimes fabricated stories [c.f., for example, here] and the paper’s exaggerated coverage of sundry scandals. Its success was also the result of the efforts of the city’s ubiquitous newsboys, who the innovative Day had hired to hawk the paper. The Sun added a Saturday edition in 1836. A number of weekly and semiweekly titles were also published, such as the Weekly Sun (1851-69), which shares the same masthead as the Sun with “Weekly” appearing in the title ornament.
The paper’s true glory days began in 1868 when Charles A. Dana, former managing editor of the New York Tribune, became part owner and editor. Dana endeavored to apply the art of literary craftsmanship to the news. Under him, the Sun became known as “the newspaperman’s newspaper,” featuring editorials, society news, and human-interest stories. A Sunday edition was added in 1875 and, later, a Saturday supplement appeared, offering book notices, essays, and fictional sketches by Bret Harte, Henry James, and other well-known writers. In the 1880s, the paper’s size increased to eight pages and in 1887 the Evening Sun hit the streets in two editions: Wall Street and Night
On September 21, 1897, in response to a letter from eight-year-old reader Virginia O’Hanlon (“Papa says ‘If you see it in The Sun it’s so.’ Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?”), the paper published “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.” This opinion piece by veteran newspaperman Francis P. Church, insisting that Santa Claus “exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist,” caused an immediate sensation. It became one of the most famous editorials in newspaper publishing history; the Sun would reprint this editorial annually until 1949… – source
“The ice was here, the ice was there, The ice was all around”*…
Your correspondent will on the road for the next several days, so (R)D will be on hiatus until on or around September 3. Meantime, a seasonally-appropriate post…
Writing for Texas Monthly, Lauren Larson visits Reddy Ice, the largest producer of packaged ice in North America and it’s CEO, Lonny Warner, to explore a billion-dollar industry that’s essential to us all, but that few of us stop to ponder…
… Warner joins a long procession of icemen who have bemoaned the lack of interest in their trade. “We are so familiar with water in its liquid and its solid form, that we seldom think of it as a mineral, and still less as a mineral product of any considerable industrial importance,” wrote W. P. Blake, an American geologist and mining consultant, in an 1883 report on the country’s ice trade. And yet, he wrote, “the industry is peculiarly American, and in no other country has the business of cutting and storing ice been so well systematized and perfected.”
By the time of Blake’s findings, people had been experimenting with making and keeping ice for centuries. In India, possibly as early as three thousand years ago, people used clay pots to cool water: The water’s evaporation through the clay removed heat, leaving chilled water or even ice under the right conditions. The technique is still used, especially as the country experiences record heat waves.
Americans in the nineteenth century, the dawn of the modern ice industry, had it easier. “The natural supply of ice in the United States is almost beyond calculation,” wrote a U.S. census agent named Henry Hall in a report submitted in 1883. Since at least 1805 so-called natural ice had been harvested from northern lakes, rivers, and ponds in a process accurately and musically depicted in the opening scene of Frozen, a rare cinematic nod to the ice industry. (In Eugene O’Neill’s 1946 play, The Iceman Cometh, a salesman has told his alcoholic friends that his wife is at home with the iceman. The iceman in question is meant to evoke death—the woman has been killed—but anxieties around swole deliverymen entering homes and seducing wives seem to have been prevalent in the twentieth century.) Using long handsaws and a variety of improvised plows, Northerners would cut grids in the ice and remove blocks, which were then stored or sent to warmer locales by ship or rail in insulated containers.
Thanks to a man named Frederic Tudor, some of these destinations were quite far-flung. Tudor was a merchant from Boston, more mutton chop than man in his later years. He would ship natural ice from Thoreau’s Walden Pond, which is startlingly Whole Foods–y branding for the nineteenth century.
Tudor envisioned a global ice industry. Perhaps he was motivated by the limited market for his Gläce-priced ice blocks in the U.S. or by the prevalence elsewhere of tropical fevers such as yellow fever, as the symptoms of these were often soothed by cold water. (In 1851 a doctor named John Gorrie experimented with creating a cold sickroom for malaria patients’ high fevers, effectively inventing air-conditioning.) In 1806, Tudor attempted to ship blocks of ice to the island of Martinique, a speculation that is detailed by Jonathan Rees, a history professor at Colorado State University Pueblo, in Refrigeration Nation, one of three books he’s written about refrigeration. First, the owner of a boat Tudor had chartered got cold feet, convinced, as many shipowners were, that the ice would melt and sink the ship. Tudor chartered another ship and successfully delivered his wares to the island, but Martinique had no icehouse in which to store it, and it began to melt, as ice does. Customers also had no idea how to transport it from his hold to their homes or keep it cold once they did; Tudor advised them to wrap their purchases in cloth. “He still got complaints, since it melted anyway,” writes Rees.
Tudor could very well have gone down in history as the father of the modern Potemkin start-up rather than the father of the modern ice industry, but he persevered. He saw that in order to create the worldwide ice trade he envisioned, he would have to build a global network of icehouses. Eventually his empire grew vast, and historians call Tudor by the absolutely sick moniker the Ice King…
… By the mid to late nineteenth century, artificial ice makers were being invented across the globe. Texans—perhaps shaken by the Civil War, which hindered the shipment of ice, and also likely motivated by the state’s growing beef industry—were aggressive in the ice race. By 1867, notes Rees, when the United States had only eight ice plants, three existed in San Antonio. Some early refrigeration machines used compressed ammonia, which is still widely used as a coolant. In the coming decades, ice plants bloomed across the state like frost on a window.
In the late 1920s, Southland Ice Company had eight plants and 21 retail locations in Texas, from which it provided ice for the iceboxes of residents in surrounding areas. (Widespread adoption of refrigerators was still several decades away and was driven, Rees tells me, by the lure of ice in the home. “The argument was always, ‘Get rid of the iceman. Buy a refrigerator.’ ”) Southland eventually became Southland Ice Corporation, and its icehouses, which had grown into convenience stores called Tote’ms, were rechristened 7-Elevens. In 1972, as 7-Eleven was growing into the brand that would stain the lips of countless middle schoolers with its neon Slurpees, Southland rebranded its large ice operation, calling it Reddy Ice Division.
Reddy was not yet the acquisitive ice empire it is today. For most of the twentieth century, regional producers thrived. But then, in the early nineties, the packaged-ice industry encountered an innovation: the in-store bagger. Refrigerator ice makers already existed but were not a particularly virile threat, as it would take a long time for a refrigerator-door ice maker to fill a cooler. In-store ice baggers were a different story.
The machines had been perfected by a young man named Jim Stuart, a former accountant who had consulted for a company called Automatic Ice Machine, or A.I.M. Inspired by that work, he began selling what he called the Ice Factory, a machine that automatically made and packaged ice at grocery stores and other retailers that had previously bought their ice from local businesses. Stuart began acquiring these flailing producers. His Houston-based company, Packaged Ice, quickly achieved ice supremacy, and in 1998, Stuart bought Reddy. (It still makes the Ice Factory.) A 2001 New Yorker profile christened Stuart the Emperor of Ice…
[Larson reviews the uses to which we put ice– the social (American’s prefer their beverages chilled), but also the more industral: ice is critical to everything from construction (e.g., in high temps it’s used to keep concrete from setting too quickly and becoming brittle) to medical treatment and research…]
… Not far from Reddy’s headquarters is a storage facility with twelve thousand pounds of ice that’s kept on reserve—kept on ice!—for emergencies. When natural disasters level our critical systems, as ritually occurs in Texas, ice is suddenly even more crucial. “When a hurricane hits and power goes out, we’re a lifeline,” Warner says. “It’s not for drinks at that point. It’s ‘how do I keep my food cold?’ ” In the event of a crisis, Reddy works with H-E-B, Walmart, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to distribute ice, often thousands of pounds of it. He vividly remembers when Hurricane Beryl tore through Houston soon after the Fourth of July in 2024. Celebrations had cleared out Reddy and its distributors’ reserves, leading them to scramble to get ice from across the country to Houston. “We had H-E-B calling us for ice, and we were just trying to get it anywhere we could,” Horton, of Polar Ice, recalls.
The moments when ice is needed but unavailable are as irritating and unsettling to us as the breakdown of any utility, even in much lower-stakes contexts than a hurricane’s aftermath. “Ice is actually a very high-passion business,” says Juan Estrada, who directs Reddy plants in the Metroplex and across the state. Customers might stop at a convenience store on the way to a party, gather some snacks, and then ask for a bag of ice at the checkout. If there is no ice available, Estrada says, they’ll likely abandon all their other purchases and walk out. For most of us, these small but searing disappointments are the only times we think about the role of ice in our lives.
But for many Texans, ice can be the only thing keeping us from succumbing to our surroundings. In 2024, Harris County Public Health reported that heat-related illnesses had increased by 329 percent between 2019 and 2023. Texans who are exposed to heat as part of their work in industries including agriculture, construction, and delivery—as is the case for more than 35 percent of Americans—are disproportionately vulnerable, as are older adults and children.
Those of us outside those groups are not immune. As early as March of this year, a ranger at Big Bend National Park tells me, she and her colleagues were responding to between four and six heat-related incidents each week. Rangers bring ice on almost every medical response; it’s crucial for stabilizing patients during what can be an hours-long journey from the park to a hospital. In the summer, says San Antonio Fire Department medic Ashley Long, everyone is vulnerable to the heat, even those who have been hydrating all day. Much like the ice distributors, Long responds to ten times as many emergencies when it’s hot. “The hospitals are just slammed. Every single bed is taken,” she says. “Every disease and debilitation that people have is magnified by the heat.”
Perhaps we don’t think much about ice because doing so requires us to consider how implausible it is that we’re able to live comfortably in such heat. How lucky we are to enjoy a snow cone on a one-hundred-degree day.
An invisible essential: “Inside the Billion-Dollar Industry That’s Keeping Your Beer Cold—and Saving Lives,” from @lonlozzin.bsky.social in @texasmonthly.bsky.social.
For a look at the even larger, even more infrastructurally-central, but equally opaque– ‘cold chain’: “Food is simply sunlight in cold storage.”
* Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
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As we stay cool, we might note that there’s still time to check in on World Water Week; today is its final day. While its in-person events are happening in Stockholm, much of the program is available online.
Why we should care (UK-centered, but all-too-relevant across the globe).
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