“We look across the landscapes of the other worlds within our solar system, now including Pluto, and see no intelligent life. The worlds within our solar system show no city lights, no road systems, and no obelisks of generations long gone. Our loneliness within our solar system makes it natural to look beyond, to stars and galaxies, to search for communicative folks. We hope to learn if we are alone or if, instead, we may join in a large collective of sentient beings with whom to share this universe.”
 — Did it ever occur to these people that maybe we’re lonely for a reason? Maybe we’re not worth seeking out? Maybe everyone else has already looked deeply into who we are and decided that they would be wise to stay as far away as they can, remaining silent if necessary rather than risk the possibility of being forced to spend a single second in our presence? Or worse, what if they’ve simply glimpsed us from a far distance and assessed just how awful we are? We’re miserable, and if we’re honest with ourselves we’ll admit that we wouldn’t want to make contact with us either. We just suck, and the sooner we acknowledge that the sooner we’ll make peace with how all alone we are and will remain. We don’t deserve companionship. Even the void recoils at the idea.

“An article on Saturday about a lawsuit challenging Seattle’s new trash policy misstated the mathematical formula in the plaintiff’s lawsuit to determine whether more than 10 percent of a garbage can’s contents should have been placed in another bin. The formula is: The height of the bin and the square of the radius multiplied by Pi, and then divided by 10; it is not the radius and twice the height of the can multiplied by Pi and then divided by 10.”

“Dieter Moebius — the electronic music and krautrock pioneer who co-founded Cluster and Harmonia — has died. His bandmates Michael Rother (of Neu! and Harmonia) and Hans-Joachim Roedelius (of Cluster and Harmonia) both confirmed the news on Facebook. The cause of death is unknown. He was 71.”
 — For additional Moebius music there are some great clips in the Pitchfork obituary.

★★ Birds cheeped and trilled. A low bullfroggy groan throbbed from somewhere in the shade underneath the house. Contrails fanned out across the zenith, tracing other people’s itineraries, in all stages of decay. A dove moaned and pigeons clapped low overhead. Walking out into direct sun was bad, and standing over the asphalt of the farmers’ market was worse, sickening, defeating. The new and better beach umbrella, once solved, made a narrow niche of shelter and shade. The beach chair had to be turned sideways to save feet the risk of burning. A dusty or salty haze lay over everything, but the colors and details of the metropolis of umbrellas could still be discerned all the way till the shore bent back out of view in the distance. The waves hit the feet with a shocking chill, sharp as the broken shells underfoot, but a few steps further was soft sand and a warmth that overcame the cold currents. Each passing swell carried a little pocket of cooler and more breathable air along with it. The afternoon sand was baked so dry it fell entirely away from the feet. The new and better beach umbrella had blown down and had to be found and re-staked. The late light was clear but opening the door led right back into a wall of suffocating air. A thin moon hung to the left of the highway, with the evening star beside it. Some number of miles later it was gone and there was only the night, the color of an old plum going bad. The city was as hot and bad as anyone could have expected.

“We — and I mean ‘we’ in the most sweeping generalization of ways, you and me and every millennial we know — like to pretend that social media doesn’t matter, even as we lurk among the tweets and Instagrams of our former lovers and hate-fave the Instagrams and tweets of friends we don’t talk to anymore, or deliberately plant sexually provocative tweets and devastatingly hot selfies as a trap for the people who are, we hope, creeping on us.”
 — Oh my God I’m so glad I’m not young.

by Jessie Guy-Ryan

10. Skull Mountain, Six Flags Grand Adventure
9. A Giant Hill of Trash
8. Your Principles
7. Your Principals
6. The Devil’s Tower, Wyoming
5. Plesa Hill, Ibanesti Forest, Romania (it just looks really nice)
4. A Giant Hill of Stuffed Animals (probably comfortable)
3. A Giant Hill of Bison Skulls
2. A Giant Hill of Human Skulls (I used this weird illustration bc actual piles of human skulls from the killing fields seemed like a bit ~much~)
1. Golgotha (worked out for some people)

Photo by Scott Robinson

“Black bear falls asleep on lawn after eating 20 pounds of dog food”
 — There are pictures, why are you still here?

It’s impressive how deeply determined Bill De Blasio seems in his bid to lose a public relations fight with a company as proudly and constitutionally disingenuous as Uber. His administration has proposed that during a yearlong study of traffic patterns, the number of new for-hire licenses issued to companies with more than five hundred vehicles would be capped at one percent of its current size*; Uber has more than twenty thousand drivers in New York City, meaning it would only be allowed to add around two hundred and forty additional drivers to its own base stations over the next year. The study is necessary, the city claims, because congestion has caused average traffic speeds to fall by nearly ten percent in Manhattan, to 8.5 miles per hour, between 2010 and 2014 — a period during which the number of for-hire vehicles increased by more than sixty percent. (There are, it is worth noting, twice as many Uber vehicles as there are taxi medallions in circulation.)

Uber, which planned to hire at least ten thousand new drivers over the next year, has framed the cap as something that will: destroy ten thousand new jobs, limit transportation options for the working class in outer boroughs, and break the service by making people wait up to half an hour for an Uber. These arguments are all…garbage? What will Uber’s rhetoric about jobs be when its fleet is primarily driverless? An Uber board member recently claimed that it wanted to buy half a million driverless cars from Tesla in 2020 — the electric car company’s entire theoretical output that year — and Travis Kalanick, Uber’s CEO, suggested 2030 as its target date for becoming driverless, a few months before it raided Carnegie Mellon’s National Robotics Engineering Center to staff its Advanced Technology Center, where it is developing its driverless fleet.

Uber may want to be how nurses “get to a night shift in the south Bronx” in the course of displacing public transit, but it’s clear from Uber’s own supsiciously tiny density map that, while “approximately 26% of all Uber rides in 2014 were trips to, from, or within the outer boroughs,” those rides were mostly to, from, or within gentrified Brooklyn and Queens — or to airports. Finally, isn’t the entire point of surge pricing — and UberPool! — to allow Uber to accommodate increased demand with a fixed supply?

A concern about a glut of cars in Manhattan is legitimate enough: The medallion system was designed in the nineteen thirties in response to the flood of drivers pouring into the streets amidst the Great Depression. (A massive, systemic economic downturn that creates an endless supply of underemployed people to drive cars, which results in fare prices being pushed toward zero? Hmm.) So perhaps it would be prudent to study the effects of adding so many cars to the road? And there are real issues to think deeply about with respect to Uber, ranging from labor to what if, in the probable near-future, Uber virtually monopolizes on-demand car service (which is why everyone loathes surge pricing so much, even if they don’t grasp, precisely, why).

Yet the De Blasio administration can neither form a particularly cogent argument about why it must cap Uber’s growth, nor avoid particularly impolitic moves like apparently threatening business groups if they choose to side with Uber on the issue. De Blasio has also taken a lot of money — too much — from the cab industry, whose record on labor is asdjghasgohasg, to the point that it’s difficult for him to even back into coherent argument about what Uber represents as the future of labor. (Which might be on-demand, underemployed non-employees with limited rights and benefits, whose jobs, such as they are, remain largely contingent on automation that has not yet come to pass.) Uber is a symbol of something so much larger that the Times could not resist tallying whether presidential candidates have taken an Uber, and if so, how often.

A quick solution, while the De Blasio administration attempts to formulate a coherent policy rationale, might be to let Uber put its billions where it says it wants to: Go forward with capping new drivers in Manhattan, but allow Uber to add as many drivers as it wants to in the outer boroughs. Much like Boro Taxis, of which there are some twelve thousand in the streets, these drivers would only be allowed to pick up riders while in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island or north of 96th Street in Manhattan. Let no driver be turned away, no nurse stymied from taking an Uber to a hospital in the Bronx at two in the morning to help deliver future TaskRabbits. Meanwhile, Manhattanites can afford permanent surge pricing, otherwise they’d live in Queens, right?

*Correction: This post originally stated that the proposed cap would allow Uber to grow one percent per month; the cap would only allow one percent growth during the entire study period, which ends in September 2016. We regret the error!

“Relish Mix points out that on social media, Marvel and Disney flooded the web with over 30 Ant-Man trailers and clips, but fans haven’t been reposting at Furious 7 rates. The 10 to 1 video repost rate is moderate per the social media tracking firm. Ant-Man‘s social media universe counts 106M comprised of 92M YouTube view activity, 8.1M Facebook video views and 5.4M Twitter reach. The film’s FB counts 528K likes. Among the stars, Rudd doesn’t have a presence on social media. The guys with the biggest footprint are much older: Michael Douglas counts 1.4M Facebook fans, while Stan Lee has 4.7M. #AntMan Twitter hashtags popped last week during the London Premiere to 9k and began resurfacing to the 8K range before the pic’s previews last Thursday.”