THE ENEMY WITHIN: China is ‘inside every major American university,’ former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warns.
Are You Overpaying for an Online Service? Here’s How to Find Out PCMag: “Not everyone pays the same price for the same service online. Find out if you’re being charged too much and then rectify it. I’ve spent more than a decade reviewing and writing about all kinds of software and online tools, and it really gets my goat that companies continue to charge some people more than others.
With physical products, the product maker typically sets a retail price and both that company and other retailers who sell it use that price as a starting point. Some might offer deals and discounts, sure, but it’s easy to shop around…”
New year, new directions
Old things for a new year / the Japanese Portable Record Player Catalog / this 1950s Fender ‘Payola’ Telecaster has three sets of circuitry and outputs so that three guitar tracks could be recorded independently and simultaneously / the 1974 Gerstenlager Camelot Cruiser (via Jalopnik) / remembering Arata Isozaki / the architecture firms to watch / mathy rock from Vocabularies / remembering one of the world’s most dangerous toys / very big Lego builds by Stefan Weinert / installations by 3kta / Paik’s Video Study, a massive archive of the work of Nam June Pai (via CDM) / contemporary figurative painting by Pascal Moehlmann / an expansive Menu of Guitar Tunings / tech markets around the world (via MeFi / a new age of generative art? / create generative music with Dittytoy (e.g. Oxygene Pt. 4 by Jean-Michel Jarre / picoSYNTH, a pixel noise machine (via BoingBoing) / Could an A.I. Chatbot Rewrite My Novel? Probably not, but that’s not going to stop a lot of people from tryingp.
The New Yorker – Half a century ago, most of the public said they trusted the news media. Today, most say they don’t. What happened to the power of the press? By Louis Menand, January 30, 2023
“When the Washington Post unveiled the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” on February 17, 2017, people in the news business made fun of it. “Sounds like the next Batman movie,” the New York Times’executive editor, Dean Baquet, said. But it was already clear, less than a month into the Trump Administration, that destroying the credibility of the mainstream press was a White House priority, and that this would include an unabashed, and almost gleeful, policy of lying and denying. The Post kept track of the lies. The paper calculated that by the end of his term the President had lied 30,573 times…The power of the press, such as it is, is like the power of academic scholars, scientific researchers, and Supreme Court Justices. It is not backed by force. It rests on faith: the belief that these are groups of people dedicated to pursuing the truth without fear or favor. Once they disclaim that function, they will be perceived in the way everyone else is now perceived, as spinning for gain or status.”