STILL NOT READY FOR MASS ADOPTION: Media notices EVs weigh a buttload, EV makers are losing their butts.

Dribs and drabs about problems with EVs are now making their way into general media release which you might not have noticed in the chorus of hosannas surrounding their development and the ensuing narrative push.

For example, EVs weigh a buttload, thanks to that battery, which can be anywhere from 1000-2000 (which is a ton) lbs. The average is about a grand of extra weight on the vehicle. As a set of regular tires will wear out 20% faster on an EV than an ICE, they have to have specially formulated tires to handle the load and torque.

The Brits are finding out that that extra weight raises hell with road surfaces.

Plus: “For all the ‘thou shalt have only electric vehicles by [insert date]’ mandating going on by state legislatures, greasy governors, and a Biden administration desperate to shove them down our throats, the numbers on the ground are signaling pretty stiff resistance.”

SAID THE PARTLY OWNED SUBSIDIARY OF NETFLIX: Out-of-Touch Obama in Massive Self-Awareness Fail. “It’s very hard to sustain a democracy when you have such massive concentrations of wealth.”

TO BE FAIR, DISNEY’S TROUBLES HAVE MORE TO DO WITH THEIR STREAMING SERVICE’S AWFUL ORIGINAL CONTENT AND DRIVING BOTH THE STAR WARS AND MARVEL FRANCHISES INTO THE GROUND:

On the other hand, DeSantis has done a fine job of exposing Disney’s woke policies and revoking the special privileges they used to enjoy.

GAMBLING: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends — and it’s philosopher 1, neuroscientist 0. “A 25-year science wager has come to an end. In 1998, neuroscientist Christof Koch bet philosopher David Chalmers that the mechanism by which the brain’s neurons produce consciousness would be discovered by 2023. Both scientists agreed publicly on 23 June, at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) in New York City, that it is still an ongoing quest — and declared Chalmers the winner.”

GOOD LUCK: DeSantis and Trump Both Vow to End Birthright Citizenship. Can They Do That?

BLUE CITY BLUES: A new reality for downtown Denver’s half-empty buildings: ‘The value’s not gonna go back to what it used to be.’ “We are seeing [that] across all the markets in the country. It’s not ever gonna be the same .… If you add what’s happening in our downtown in terms of homelessness and crime and other concerns, the downtown market is going to shift.”

INTRODUCING…: The Big Money Donors Behind the Attacks on Conservative Supreme Court Justices.

UM…: ‘I don’t want to become San Francisco’: Urban woes spur state action on housing. “Officials in Washington state and Vermont looked at the housing crisis in San Francisco this year and took action to prevent the same thing happening in their states: They effectively banned single-family zoning.”

San Francisco is all of 47 square miles of some of the most desirable (well, formerly) real estate in the world. Washington and Vermont are entire states.

HMM: District Attorney Recuses Her Office From Prosecuting Atlanta Domestic Terrorists.

THE PROCESS IS THE PUNISHMENT: Professor suspended for handing out Jeremy’s Chocolate remains on leave.

Richardson, a history professor at Madera Community College in California for nearly 30 years, was suspended after handing out the chocolate during an open house event on campus.

A faculty member confronted Richardson for handing out the chocolate bars, after which he was placed on administrative leave.

Jeremy’s Chocolate bars are labeled with the pronouns “He/Him” and “She/Her,” the former of which have nuts in them and the latter of which do not. Progressives on social media have criticized the brand as “transphobic.”

Richardson, who is gay, has since been interviewed by an outside investigator, but has received no word on whether he will be allowed to return to campus, he said.

“There’s no way for me to prepare for classes unless I have access to the work computer. I’m in a very weird nether world right now where I don’t know what’s happening,” he said.

Once again, the worst mistake the LGBs made was letting the QTs tack themselves on.

KRUISER: Hey Leftists: Stop With the Whining About Being ‘Unsafe’ on Twitter.

MODERN PROBLEMS: Junk websites filled with AI-generated text are pulling in money from programmatic ads.

Over 140 major brands are paying for ads that end up on unreliable AI-written sites, likely without their knowledge. Ninety percent of the ads from major brands found on these AI-generated news sites were served by Google, though the company’s own policies prohibit sites from placing Google-served ads on pages that include “spammy automatically generated content.” The practice threatens to hasten the arrival of a glitchy, spammy internet that is overrun by AI-generated content, as well as wasting massive amounts of ad money.

Most companies that advertise online automatically bid on spots to run those ads through a practice called “programmatic advertising.” Algorithms place ads on various websites according to complex calculations that optimize the number of eyeballs an ad might attract from the company’s target audience. As a result, big brands end up paying for ad placements on websites that they may have never heard of before, with little to no human oversight.

To take advantage, content farms have sprung up where low-paid humans churn out low-quality content to attract ad revenue. These types of websites already have a name: “made for advertising” sites. They use tactics such as clickbait, autoplay videos, and pop-up ads to squeeze as much money as possible out of advertisers. In a recent survey, the Association of National Advertisers found that 21% of ad impressions in their sample went to made-for-advertising sites. The group estimated that around $13 billion is wasted globally on these sites each year.

Now, generative AI offers a new way to automate the content farm process and spin up more junk sites with less effort, resulting in what NewsGuard calls “unreliable artificial intelligence–generated news websites.” One site flagged by NewsGuard produced more than 1,200 articles a day.

Bots producing content for bots that negotiate ad rates for sites frequented by bot-run click farms is no way to run an internet, but it might be Peak AI.

BRING IT ON: More Evidence Against Hunter Biden Is Coming.

BOONDOGGLE: Biden announces $42.5 billion plan to expand high-speed internet to communities with no or slow service. “President Joe Biden on Monday said that high-speed internet is no longer a luxury but an “absolute necessity,” as he pledged that every household in the nation would have access by 2030 using cables made in the U.S.”

Cables? We don’t need no stinkin’ cables.

Or tax dollars, either.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: The Punishment for Treason in Russia Is… NOTHING? Really?

Before leading his armed rebellion against Putin’s defense chief, Prigozhin went even further, calling into question the entire justification for the war. “The Ministry of Defense is trying to deceive the public and the president and spin the story that there were insane levels of aggression from the Ukrainian side and that they were going to attack us together with the whole NATO block,” he said on Telegram last Friday.

And then Prigozhin sacked the Southern Military District headquarters in Rostov-on-Don before ordering an armored column to head north toward Moscow. Putin himself went on national television to denounce Prigozhin’s mutiny as “treason” and vowed to crush the “armed uprising.”

For reasons still unknown, Prigozhin backed down on Saturday, just 24 hours into Wagner’s effort to forcibly unseat Shoigu and others in the Ministry of Defense. He claimed to want to “avoid bloodshed.”

But then something very strange happened, or maybe what’s strange is what didn’t happen.

Much more at the link.

SOUTH KOREA: In country with world’s lowest fertility rate, doubts creep in about wisdom of ‘no-kids zones.’

In addition to the world’s lowest birthrate, South Korea has one of the world’s fastest aging populations. That has left it with a problem familiar to graying nations across the world, namely: how to fund the pension and health care needs of a growing pool of retirees on the tax income generated by a slowly vanishing pool of workers.

And South Korea’s problem is more acute than most.

Last year, its fertility rate dropped to a record low of 0.78 – not even half the 2.1 needed for a stable population and far below even that of Japan (1.3), currently the world’s grayest nation. (And even further below the United States, which at 1.6 faces aging problems of its own).

With young South Koreans already facing pressure on multiple fronts – from sky-high real estate costs and long working weeks to rising economic anxiety – critics of the zones say the last thing the country needs is yet one more thing to make them think twice about starting a family.

The government, they point out, should know this better than anyone. After all, it’s spent more than $200 billion over the past 16 years trying to encourage more people to have children. Critics suggest that, rather than throwing more money at the problem, it needs to work on changing society’s attitudes towards the young.

I’m not sure if there’s any one good solution to the low birthrate problem, but reducing tax and regulatory burdens to levels last seen when people were having two or more kids might be a good start.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Climate Commies Ruin Everything—Pizza Edition. “In a city with rats the size of ponies and crime rates that are surging, the climate change weirdos would have people believe that the aroma from the neighborhood pizza joint is the real problem. Imagine how mentally unbalanced you’d have to be to buy into that without question.”

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Notorious Sex Change Provider Targets Underage TikTok Users In Ad Campaign.

FASTER, PLEASE: McCarthy Sets Date for Possible Impeachment Hearings Against Merrick Garland.

SOD OFF, SWAMPY: Far-left NYC cracks down on coal, wood-fired pizzerias to fight climate change.

My great-grandfather Luca was among those who came to New York from Italy and sought to earn his living and start a family. He came from Sicily and found work as a baker. He began making little pies with pomodoro and cheese, and it wasn’t long before he was building his own brick oven in Brooklyn. The Rosalia Bakery turned out loaves of Italian bread and pizza pies that sustained my family for decades. During the depression, family lore goes, it was a member of the Mafia that loved Luca’s pizza and kept him in business.

The new plan from the geniuses at the city level is to do away with this tradition, the tradition of my ancestors, and to make pizzerias that use this old-time method not only pay out the nose to keep doing it, but to make the pizza a shadow of its former glory.

The New York City Department of Environmental Protection is moving to demand that New York City pizzerias cut their carbon emissions by 75 percent.

Now have you had enough, New Yorkers?

VICTORIA TAFT: Portland Proud Boys Unmask Attackers at Pride Protest – And Well, Well, Well, What Have We Here?

GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: (Movie) Romance is Dead.

It’s difficult sometimes to remember that there was a time, not even that long ago, when movies were made for one reason… to make the largest possible audience happy on a Friday night… to give them a fun way to spend two hours and to send them home with a smile on their faces to enjoy the rest of their weekend.

A happy customer, Hollywood used to understand, is a repeat customer.

Nowadays it seems like the prevailing wisdom in Hollywood is that if an audience walks out of the theater smiling, then it means they didn’t learn their lesson.

Which brings me to THE SECRET OF MY SUCCESS, which I re-watched last week, thanks to the almighty Algorithm.

This one’s a treat; read the whole thing.

HMM: Spam Denial of Service Attack Against James O’Keefe? “First James O’Keefe dropped a video in which a Black Rock recruiter says they buy and sell politicians…”

THE SECOND ARRANGEMENT: Tale of the tape.

In the days before a hapless studio technician erased Steely Dan’s “The Second Arrangement” in 1979, Roger Nichols, the band’s late, great longtime engineer, made a rough mix of the track on a cassette tape. The song was nearly complete. Horns and a fade would soon be added. Producer Gary Katz already was imagining it as the band’s next single. When Nichols returned to his apartment at 30 Lincoln Plaza in New York, he set the tape aside and forgot about it.

“Roger would bring home work tapes from the studio almost every night,” says Conrad Reeder, Nichols’s widow. (He died from pancreatic cancer at the age of 66 in April 2011.) “He wasn’t much into cassettes, though, because he didn’t want to hear a track at anything but the highest fidelity. So the tapes would just be lying around the house.”

The day of the “Second Arrangement” fiasco, Reeder recalls Nichols coming back from the studio hours earlier than usual. “He walked in the door and looked ashen, as if somebody had died. I was like, ‘What happened?’ He told me an assistant engineer had erased the song—everything up to the fade.”

For a time there was hope that the song could be salvaged from one of the rough mixdowns. Engineer Elliot Scheiner came forward with a mix that had been made at a lower speed setting—15 inches per second (IPS) as opposed to 30 IPS. “‘Do we want to try and overdub on that?’” he asked. “I gave them the tape, and Roger put it up and listened to it,” but the quality wasn’t quite up to the Dan’s lofty standards.

“We tried cutting the song again,” Nichols wrote in a post on an EQ magazine audio forum in 1999, “and finished it. Horns, backgrounds, lead vocal. We listened to it and Donald said, ‘NAW…scrap it!’”

At some point Nichols put the “Second Arrangement” tape into a drawer of a roll-top desk. And there it remained, undisturbed, until after his death.

You can hear it at the link.

(Hat tip, fellow Dan fan Will Collier.)

OH MY: Did The White House Quietly Admit Biden Was Involved With Hunter’s Business Deals?