January 4, 2017
1. Ford cancels a $1.6 billion plant in Mexico and gives credit/thanks to Trump. (Not much discussed: The cars that would’ve been built in the new plant will be built now in an existing Mexico plant.) Trump’s tweets also “nailed the coffin” on the House GOP’s ethics affair. / The New York Times, Politico
2. No cases filed in the horrifying New Year’s Eve mass molestation of women in Bengaluru. We shouldn’t be surprised, but we are. / bangaloremirror.indiatimes.com
3. What the West can learn from Nigeria, a report from a newcomer to Lagos. / Bloomberg
Related, and worth a revisit: Teju Cole’s “Home, Strange Home” from 2011. / The New Yorker
4. Why America’s subway-building is the world’s most expensive: governing is hard; we like big stations; we’re just not cost-effective. / Vox
5. To awaken your brain: The moving sofa problem. / math.ucdavis.edu
Saudi Arabia’s royal family, numbering between 5,000 and 15,000, is by all accounts “spending lavishly” on property—mostly out of the country, just in case a portion of the family gets lopped off in the name of austerity and needs to go into exile. / The New York Times
“The atmosphere in Iran…and the fact that I still think about my family doesn’t allow me to understand what I actually am.” A look at the complicated and separate statuses of gay and trans people in Iran: the former violently shunned, the latter ostensibly embraced, but with extreme caveats that come with the bureaucracies of a state ruled by Islamic Law / BuzzFeed News
A look inside the special snowglobes made by Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz, where something often goes wrong. / martin-munoz.net
“The front of the class don’t need to change a thing, they’ve made good grades their whole lives, they’re never wrong, and they’re going to just keep on being right and losing fights.” Postmortem 2016: “The snobs lost to the slobs, but true to the character of the well-educated, they simply will not hear criticism that does not come from the similarly credentialed.” / Medium
Megyn Kelly, who announced this week she will be jumping from FOX News to NBC at the end of the week, will not only bring her unflappable independence to the network, but also some seriously great clothes. / New York Times, Vanity Fair
“At some point in 2017, a fully autonomous Tesla will blast across the country en route from Los Angeles to New York.” Limited deployment of self-driving vehicles is “technically, legally, and socially possible, even under today’s laws.” / Backchannel
The self-driving revolution could pull the rug out from under the most common form of employment for American men without a college degree: driving.
The long-term outlook for the 8.7 million jobs in trucking is bleak following successful beta road tests of self-driving trucks from companies like Otto. Driving a truck is the most common employment in most American states. / Medium, Backchannel, NPR
1. Automation could cause the cost of transportation to drop so low that the rich segregate themselves to well-off exurbs / Slate
2. If cars aren’t already electric by then, it could also cause emissions to spike. / conservationmagazine.org
3. Self-driving taxis might be cheap, but do we really want them to replace public transit (which retains a public obligation to serve everyone equally)? / Bloomberg
Ninety percent of all car accidents are caused by human error. Red-light-running Ubers aside, this video shows how an autonomous fleet could cut that down massively. / mlive.com
As social theorist Ivan Illich noted in his many jeremiads against the automobile, technologies as pervasive as the car can begin to bend the rest of the world, inverting the priorities of planners to favor the needs of cars over those of people. / ranprieur.com
Are cars on the brink of the first real revolution since the Model T? Calling these developments a revolution might be inflammatory, of course. After all, it will take decades to roll out the infrastructure for electric charging stations, and maybe millennials will still buy cars. / Bloomberg
“Over the last 10 years, Anchorage Public Schools in Alaska were closed for just eight days.” School closure has as much to do with transit as it does with weather. / CityLab
Throat-singing allows a singer to produce multiple tones at once, including harmonics and overtones. It can be baffling to hear, but when you see it visualized, it makes a lot more sense. / YouTube