A sane market would be going crazy right now.

 This weekend alone, we saw the administration threatening to bring criminal charges against the chair of the Federal Reserve, and we edged closer to a military conflict with a NATO country. Those were not the only big and worrying developments over the past few days, nor was the week being ended by any stretch of the imagination quiet.



This isn’t to say that the market hasn’t reacted to bad news previously during the current administration. There have certainly been cases where a disastrous policy announcement has caused things to drop, but always with remarkable speed, investors have reverted back to the “this is fine” mode, even if the problem they were reacting to has by no means gone away.

We'll see how things play out over the next few days, if Trump again backs down again (which will be somewhat difficult now that the wheels are in motion) and whether or not the markets decide this is finally a time for a flight to safety and the bond vigilantes actually get serious. 

POWELL: “The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the President.” youtu.be/KckGHaBLSn4

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— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla.bsky.social) January 11, 2026 at 5:01 PM

Tillis is spot on. The Senate can't confirm a Trump toady to succeed Powell at the Fed. The rest of the game is now out in the open, and it doesn't end well.

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— Justin Wolfers (@justinwolfers.bsky.social) January 11, 2026 at 6:00 PM

What can history teach us about what happens when a populist strongman with an idiosyncratic taste for low interest rates undermines central bank independence?

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— Justin Wolfers (@justinwolfers.bsky.social) January 11, 2026 at 5:44 PM

Still not sure why editors in NYC were more traumatized by the LA fires than those of us in LA were...

I kid, of course. 

I know exactly why we've seen such ghoulish displays of mock concern. It's a doomed Los Angeles story (always a favorite). The victims are disproportionately rich and famous (at least the ones you hear about. The New Yorker recently ran an epic hour-long read on the plight of the wealthy enclave of Pacific Palisades. The middle class and far more devastated Altadena was mentioned twice). The story fits nicely with narratives pushed by conservative media, particularly about Mayor Bass and her responsibility for the empty reservoir that had been drained years before she took office. 

Now that we're starting to see titles like "The Day L.A. Burned," you might want to check out some of our posts from shortly after the smoke cleared.

 

Wednesday, January 15, 2025

Mundane Monday

I had lunch outside on Monday. Airnow.gov said that the air quality was good so I took the opportunity to enjoy the sunshine and walk down to a neighborhood restaurant not far from my place with a nice patio facing the sidewalk. It was a beautiful, chilly day. Things felt back to normal.

People I encounter are still talking about the fires, of course. They compare notes on the damage wrought by the windstorm and what the air quality was like in the days after, conversations of people who shared and interesting adventure, the sort you hear after a typical Los Angeles earthquake. There is a small amount of anxiety about the next fire – – conditions in Southern California remain very dangerous – – but no sense of trauma, certainly nothing like what the coverage would suggest.

There are two essential pieces of context absent from the stories that have been dominating the news. The first is the sheer scale of this place. Los Angeles County (and, as is usually the case, county is the appropriate unit here) has over 10 million people and covers over 4000 square miles. A considerable portion of that is forested. For those living next to those wooded areas, or worse yet nestled in them like Pacific Palisades or La Cañada Flintridge, these fires can present a serious and immediate danger and there have been some real tragedies, but for the vast majority of us the impact of the past few days has been limited to wind damage and smoke.

The second piece of information you need in order to understand how this story has been reported is that one of the two major fires, the Palisades Fire seemed to target the richest and most famous people in Southern California. This is not entirely a coincidence. Wealthy celebrities are attracted to the spectacular views and relative isolation found in the Santa Monica Mountains. People like Ben Affleck pay a considerable premium to live in these beautiful tinder bundles. The median home price for Pacific Palisades is somewhere around $4 million and the outliers raise the mean considerably.

Journalists love talking about the travails of the rich and famous; they love showing pictures of desolate wreckage and burned out buildings. The past week has given them lots of the sort of things they look for and has made for some very happy editors, but the picture that the rest of the country has gotten has been wildly inaccurate.

Tuesday afternoon a week ago I watched heavy metal lawn furniture get picked up and thrown in a pool. That night the power went out, perhaps due to the huge tree that came down half a block from my apartment, the trunk of which I had to climb over to get to the one isolated restaurant that still had the lights on. (I have no idea how they still had power. Everything else was dark for miles.) For about four days after that the air had that distinctive orange-brown-purple bruised color. Other than some drives to the store, I stayed inside my apartment, occasionally checking to make sure that nothing unlikely had happened with the evacuation zones.

It was an interesting week, representative of the recent experiences of most Angelenos, but fallen trees and smoky air are not the sort of footage that goes national, which is why I also spent the week fielding calls from friends and family seeing how I was doing.

I'm fine. It is still too dry, still too windy, and the next fire might be closer, but for the moment I am doing just fine.

________________________________________________ 

 

Tuesday, March 18, 2025

Every picture tells a story

 A bit of context. Substantially more people died in the Eaton fire than in the Palisades fire. Far more people were left homeless in Altadena than in Pacific Palisades. In terms of the rest of LA, it was Eaton that came dangerously close to highly populated areas and could have racked up a horrific death toll had things gone differently. 

What happened in Altadena was many times more newsworthy than what happened in Pacific Palisades. There was only one reason to talk mainly about the latter: that neighborhood was where the rich and famous people lived.

 

_____________________________________________ 

Wednesday, March 12, 2025

How can we possibly hope to rebuild after losing more than one half of a percent of our housing?

 Two months later and the Wall Street Journal is still pushing the drama (not to mention a couple of its favorite narratives).

Rebuilding Los Angeles Is California’s Economic Moment of Truth

As I've said before, I don't want to minimize the loss and personal tragedy experienced by the residents of Altadena and Pacific Palisades, but this has just gotten silly.

This is not San Francisco after the earthquake. The combined population of the unincorporated L.A. County community of Altadena and the L.A. City neighborhood of Pacific Palisades was somewhere around 65,000, with about two-thirds of them living in the Altadena. That's a lot of people experiencing a great deal of human suffering, but we have to keep some sense of proportion. Los Angeles County has around 10 million people. 

Other than four or so days of bad air and some admittedly scary reporting around the possibility of things spreading into much more densely populated areas, the fires had no direct impact on the vast majority of Angelenos. Other than some burn scars on some of the mountains, most of us haven't even seen any signs of the fires. To say that life goes on would be a massive understatement.

It would take some work to check, but it certainly seems like the press forgot about Hurricane Helene faster than they forgot about the L.A. fires, despite that storm killing hundreds and leaving hundreds of thousands displaced, though, in defense of the editors and reporters covering that other story, almost none of those houses belonged to movie stars.

In Elon's defense, maybe people who stayed on X are just disproportionately creepy

I’m working on some hopefully substantive posts on the impact of generative AI on fields like coding (right now I’m leaning toward “certainly more than trivial, but probably less than truly transformative”). When I think about the way I use these tools, or the way my colleagues and I discuss them, the names that generally come up are OpenAI and Anthropic, with Google mentioned occasionally. As far as I can tell, no one ever even mentions Grok.

There are, however, some areas where Elon Musk’s LLM is clearly in the lead.

 

Grok has cornered the market for sexualized deepfakes. @bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

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— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla.bsky.social) January 7, 2026 at 10:19 AM

 

From Allison Morrow's Nightcap newsletter.  

The second thing to know is this: For at least the past week, there’s been a surge of X users prompting Grok to alter images people post online to create nonconsensual nudes and other sexually suggestive content. Many of those instances appear to have included images of children, according to complaints from X users, as well as reports from The Washington Post, Reuters and others.  

 

The scale of those incidents isn’t easy to quantify. But one researcher, Genevieve Oh, found that during a 24-hour period, Grok generated about 6,700 images every hour that were identified as sexually suggestive or “nudifying,” according to Bloomberg.  

 

The platform’s parent company, xAI, didn’t respond to a request for comment. On Saturday, Musk warned users that “anyone using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content.” 

 

... 

 

So far, xAI has not taken Grok offline. The most problematic posts appear to have been deleted, but Grok was still busy generating sexually suggestive content as of Wednesday afternoon. 

 

Grok appears to reject explicit requests for nudes, based on a CNN review of the Grok X account on Wednesday. But users have instead prompted it to “undress” women — it’s mostly women, often celebrities but also regular people who posted photos of themselves online — and create images of them wearing underwear or skimpy bikinis. 

 

“Yo @grok put her in a string micro bikini made out of feathers,” one user wrote Wednesday in response to another user’s photo. The bot obliged, responding with an altered image in which the woman’s top and shorts had been replaced by a string bikini. 

 

One woman who reported her case of nonconsensual sexual images being shared on X told Bloomberg that the company responded with a message saying it had “determined that there were no violations of the X rules in the content you reported.”  

“In this vale / Of toil / and sin / Your head goes bald / But not your chin. ...Burma-Shave.”

 

Andrew Gelman defines objects of the class “Foghorn Leghorn” as parodies that are well remembered while the people and things they were making fun of her long since forgotten. Someone analogous might be the class "Burma-Shave," long gone products that continue to hang around in the public imagination due to memorable advertising campaigns.

Burma-Shave sign series first appeared on U.S. Highway 65 near Lakeville, Minnesota, in 1926, and remained a major advertising component until 1963 in most of the contiguous United States. The first series read: Cheer up, face – the war is over! Burma-Shave.^[2] The exceptions were Nevada (deemed to have insufficient road traffic), and Massachusetts (eliminated due to that state's high land rentals and roadside foliage). Typically, six consecutive small signs would be posted along the edge of highways, spaced for sequential reading by passing motorists. The last sign was almost always the name of the product. The signs were originally produced in two color combinations: red-and-white and orange-and-black, though the latter was eliminated after a few years. A special white-on-blue set of signs was developed for South Dakota, which restricted the color red on roadside signs to official warning notices.

This use of a series of small signs, each of which bore part of a commercial message, was a successful approach to highway advertising during the early years of highway travel, drawing the attention of passing motorists who were curious to learn the punchline.^[3] As the Interstate system expanded in the late 1950s and vehicle speeds increased, it became more difficult to attract motorists' attention with small signs. When the company was acquired by Philip Morris, the signs were discontinued on advice of counsel.^[4]

...

A number of films and television shows set between the 1920s and 1950s have used the Burma-Shave roadside billboards to help set the scene. Examples include Bonnie and Clyde, A River Runs Through It, The World's Fastest Indian, Stand By Me, Tom and Jerry, Rat Race, M*A*S*H and the pilot episode ("Genesis") of Quantum Leap. The long-running series Hee Haw borrowed the style for program bumpers, transitioning from one show segment to the next or to commercials.

The Flintstones episode "Divided We Sail" has Barney Rubble reading messages on a series of buoys that say, "If You're Queasy riding on the wave, just open your mouth. Shout Terra Firma Shave."

The final episode of the popular television series M*A*S*H featured a series of road signs in Korea "Hawk was gone, now he's here. Dance til dawn, give a cheer. Burma-Shave".

 This verse is on display at the Smithsonian.

 

Aside from museums and recreations, the ads too would be all but forgotten if not for long shelf life of movies like Bonnie and Clyde and shows like MASH. Perhaps we need another class to capture what's going on. 

Welcome to Pottersville

One last holiday post. 

David Goldman writing for CNN: 

A soaking wet George Bailey and Clarence, warming up by the fire in the toll house on the bridge, discuss why Clarence jumped into the freezing water. It was to help George, Clarence tells him.

“Only one way you can help me,” George says sarcastically. “You don’t happen to have 8,000 bucks on you?”

The film then cuts to an elated George running through town, gleefully shouting “Merry Christmas” to the “You are Now in Bedford Falls” sign, Mr. Potter, the bank examiner and eventually his family.

Wait, what?

That’s the surprise you got if you selected the “abridged” version of the Christmas classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” on Amazon Prime Video. By the thousands of confused and outraged comments posted on social media on Christmas Day — you weren’t alone if you did.

Amazon streams the full version of the movie for Prime members, but the abridged version is available free for anyone, with ads. The abridged version cuts about a half hour out of the 1946 Frank Capra film’s runtime, axing the entire “Pottersville” scene, where Clarence the angel (second class) guides George through an alternate reality in which he never existed.

Of course, the movie makes no sense without that pivotal part of the story. So why cut it?

Copyright law. Well, an interpretation of it, anyway.

The idea here is that the sequence where George sees what the world would have been without him came from the short story "the Greatest Gift," which is why you have to pay Paramount if you want to air the original, which is especially strange since Paramount doesn't own that story and the people who do own it would rather it was still in the public domain.

The owners of the film in 1974 (it had changed hands probably a half dozen times since Capra was forced to close Liberty Films, at least in part because It’s a Wonderful Life bombed at the box office) had forfeited their rights by failing to renew the copyright, then had done absolutely nothing about it for a couple of decades before suddenly starting to call TV stations and threaten them with legal action if they continued to play the film without paying royalties. 

This extraordinary action was not based on a recent court ruling or a new development in the case. The extremely dubious justification for clawing the beloved movie back out of the public domain was that, while they had allowed the film’s copyright to lapse, the family of the author of the original short story had continued to renew their copyright which somehow related to the ruling on Stewart v. Abend despite that case involved a very different rights issue and had nothing to do with the public domain. The bottom line was Republic/Paramount had money and lots of lawyers.

Just to be clear, the children and grandchildren of the author, who do undisputedly own those rights and possibly the film rights as well) and who still license the property for reprints and stage productions, had nothing to do with this and, as far as I can tell, are quite unhappy with this turn of events.

The decision to claw the movie out of the public domain (something that should never be allowed to happen) had everything to do with a couple of developments that occurred during those twenty years, one of which everyone knows and the other almost no one talks about.

The first was that It’s a Wonderful Life went from a largely forgotten commercial flop to a cultural institution—and arguably the definitive Christmas movie—primarily due to broadcast television and, a few years later, cable stations putting it into heavy rotation during the holiday season, at least in part because it was now in the public domain (there are lots of ironies in this story).

Keep in mind that through the 1970s, and probably well into the 1980s, TV stations all had a room full of reels of film, and pretty much any movie or old TV show you saw that wasn’t a network feed came from that room. This gave stations an incentive to get the most out of a print of a movie, particularly if they didn’t have to pay to air it.

The other big development was the Mickey Mouse Protection Act of 1976, when Disney laid siege to Washington with an army of lobbyists to prevent its spokes-critter from entering the public domain. Suddenly, old IP had a greatly extended copyright, making it considerably more valuable.

While it would be an overstatement to say that the studio simply didn’t bother to renew the copyright, they certainly would have been less likely to be so careless had they known what was coming. It’s a bit like losing a lottery ticket before versus after learning it was a winner. It is not surprising that they were desperate to get that ticket back; it is surprising—and more to the point damning—that they did it so easily.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the story of It’s a Wonderful Life is one of an evil big business trying to establish a monopoly in order to exploit the public. The past fifty years have seen corporations effectively gut antitrust laws, push through more and more monopolies, greatly undermine the public domain, and attack the very idea of ownership itself (we live in a world where farmers are often not allowed to own either the tractors they drive or the crops they grow, and that is just the pointy end of the spear).

If we don’t live in Pottersville now, that is certainly where we’ve been heading for a long time. 

Things the NYT thinks are less news-worthy than Kimberly Guilfoyle's party schedule

I realize that this was a slow news day and it may have seemed a good time to run some lighter stories like the Guilfoyle piece and some fairly trivial local news...

But I can't help but feel they could have found something a bit more substantive. 

Maybe they could do something about the speculations around the timing. 

Or something about this...

UPDATED LIST of countries the Trump administration has threatened to invade, annex, or otherwise attack in the 85 hours of 2026 so far: 🇻🇪 Venezuela 🇨🇺 Cuba 🇬🇱 Greenland 🇮🇷 Iran 🇨🇦 Canada 🇨🇴 Colombia 🇲🇽 Mexico Insane.

— Seth Abramson (@sethabramson.bsky.social) January 4, 2026 at 10:09 AM

Trump: "Cuba is ready to fall. Cuba looks like it's ready to fall. I don't know if they're gonna hold out."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) January 4, 2026 at 5:13 PM

Trump: We have a very sick neighbor. That’s Venezuela. Colombia is very sick too. Reporter: So there will be an operation by the US in Colombia? Trump: Sounds good to me

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— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) January 4, 2026 at 6:26 PM

It's wild that the PM of a NATO member feels compelled to put out a statement like this vis-à-vis the US government.

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— Thorsten Benner (@tbenner.bsky.social) January 4, 2026 at 12:23 PM

From the wife on Stephen Miller.

Greenland slams ‘disrespectful’ pic posted by Trump aide’s wife www.ctvnews.ca/world/articl...

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— Serena (@bibliophile99.bsky.social) January 4, 2026 at 12:03 PM

This claim from inside the White House might be worth discussing.

WH sources say Venezuela's opposition leader committed the "ultimate sin": She accepted the Nobel Peace prize. “If she had turned it down and said, ‘I can’t accept it because it’s Donald Trump’s,’ she’d be the president of Venezuela today,” one said. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

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— Eric Umansky (@ericumansky.bsky.social) January 4, 2026 at 7:02 PM

Or these questions about the way Russia and China might react.

“Russian commentators have frequently suggested that Latin America lies in America’s domain just as Ukraine was under the Russian shadow. Vladimir Putin thinks the same of much of eastern Europe. Xi Jinping will draw his own conclusions.”

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— Dan Froomkin/Press Watch/Heads Up News (@froomkin.bsky.social) January 3, 2026 at 7:49 AM

“.. The United States has now given Russia, China, and anyone else who wants to give it a try a road map for invading countries and capturing leaders who displease them ..” @radiofreetom.bsky.social www.theatlantic.com/internationa...

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— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla.bsky.social) January 3, 2026 at 1:56 PM

The paper of record could examine whether you can really make a secure situation room by partitioning of part of a Mar-A-Lago ballroom with black curtains.

Name Brand vs Dollar Store Knockoff

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— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn.bsky.social) January 3, 2026 at 1:23 PM

Trump is posting some photos from last night / this morning, including this one. Very weird to see this in a non-situation room setting with black curtains

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— Jake Lahut (@jakelahut.bsky.social) January 3, 2026 at 10:06 AM

 

Shortly before the US military launched an attack on Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro, an account on Polymarket made some very suspiciously timed investments. The prediction market had been running bets on when or if Maduro would be removed from power, with prices for “out by January 31, 2026” as low as $0.07 late Friday evening. But within 24 hours of the military action, a newly created account invested tens of thousands of dollars, racking up several hundred thousand in profits.

The account was created less than a week ago, and invested over $30,000 the day before the assault, turning a profit of over $408,000. The activity was flagged on social media, with people speculating that the person placing the bet was acting on inside information and perhaps even worked at the Pentagon. Joe Pompliano, an investor and podcaster, quickly pointed out on X that “Insider trading is not only allowed on prediction markets; it’s encouraged.”

There have been past incidents of seemingly obvious insider trading on prediction markets, but the companies often show little interest in curbing such behavior. This is partly because these companies believe the value they offer is not a level playing field for investors, but rather in delivering news and insights. When reached for comment, Kalshi, another prediction market, pointed us to a post on X stating that such insider trading was against its rules. We reached out to Polymarket for comment, but have yet to receive a response.

 We'll be coming back to that last one.

Everyone complains about the traffic. In LA, the guerrilla artists do something about it.

This is a fascinating and very LA story. As a bit of background, the 110 is quite possibly the worst stretch of freeway in Los Angeles. As the video explains, it was adapted from a stretch of road that was designed for cars traveling 40 miles an hour with off ramps and particularly on ramps that make you feel like you're taking your life in your hands every time you drive it. The Interstate 5 turnoff can also be extraordinarily stressful with even moderate traffic. Keep that in mind when watching this video. 

 PS. If you'd like to delve further, here's more on Richard Ankrom.

New Year's Day greetings from Winsor McCay

 1909

 

New Year's Eve greetings from Winsor McCay

1905

 

 

 

How Christmas goose and Christmas turkey switched places. The economics and agriculture behind changing holiday traditions.

How Christmas goose and Christmas turkey switched places: the economics and agriculture behind changing holiday traditions.

Keeping with the festive theme for the rest of the week, here’s a video that explains the history and science behind the traditional carol, “Christmas Is Coming, the Goose Is Getting Fat.”

This is very much a Talking Heads–style clip (except for the plucking scenes, which might actually be a bit too vivid for some viewers), but Sarah Taber is one of the sharpest commentators on the vitally important but woefully undercovered topic of agriculture, and she always has something insightful and well-informed to say on the subject.

I’m going to start introducing our readers to some of the YouTubers I find entertaining and educational. Between AI slop and content farms, it is getting increasingly difficult to separate the wheat from the tsunami of chaff, but the platform still has a tremendous number of smart, hard-working people putting out tons of great videos.

And here’s some bonus content: Taber giving an excellent analysis of why farmers thought it was rational to support Trump even though they fully believed his tariff policies would do serious damage to their businesses.

It's basically the story of the mechanical Turk but with a really dystopian final act

Everyone here probably already knows the basics, but just to review:

Elon Musk is the world’s richest man, and he has been using his tremendous wealth and power to push far-right causes, white supremacist movements, and huge sweetheart government contracts. The majority of his fortune comes from Tesla stock holdings and compensation packages approved by arguably the most corrupt—and certainly the most well-paid—board of directors in corporate America.

Based solely on its small and shrinking car sales (the only significant product that Tesla actually makes) the company is, by any reasonable standard, overvalued by more than one and probably close to two orders of magnitude. This insanely inflated stock price is justified largely, perhaps primarily, by investors’ faith in the Optimus humanoid robot.

In order for this market cap to make sense, you have to believe that bipedal humanoid robots represent the future of labor, that the time frame for them revolutionizing the world’s economy is five—or at the very worst, ten—years away, and that the dominant manufacturer of the entire world’s market will be Tesla.

While it is entirely possible, even likely, that most physical labor will be done by robots sometime in the future, every other proposition in that list is absurd.  It’s true that great progress has been made, but the prototypes we are seeing now are still years away from the performance being promised and that's not even the biggest obstacle. Despite the name, according to the large majority of roboticists not actually on the payroll of these companies, Optimus and other humanoids are a decidedly suboptimal design for all but a handful of situations: expensive, inefficient, unreliable, unstable, too large or too small for most tasks, and obscenely over-engineered for virtually every job. Even if the future belongs to robots, it almost certainly won't be these robots.  
But perhaps silliest of all is the belief that Tesla is the cutting-edge company in this field. 

 Matt Novak writing for Gizmodo:

Tesla held a special pop-up event over the weekend for Art Basel Miami Beach, the international art fair in Florida. The pop-up was dubbed “The Future of Autonomy Visualized” and reportedly featured Elon Musk’s Cybercab prototype and Optimus robots. But a video from the event is going viral for all the wrong reasons. And it’s pretty hilarious.

The video, which appears to have first been posted to r/teslamotors on Reddit, shows an Optimus robot knock over several bottles of water on a table before lifting its arms into the air. The arms move in ways that would be consistent with taking off a VR headset, and then they fall heavily, with one hitting a water on the table that seems to explode and shoot water everywhere. After that, Optimus appears to go lifeless and falls backward.

The video is just five seconds long, but it tells quite a funny story in that short burst of time.

What’s happening here? Many people online speculate that an unseen person was controlling the Optimus robot, and that person took off their headset before disconnecting. And that seems to be the most likely explanation.

This kind of robotic control is called teleoperation, and it has been in existence since at least the 1940s. Sometimes called a waldo, Walt Disney showed off how he made the 1964 New York World’s Fair attraction Carousel of Progress with a similar technology.

 

Tesla Optimus
byu/Decent_Cheesecake643 inteslamotors

 

 As Novak points out, this is not the first time Musk has tried to pass off puppetry for automation with Optimus -- at least twice sharp-eyed viewers have spotted controllers off to the side in videos -- nor is this sort of thing limited to the robotics division. We've seen faked demonstrations of self-driving cars and solar roofs along with suspicious accounting practices, data suppression, and projections so unrealistic they can only be called lies. 

Unlike with LLMs where serious people are having real discussions about the state and promise of the technology, the case for humanoids is nothing but hype and the the kind of crude approach to engineering that comes from getting your ideas about technology from old sci-fi shows. the entire sub-bubble is an embarrassment, but you know what's more embarrassing than being a humanoid robot company? Having to fake your demos so no one will notice you're being lapped by pretty much all of your competitors 

Dystopia Watch -- Surveillance State Edition

I’ve been meaning to post more of Benn Jordan’s videos and to talk more about the exceptionally good work being done by 404 Media. This is a two-for-one.

You probably don’t realize how many cameras are watching you on a daily basis. You almost certainly don’t realize how widely available the data they gather is to governments, corporations, and reasonably competent hackers. When you factor in the people currently in charge of both these tech companies and the government, this becomes one of the more disturbing stories of 2025 — and that is a high bar to clear.

Breaking The Creepy AI in Police Cameras



We Hacked Flock Safety Cameras in under 30 Seconds.



This Flock Camera Leak is like Netflix For Stalkers

Little Nemo Meets Lieutenant Kijé

Just over ten years ago, I was playing around with the very cool open-source video editor, Kdenlive and put together this video. The software has gotten considerably more powerful since then yet it's still remarkably intuitive and, you know, free.

 

The images are from Winsor McCay. The music is by Sergei Prokofiev, though you may know it better from the many artists like Greg Lake and Sting who have borrowed it over the years. 

Christmas Eve greetings from XKCD

 Maybe we should state all holidays as Eve powers

 

Christmas Eve Eve with the California Raisins — more on commerce and Christmas.

[We’ll be getting back to serious topics and horrible people next week. For now, I’m thinking more pleasant thoughts.]

A personal favorite here.

There have been many attempts to turn popular TV ads into media franchises (I actually had to Google the Mean Joe Greene ad to make sure I wasn’t just imagining that they actually aired a made-for-TV movie based on it). But A Claymation Christmas Celebration (1987) is probably the best of the bunch.

The reason it stands out is that Will Vinton Studios was an extraordinary operation filled with wonderfully gifted artists and animators. They never had either the cultural impact or, if you’ll pardon the expression, the commercial success they deserved. Nonetheless, they put out an exceptional body of work.

As charming and well animated as the titular raisins might have been, they easily could have worn out their welcome in a longer format. The producers of the Christmas special wisely chose to keep their appearance to a single musical number and instead filled out the rest of the half hour with a range of clever, funny, and—in one case—absolutely beautiful  animation.