Fabius Maximus:

Automation need not be feared. Many of the dooms we fear will disappear along with the lost jobs. Automation improves productivity, giving us more national wealth and income. We need only adapt our society to gain its benefits, minimize the trauma of the transition, and share the benefits (which we have failed to do with the gains from the last 30 years). We want to succeed like Britain did in the 1760 – 1840 period, with internal peace and prosperity. We do not want to follow France’s path during that period.
 
 Planning for success requires reassessment of America’s strengths and weaknesses. For example, economists consider as strengths our relatively high fertility and attractiveness to immigrants. Not so as automation destroys jobs by the millions during the next few decades.
 
 In the 21st century population growth will not be necessary for economic growth. Perhaps the 21st century will reverse that, making Japan is the nation best prepared for the next wave of automation — as seen in the below graph from “Japan Meanderings”, Christopher Woods, CLSA, 5 December 2013:

Jason Fagone:

Why do major leaps forward come so rarely in the auto industry? There are of course the usual suspects: crash test standards, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration requirements, European pedestrian safety protections; entrenched capital investment in infrastructure and manufacturing methods; long vehicle development cycles — the whole legacy kaboodle of a mature and highly regulated industry. But I spent four years researching, interviewing, and writing about inventors who aren’t limited to thinking like the auto companies, and who made cars that are drastic departures from the ones we’re driving now. They did this as part of a grand-challenges approach to innovation — a $10 million X Prize that pushed inventors to build the super-efficient car of the future.
 
 Auto companies like to sneer at legitimately futuristic cars, calling them “science projects” and saying consumers will never buy them. I believe this is a mistake. Because ultimately, they don’t really know. They’ve never tried to make and sell cars like the ones that ended up excelling in the X Prize contest. And they’re awfully good at blaming consumer timidity for their own engineering fears and failures.
 
 
 Announced in 2007 and staged in 2010, the Progressive Insurance Auto X Prize attracted diverse interest — not from big automakers but from lone inventors, garage hackers, students, entrepreneurs, and startup companies all over the world, all with different ideas about how to shape the future of the automobile. To win a piece of the $10 million prize pot, teams had to build a safe, practical car that could travel 100 miles on the energy equivalent of a gallon of gas (MPGe) and emit 200 grams per mile or less of CO2 (a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming).

Alex Kantrowitz:

The workshop, called “Blurred Lines: Advertising or Content,” focused on whether publishers and advertisers are doing enough to keep consumers from mistaking native ads — which are meant to closely resemble non-sponsored content — from the content itself.
 
 “As consumers, we started seeing, when we went online, things we that weren’t sure what they were,” said Mary Engle, the FTC’s associate director for advertising practices, in reference to native ads’ resemblance to editorial content. Concerns about deception, she said, sparked the FTC’s interest.
 
 Trying to make money
 Fearful the federal government would meddle with the hottest new form of advertising, leaders from across the spectrum came together in its defense. Executives from Procter & Gamble, Hearst, Mashable,The Huffington Post, Outbrain, Sharethrough and more participated in the standing-room only workshop that ran all day. Over the course of it, every imaginable defense of the medium surfaced, from the standard “native advertising is transparent enough” argument to a claim that consumers want more native ads.

Wolf Richter:

Average loans for new cars jumped by $756 to $26,719 in the third quarter from a year ago, the highest increase in five years, according to Experian Automotive, which collects registration data from motor vehicle departments and financing data from lenders – an essential cog in the perfect surveillance society. Despite the jump in loan balances, the average monthly payment rose only 1.3% to $458, due to two factors:
 
 Magically lower interest rates. Though interest rates elsewhere in the economy rocketed higher in Q3, auto lenders just ignored them, and average rates actually dropped to 4.27% from 4.53% a year earlier.
 
 Dizzyingly long terms. The average term grew by one month to 65 months. A stunning 19% of all new-car loans were stretched to over 72 months, up from 16% last year.
 
 Used vehicles saw similar dynamics. The average amount financed rose 1.8% to $17,900, but the average monthly payment remained flat at $350, thanks lower interest rates and longer terms.
 
 Leasing – a fancy word for “long-term renting,” something dealers, lenders, and automakers love because they get to extract more money out of you, and you don’t even know it because the monthly payments are deceptively low – made up 27.2% of all new financing in Q3, up from 24.4% a year ago, up from 14.2% in 2009, and up from the mid-single digits back when I was still in the business (and we loved, loved, loved leases!).

The Economist:

WHEREVER automotive engineers gather, some wag will sooner or later announce that hydrogen is the fuel of the future—and always will be. The hydrogen-powered car has been just around the corner for decades. However, judging from announcements by Honda, Hyundai and Toyota at last week’s motor shows in Los Angeles and Tokyo, hydrogen cars will be hitting the showrooms from spring 2014 onwards. It seems the future is about to arrive.
 
 Hydrogen’s attraction as a transport fuel is that, unlike petrol, diesel, kerosene, natural gas and every other hydrocarbon fuel, it contains, well, no carbon. Burning it therefore creates no carbon-based greenhouse gases—at least, not in the engine. However, if air is used as the oxidiser instead of pure oxygen, burning hydrogen produces all the noxious oxides of nitrogen that fossil fuels generate. These are an even bigger curse than carbon dioxide as far as damaging greenhouse gases are concerned.
 
 That is why work on using hydrogen as a fuel for a modified internal-combustion engine has been more or less abandoned, even though getting such a power unit into production was considered cheaper than any of the clean alternatives. BMW built a couple of hydrogen-powered supercars, only to find them no cleaner than clunkers from the days before catalytic converters.

Jeff John Roberts:

Digital marketers, weary of online scams, will start placing more ads on Facebook rather than run the risk that their ads will be shown to robots instead of actual people.
 
 That was one conclusion of an ad industry breakfast in Manhattan, titled Bagels and Bots, where executives last week explored the pervasiveness of botnets — networks of corrupted computers that provide an easy way for criminals and hackers to defraud big brands out of billions of dollars. Here are some new numbers, and the implications for advertisers.

Michael Spector:

From Galileo to Servetus to Mendel to Einstein. Revolutionary science has always incited visceral hatred on a mass scale. Galileo told us that the Bible was wrong and he was chastised for denying the word of God. Mendel was engaged in the devil’s work. And Einstein “invented a weapon that killed millions” because of his original theories of physics.
 
 It’s a lot easier for a reaction to something new to turn into repeated statements of evil, supported by anecdote and innuendo, and eventually turn into a meme, ultimately becoming the commonplace perception. Melissa McEwen is a blogger who writes about sustainable agriculture and healthy eating. She recently penned an article titled “Just Kale Me: How your Kale habit is slowly destroying your health and the world”. She chastised Kale (a very healthy vegetable) as being deadly (http://huntgatherlove.com/content/just-kale-me-how-your-kale-habit-slowly-destroying-your-health-and-world). She used innuendo, extrapolation, unscientific references, out-of-context facts and statements to make her point. Her “fake” article spread like wildfire and for about a day was considered “truth” by many “healthy living” bloggers and readers alike. The very next day, she edited the article and admitted to the truth—she was trying to make a point that it is so easy to demonize something without clear logic and fact, and still get everyone to believe you and repeat the bottom line. Her declaration was that when you read “an article that demonizes a food, think about whether or not there are citations and follow those citations”. Her article struck me as very poignant, in light of all the GMO research I had been doing in the prior weeks. There are so many articles (some are repeatedly published) that are wholly inaccurate, based in half-science, extrapolation, innuendo, and out-of-context rhetoric. When I did my own research—to the source and in the science—I was amazed at how far these inaccurate statements had gone and how wrong so many people were, thinking they were right because they repeated the same things others did.
 
 Perhaps Monsanto should have adopted the mantra that Paul Bucheit so cleverly and timely introduced at Google in 2000—“don’t be evil”. Just saying that was their mantra has helped Google countless times avoid the evil designation that so many people have tried to hurl their way over the years. It has worked.
 
 Did you know: Google sues more of its customers each year than Monsanto does? Google spends 3 times as much as Monsanto on Federal lobbying? There are more ex-Googlers in the Obama administration than there are ex-Monsanto employees?
 
 I could go on. But a lot of the “bad things” being said about Monsanto are simple truths about the nature of doing business at scale. On the list of top lobbyists on payroll in DC, Monsanto is not even in the top 50. The “Monsanto Protection Act” is actually called the “Farmer Assurance Provision” and was drafted and written by a number of farm groups, including the American Farm Bureau Federation, American Soybean Association, National Corn Growers, and others, to help ensure farmers aren’t denied the right to grow crops that are approved and regulated by the Federal agencies, protecting them from emerging state propositions that aren’t based on science or research.

Kurt Anderson:

David Hockney and others have speculated—controversially—that a camera obscura could have helped the Dutch painter Vermeer achieve his photo-realistic effects in the 1600s. But no one understood exactly how such a device might actually have been used to paint masterpieces. An inventor in Texas—the subject of a new documentary by the magicians Penn & Teller—may have solved the riddle.

In the history of art, Johannes Vermeer is almost as mysterious and unfathomable as Shakespeare in literature, like a character in a novel. Accepted into his local Dutch painters’ guild in 1653, at age 21, with no recorded training as an apprentice, he promptly begins painting masterful, singular, uncannily realistic pictures of light-filled rooms and ethereal young women. After his death, at 43, he and his minuscule oeuvre slip into obscurity for two centuries. Then, just as photography is making highly realistic painting seem pointless, the photorealistic “Sphinx of Delft” is rediscovered and his pictures are suddenly deemed valuable. By the time of the first big American show of Vermeer paintings—at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in 1909—their value has increased another hundred times, by the 1920s ten times that.

Despite occasional speculation over the years that an optical device somehow enabled Vermeer to paint his pictures, the art-history establishment has remained adamant in its romantic conviction: maybe he was inspired somehow by lens-projected images, but his only exceptional tool for making art was his astounding eye, his otherworldly genius.

Travel is a blessing, particularly walking around when a few free minutes appear. Happy Thanksgiving.

Burkhard Bilger:

Human beings make terrible drivers. They talk on the phone and run red lights, signal to the left and turn to the right. They drink too much beer and plow into trees or veer into traffic as they swat at their kids. They have blind spots, leg cramps, seizures, and heart attacks. They rubberneck, hotdog, and take pity on turtles, cause fender benders, pileups, and head-on collisions. They nod off at the wheel, wrestle with maps, fiddle with knobs, have marital spats, take the curve too late, take the curve too hard, spill coffee in their laps, and flip over their cars. Of the ten million accidents that Americans are in every year, nine and a half million are their own damn fault.
 
 A case in point: The driver in the lane to my right. He’s twisted halfway around in his seat, taking a picture of the Lexus that I’m riding in with an engineer named Anthony Levandowski. Both cars are heading south on Highway 880 in Oakland, going more than seventy miles an hour, yet the man takes his time. He holds his phone up to the window with both hands until the car is framed just so. Then he snaps the picture, checks it onscreen, and taps out a lengthy text message with his thumbs. By the time he puts his hands back on the wheel and glances up at the road, half a minute has passed.
 
 Levandowski shakes his head. He’s used to this sort of thing. His Lexus is what you might call a custom model. It’s surmounted by a spinning laser turret and knobbed with cameras, radar, antennas, and G.P.S. It looks a little like an ice-cream truck, lightly weaponized for inner-city work. Levandowski used to tell people that the car was designed to chase tornadoes or to track mosquitoes, or that he belonged to an élite team of ghost hunters. But nowadays the vehicle is clearly marked: “Self-Driving Car.”

Via Oliver Bruce.