Conducted by progressive think tank data for progress

1 Traffic & Transit Though ownership is disproportionate, interest in electric cars is high across all incomes and races, according to a 2019 survey. CalMatters , News Partner Posted Reply In Atherton, one of the nation’s richest towns, giant oaks and well-manicured hedges surround gated mansions owned by some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent billionaires, basketball stars, tech executives and venture capitalists. Each set on an acre of land, six-bedroom estates, brick-paved pathways, neoclassical statues and cascading fountains are on full display. But increasingly, another status symbol has been parked in these driveways: a shiny electric car — sometimes two. This tiny San Mateo County community — with an average home value of almost $7.5 million and average household income exceeding half a million dollars — has California’s highest percentage of electric cars, according to a CalMatters analysis of data from the … [Read more...] about Who Buys Electric Cars In California — And Who Doesn’t?

LUCERNE, Switzerland IN a maroon turtleneck and loose-fitting gray suit, eyes on his score, Pierre Boulez took turns one late August morning here rehearsing the soloists for “Répons.” Written in 1981 for six soloists, chamber orchestra and live electronics, it is the first major work he wrote using the electronic-music institute in Paris, Ircam. But it has rarely been performed, just a few dozen times. Now Mr. Boulez had young musicians from the Lucerne Festival Academy on hand. Intimations of jazz, Balinese gamelan, African drumming and Japanese music floated from welters of rapid passagework. “You are freer there, so to speak,” he reminded the harpist where the score mandated improvisation. “No, no, no, no,” he gently chided one of the pianists, adding, consolingly, “It’s difficult also for the conductor, believe me.” It sounded nearly impossible, not least when the six soloists finally played together before the rehearsal broke. Intense complexity created waves of … [Read more...] about Boulez’s Gentler Roar

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images OpenAI entered the Silicon Valley stratosphere last year with the release of two AI products, the image-generator DALLE-2 and the chatbot ChatGPT . (The company recently unveiled GPT-4 , which can ace most standardized tests, among other improvements on its predecessor.) Sam Altman, OpenAI’s co-founder, has become a public face of the AI revolution, alternately evangelical and circumspect about the potent force he has helped unleash on the world. In the latest episode of On With Kara Swisher , Swisher speaks with Altman about the many possibilities and pitfalls of his nascent field, focusing on some of the key questions around it. Among them: How do we best to regulate a technology even its founders don’t fully understand? And who gets the enormous sums of money at stake? Altman has lofty ideas for how generative AI could transform society. But as Swisher observes, he sounds like the starry-eyed tech founders she … [Read more...] about Sam Altman on What Makes Him ‘Super Nervous’ About AI

Two influential and very establishment writers are debunking the criticisms that left-wingers enjoy throwing at former President Donald Trump. Trump did not win the 2016 election because of rising racism, admitted Thomas Edsall, a New York Times columnist who normally zigs-zags between criticizing populists while also admitting that establishment economic policies have been harmful to most Americans. I've seen two articles on recent electoral trends this week. Both worth reading, but I'd like to add a sidebar: https://t.co/v3H6kKe3Xv https://t.co/ofzTCQxcPP — Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) March 22, 2023 Under the March 22 headline, “The Unsettling Truth About Trump’s First Great Victory,” Edsall describes the new evidence about Trump’s shocking win in the 2016 election: Trumpism has found fertile ground across a broad swath of the electorate, including many firmly in the [non-racist] mainstream. That Trump could capture the hearts and minds of these [non-racist] … [Read more...] about Establishment Op-Eds: Trump Transformative, His Voters Not Racist

Over half of Germans believe that their country could be heading towards a future war and that the country is unable to defend itself, polling has revealed. A study undertaken by the R+V Insurance company has reportedly found that over half of Germans now fear that the country could end up getting itself actively involved in a war in the near future. The majority in the country, the poll asserts, also reportedly view the German state as being unable to defend itself, a viewpoint that appears to largely be in keeping with those in the country’s government . According to the data reported on by N-TV, 55 per cent of those in Germany fear that the country is heading towards a future war, with this statistic rising to 63 per cent when only women are polled. This statistic rises even further when only those in the once-communist-occupied east are polled, with around two-thirds of the region’s population believing that a future war is on the cards for the country. German … [Read more...] about Most Germans Fear Future War, Inability of their Country to Defend Itself

So I guess we’re in a new cold war. Leaders of both parties have become China hawks. There are rumblings of war over Taiwan. Xi Jinping vows to dominate the century. I can’t help wondering: What will this cold war look like? Will this one transform American society the way the last one did? The first thing I notice about this cold war is that the arms race and the economics race are fused. A chief focus of the conflict so far has been microchips, the little gizmos that not only make your car and phone work, but also guide missiles and are necessary to train artificial intelligence systems. Whoever dominates chip manufacturing dominates the market as well as the battlefield. Second, the geopolitics are different. As Chris Miller notes in his book “Chip War,” the microchip sector is dominated by a few highly successful businesses. More than 90 percent of the most advanced chips are made by one company in Taiwan. One Dutch company makes all the lithography machines that are … [Read more...] about The Cold War With China Is Changing Everything