Cause or effect?
Seen outside a shop selling vapes in London. I’ve often wondered if these e-cigarettes act as a gateway drug for tobacco. The answer seems to be ‘yes’. At any rate the largest review of dozens of research studies to date found that young people who vape are about three times more likely to start smoking tobacco later than those who don’t vape.
Quote of the Day
”Some drink deeply from the river of knowledge. Others only gargle.
- Woody Allen
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Grateful Dead | Ripple
One of their loveliest numbers. There’s a nice video of how it was conceived.
Long Read of the Day
Sovereignty for sale
Really interesting blog post by Sam Freedman on the way some tech monopolies (and their owners) now seem to be more powerful than nation states.
Elon Musk’s decision to block Russia from using Starlink satellites has proved a serious setback for Moscow; hampering troops’ use of drones and artillery. Putin’s reliance on tech controlled by a foreign company has left him badly exposed.
The Ukrainians have had their own issues with Starlink. Musk provided thousands of terminals in the first days of the war, after Russia blocked access to the Viasat satellite communications systems. But since then he’s limited Ukraine’s ability to use it to attack Russian territory; starting after he spoke to Putin in autumn 2022.
Musk’s ability to change the course of the conflict raises questions that go far beyond Ukraine. Private businesses have a long history of participating in wars, and providing public services, as contractors and suppliers. But the power that major tech companies have over nation states is something new…
It is.
And it’s not just Starlink. Closer to home there’s Peter Thiel’s brainchild, Palantir, which the UK government has invited into the NHS.
My commonplace booklet
“An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted… A retreat began from the old confidence in reason itself; nothing any longer could be what it seemed… A sort of political surrealism came dancing through the ruins of what had nearly been a beautifully moral and rational world… The whole place was becoming inhuman, not only because an unaccustomed fear was spreading so fast, but more because nobody would admit to being afraid.” (Miller 1974: 30, 32, 36)
Arthur Miller: “The Year it Came Apart”, New York Magazine, 30 December, 1974.
Linkblog
Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.
From Tuesday’s edition of Heather Cox Richardson’s marvellous Substack…
Today the war continued to widen, leaving hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals in the Middle East desperate to leave. France alone has 400,000 people there. The U.S. has between 500,000 and a million people in the Middle East. The U.S. State Department has urged them to leave but said it could not help, and with airports and airspaces closed, just how they are supposed to do that is unclear. After pressure, the government is now saying it will work on chartering aircraft and using military planes to transport people who want to leave.
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