Sunday, January 15, 2023

15: Nepal

Are Protein Bars Actually Good for You? Or are they just glorified candy bars? The global market for protein bars is growing quickly and expected to swell to more than $2 billion by the end of 2026 ........ “We’ve just gone completely off the rails with protein in recent years” ........ Despite the advertising, though, nutrition experts say that protein bars aren’t all that healthy. ........ “We value protein so much that it’s the central thing on our plate” ...........

You’d be hard-pressed to find an American who actually needs more protein, though

........ Most meat eaters get far more than the recommended daily dose of protein (which is about 0.4 grams per pound of body weight). And those who don’t eat meat can get enough protein from plant sources like tofu, nuts and legumes. ......... many protein bars are also full of sugar. ....... A Gatorade protein bar in the flavor chocolate chip contains 28 grams of added sugars, twice the amount in a Dunkin’ Donuts chocolate frosted doughnut with sprinkles. .......... “By and large, they’re highly processed, high in sugar and salt — kind of a ‘Frankenfood’” ........ grapes, a banana, an apple or yogurt with berries ....... a handful of nuts ....... tuna or hard-boiled eggs, which are high in protein but not processed.

Kellyanne Conway: The Cases for and Against Trump Shrugging off Mr. Trump’s 2024 candidacy or writing his political obituary is a fool’s errand — he endures persecution and eludes prosecution like no other public figure. That could change, of course, though that cat has nine lives. ........ It’s tough to be new twice. ........ A popular sentiment these days is, “I want the Trump policies without the Trump personality.” ......... it was a combination of his personality and policies that forced Mexico to help secure our border; structured new trade agreements and renewed manufacturing, mining and energy economies; pushed to get Covid vaccines at warp speed; engaged Kim Jong-un; played hardball with China; routed ISIS and removed Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s most powerful military commander; forced NATO countries to increase their defense spending and stared down Mr. Putin before he felt free to invade Ukraine. ......... When it comes to Donald J. Trump, people see what they wish to see. ........ what some perceive as an abrasive, scornful man bent on despotism, others see as a candid, resolute leader unflinchingly committed to America’s interests. ...... until one faces the klieg lights, and is subjected to raw, relentless, often excessive scrutiny, and unfair and inaccurate claims, there is no way to suss out who possesses the requisite metal and mettle. ........ Trump boasts that his general election win-loss record was 233-20 and that he hosted some 30 rallies in 17 states and more than 50 fund-raisers for candidates up for re-election, and participated in 60 telerallies and raised nearly $350 million in the 2022 cycle for Republican candidates and committees. .......... For seven years Mr. Trump hasn’t stopped campaigning .

Republicans Are Getting It Wrong About DeSantis and Florida After his commanding performance in the midterm elections, I informally polled my conservative family members in Miami, who all said they had dumped Mr. Trump and were on team DeSantis for ’24. One colorfully called the former president she had voted for twice a “whiny crybaby” who could only talk about losing the last election. .......... Florida now has the fastest-growing population in the country ........ “People vote with their feet,” he said. “We are proud to be a model for the nation, and an island of sanity in a sea of madness.” ........ Florida is not a model for the nation, unless the nation wants to become unaffordable for everyone except rich snowbirds. .......... Florida is underwater demographically. Most of those flocking there are aging boomers with deep pockets, adding to the demographic imbalance for what is already one of the grayest populations in the nation ....... All of the new arrivals have contributed to a growing unaffordability crisis in Florida. You can see it everywhere ......... Eighty-year-old wooden bungalows nearby now go for almost $2 million, and glitzy new projects have moved into historically Black neighborhoods like Little Haiti, pushing out local people. ......... While Mr. DeSantis has been busy limiting what can be taught in schools, flying immigrants to Northern states and punishing “woke” Disney, working-class Floridians are being priced out of many Florida cities. Miami now surpasses Los Angeles and New York City as the least-affordable city for housing in the United States, and joining it in the top five is the once working-class South Florida Cuban-American bastion of Hialeah. Miami is also second in income inequality, with levels roughly comparable with Colombia’s and Panama’s. .........

Florida is having many of the same problems as its liberal archnemesis California

......... More than 76 percent of Floridians live on the coasts .



Date Like a Monk ‘We’re not here to impress each other. We’re here to connect.’ ........ The Sanskrit word for monk, brahmacharyi, means “the right use of energy.” ......... my practice teaches that we all have a limited amount of energy, which can be directed in multiple directions or one. When energy is scattered, it’s difficult to create momentum or impact. ......... If you haven’t developed a deep understanding of your motivations and obstacles, it’s harder to move through life with patience and compassion. ......... During college in London, I had devoted so much time to a long-distance girlfriend that I missed most of my classes. Celibacy allowed me to use that time and space to understand myself and develop the ability to still my mind. .......... When I left the ashram for good, I hadn’t watched TV, seen a movie, or listened to music in three years. I didn’t know who had won the World Cup or who the Prime Minister of England was. ....... The night was going to cost me nearly a week’s income, and I wanted it to be perfect. ........ She smiled politely, but she wasn’t eating much. ....... Monks never try to impress anyone. As a monk, you strive to master your ego and your mind. We think love is its own puzzle ........ when you explore the dark lanes of your own mind, as monks are trained to do, you develop patience, understanding and compassion toward yourself, which you can then bring to all your relationships. Going through the process of learning to love yourself, as monks are also trained to do, teaches you how to love someone else. ........ what she actually said: “I’d be perfectly happy to go to a grocery store and buy some bread.” ......... My monk teachers never tried to impress me and never wanted me to impress them. ........ you’re never better or worse than anyone else ........ Her grandmother worried I would leave her and return to the ashram. Her friends assumed I was against watching TV or going to movies and imagined that all we could do together was sit and meditate. ......... monk training is mind training ......... I haven’t gone back to eating meat or drinking alcohol ....... it opened my mind to understanding and acceptance. .......... I respected that everyone was moving at their own pace, in their own time. My way wasn’t right or wrong; they weren’t too slow or too fast. I learned to see the essence of a monk in everyone I met. Everyone has a part of themselves that is compassionate, loving and beautiful. .......... She was more of a monk than I would ever be, and we didn’t need a fancy restaurant to connect. For our next date, I took her to an outdoor ropes course, where we helped each other swing from trees, climb walls and walk narrow balance beams. We were bowing to each other, in our way. ........ The monks, who say nothing about romantic love, had taught me everything I needed to know about romantic love.

Electric Vehicles Keep Defying Almost Everyone’s Predictions Around the world, E.V. sales were projected to have grown 60 percent in 2022 ........ There are now almost 30 million electric vehicles on the road in total, up from just 10 million at the end of 2020. E.V. market share has also tripled since 2020. ........ what looked not that long ago like a climate pipe dream is now undeniably underway: a genuine transition away from fossil-fueled transportation. ........ a net zero transportation sector by 2050 ....... In Norway, electric vehicles now represent four out of every five new cars sold; the figure was just one in five as recently as 2016. In Germany, more than 55 percent of new cars registered in December were electric or hybrid. In China, where more electric vehicles are sold than everywhere else in the world combined, the rise is perhaps even more dramatic: from 3.5 percent of the market at the beginning of 2020 to 20.3 percent at the beginning of 2022. .......... Its largest single manufacturer, BYD, has surpassed Tesla for global market share ..........

market share of E.V.s will approach 40 percent by the end of the decade

.......... In the United States, investments in battery manufacturing reached a record $73 billion last year — three times as much as the previous record, set the year before. Globally, battery manufacturing capacity grew almost 40 percent last year, and is projected to grow fivefold by just 2025. By that year, lithium mining is expected to be triple what it was in 2021. .......... many other areas of the green transition experiencing similarly shocking exponential or quasi-exponential growth: renewable energy investments in the United States quadrupling in a decade, global investments in clean tech growing more than 30-fold over the same period, a solar supply chain already big enough to facilitate a total transition ........... the world hasn’t undertaken a breakneck allover revolution like this ever before in its history. .......... like carbon itself, which hangs in the air for centuries at least — dirty cars stay on the road for a very long time, emitting all the while............ demand already outstrips supply ........ China produces about 75 percent of all E.V. battery cells, manufactures roughly the same share of those cell components and does more refining of many of the biggest raw inputs than the rest of the world combined. ........ At what point do gas stations become unprofitable, and what happens then? ........... But there, at least for now, the electric vehicle revolution is taking a very different shape — often with two or three wheels rather than four. Globally, there are 10 times as many electric scooters, mopeds and motorcycles on the road as true electric cars, accounting already for almost half of all sales of those vehicles and responsible already for eliminating more carbon emissions than all the world’s four-wheel E.V.s. ......... In 2020, Americans bought twice as many e-bikes as they did E.V.s. .

The Dystopia We Fear Is Keeping Us From the Utopia We Deserve usable nuclear fusion remains, optimistically, decades away. ....... humanity courts calamity if we don’t respect our limits and discard fantasies of endless growth. ....... the third possible goal:

a world of energy abundance

. ........ His titular flying car stands in for all that we were promised in the mid-20th century but don’t yet have: flying cars, of course, but also lunar bases, nuclear rockets, atomic batteries, nanotechnology, undersea cities, affordable supersonic air travel and so on. Hall harvests these predictions and many more from midcentury sci-fi writers and prognosticators and sorts them according to their cost in energy. What he finds is that the marvels we did manage — the internet, smartphones, teleconferencing, Wikipedia, flat-screen televisions, streaming video and audio content, mRNA vaccines, rapidly advancing artificial intelligence, to name just a few — largely required relatively little energy and the marvels we missed would require masses of it. .............. The water crises of the future could be solved by mass desalination. Supersonic air travel is a solved technological problem. Lunar bases lie well within the boundaries of possibility. ........ an “ergophobic” society, which he defines as a society gripped by “the almost inexplicable belief that there is something wrong with using energy.” .......... The true conflict, he says, is not between the haves and the have-nots but between the doers and the do-nots. “The do-nots favor stagnation and are happy turning our civilization into a collective couch potato,” he writes. And in his view, the do-nots are winning. ............ the villainy of lawyers and regulators and hippies. .......... He predicts that if solar and wind “prove actually usable on a large scale,” environmentalists would turn on them. “Their objections really have nothing to do with pollution, or radiation, or risk, or global warming,” he writes. “They are about keeping abundant, cheap energy out of the hands of ordinary people.” ........... the Deploy Solar and Wind Everywhere and Invest in Every Energy Technology We Can Think of Act. ............. Too often, the right sees only the imagined glories of the past, and the left sees only the injustices of the present. ........ We’ve lost sight of the world that abundant, clean energy could make possible. ........... “Take any variable of human well-being — longevity, nutrition, income, mortality, overall population — and draw a graph of its value over time,” Charles Mann writes in “The Wizard and the Prophet.” “In almost every case it skitters along at a low level for thousands of years, then rises abruptly in the 18th and 19th centuries, as humans learn to wield the trapped solar power in coal, oil and natural gas.” .............. visitors to the Palace of Versailles in February 1695 marveled at the furs worn to dinners with the king and the ice that collected on the glassware. It was freezing in Versailles, and no amount of wealth could fix it. .............. A hundred years later, Thomas Jefferson had a vast wine collection and library in Monticello and the forced labor of hundreds of slaves, but his ink still froze in his inkwells come winter. ......... Today, heating is a solved problem for many. But not for all. There are few inequalities more fundamental than energy inequality. ............ 2010 ....... roughly two billion people had little or no access to electricity and still cooked food and heated water by fire. About three billion had access to enough electricity to power electric lights. An additional billion or so had the energy and wealth for labor-saving appliances like washing machines. It’s only the richest billion people who could afford to fly, and they — we — used around half of global energy. .............. “You load the laundry, and what do you get out of the machine? You get books.” There is no global aid strategy we could pursue that would do nearly as much as making energy radically cheaper, more reliable and more available. ......... “Flights that take 15 hours on a 747 could happen in an hour on a point-to-point rocket” .......... Vertical greenhouses could feed far more people, and desalination, which even now is a major contributor to water supplies in Singapore and Israel, would become affordable for poorer, populous nations that need new water sources most. Directly removing carbon dioxide from the air would become more plausible ......... definition of superabundance ............... but the combination of fixed-price for infinite compute and the new trend of inefficient but modular technology has created an inventor out of almost everybody. ........... longevity drugs, which can only be synthesized in pristine zero-G conditions. Then you scoot off to a last-minute meet-up with friends in Tokyo. .......... dinner (made from ingredients grown in the same building and picked five minutes before cooking) ......... You bask in yet another serendipitous, in-person interaction, grateful for your cross-continental relationships. ........... it is not just fusion. The advance of wind and solar and battery technology remains a near miracle. The possibilities of advanced geothermal and hydrogen are thrilling. Smaller, modular nuclear reactors could make new miracles possible, like cars and planes that don’t need to be refueled or recharged. This is a world progressives, in particular, should want to hasten into existence. Clean, abundant energy is the foundation on which a more equal, just and humane world can be built. .............. “Folks will look back and be blown away by how we used energy today. They’ll say, ‘Wait, you just burned it?’” .



famously unfinished film These evocative, well-composed and tonally immaculate images were generated in seconds with the magic of artificial intelligence. ....... The project ended once Alejandro presented his massive compendium of artwork to the Hollywood studios. They turned it down out of fear or shortsightedness or simply because they could not comprehend what he was trying to do. ........ threatening that his “Dune” would be as long as 20 hours. .......... It will forever be the greatest film never made, because it exists solely in our imaginations. ......... This unfilmed film’s influence on our culture is nothing short of astounding. Specific ideas and images from the “Dune” art bible have escaped into the world. They can be experienced in movies such as “Blade Runner,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Prometheus,” “The Terminator” and even the original “Star Wars.” His “Dune” does not exist, yet it’s all around us. ........... It took Alejandro and his team two years of pure analog struggle to create his “Dune” — pencil on paper, paint on canvas, inventing the practical effects required to deliver his onscreen spectacle. ......... It’s different with A.I. No struggle was involved in creating these images of “Jodorowsky’s Tron.” It didn’t require any special skills .......... I want to say that influence is not the same thing as algorithm. But looking at these images, how can I be sure? .......... The technology is jaw-dropping. And it concerns me greatly. ............ Is the training of this A.I. model the greatest art heist in history? How much of art-making is theft, anyway? ....... If A.I.s were eligible for the Academy Awards, I’d vote for “Jodorowsky’s Tron” for best A.I. costume design just for dreaming up such outrageous retro sci-fi hats and helmets. ......... He needed to state his prompt cleanly and clearly. But the creativity bubbled out of the machine. ........ What will it mean when directors, concept artists and film students can see with their imaginations, when they can paint using all the digitally archived visual material of human civilization?



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