de minimis exemption (12. 206)

Amid the US announcing an additional ten percent tariff on all Chinese imports—to which China has responded in kind—the American postal service (see previously) will no longer accept parcels and packages from the mainland or Hong Kong. Whilst no official reason was given for the suspension—confoundingly reversed hours later causing turmoil for freight companies, it is presumably to seal a legal loophole that permitted small shipments to be shipped without being subject to duties and customs fees. Retailers, particularly in the fast-fashion industry, have exploited this exemption to—according to certain viewpoints—flood the market with cheap goods. The EU, which has a lower threshold, is planning similar legislation in order to foster a more competitive e-commerce sector.

 synchronoptica

one year ago: Assyrian canine figurines (with synchronoptica), a short-lived tv show plus airspace maps

seven years ago: music for felines, the roots of February plus Germany united longer than it was divided

eight years ago: more Trump Dumps, archiving US government websites plus faux four-leafed clover

nine years ago: assorted links worth revisiting, micro-aggressions, a boutique bookshop plus ergonomic exoskeletons

ten years ago: new world order, solutions for the German housing shortage, the Mandela Effect, Kulturkampf plus the lithium-ion battery

beach front property (12. 205)

Hinted at a couple weeks ago with the territory characterised as a demolition site and floated the idea of encouraging neighbouring countries to take in more refugees displaced by the war, during a meeting with Israeli president Netanyahu, Trump made clear that those comments were not idle speculation and has made profoundly clear he intends to finish the process of ethnic cleansing for Gaza—resettling all Gazans in Jordan and Egypt and taking “ownership” of the territory and transforming it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” This vision aligns with aspirations of ultranationalist Israelis for more territorial expansion as well as Trump’s own manifest destiny and aspirations for Greenland and the Panama Canal, again not ruling out the option of military force. Pressed by reporters on whether Palestinians might return to this real estate development programme after rebuilding (unclear by what authority a long term occupation), Trump answered that the “world’s people” would live there—“an unbelievable, international place,” finally adding “also Palestinians.” Condemnation of this proposed deal was swift and global.

synchronoptica

one year ago: 1980s edutainment screen-grabs (with synchronoptica), Fleetwood Mac Rumours (1978), Goodwin’s Law, cultural genocide in Gaza plus more McMansion Hell

seven years ago: a kiss by wire 

eight years ago: the names of fingers and toes, moral relativism, consciousness as a by-product of entropy, a flat-pack solution plus a Mondrian make-over

nine years ago: the Frinkiac Simpsons image search 

ten years ago: a bit of prose plus the Christian text book publishing industry

8x8 (12. 204)

de sneeuwpoopen van 1511: some historical, lost sculptures of snow and ice  

mad man across the water: grim-triggers, bluffs and other tactics in game theory  

mspaint: famously chonky pixel-editor with its own special aesthetic is getting an AI-infusion for some reason  

letters from an american: Heather Cox’ somewhat becalming analysis of the DOGE Putsch  

waterblasies: poaching and the illegal trade in southern African ornamental succulents 

pulling back the curtain: DeepSeek’s open-source code may be the biggest step towards democratising the web since its inception 

juice now worth the squeeze: pause on tariffs includes US concession to staunch the flow of guns to Mexico—see previously, see more 

the air is on fire: revisiting David Lynch’s snowmen

understudy (12. 203)

Pending senate approval for Trump’s nominee Kash Patel as director of the FBI, two officials from the bureau were selected to run it on an acting basis. The White House however listed the wrong individual on their webpage and instead of correcting the mistake, hopeful that Patel would be confirmed soon—we learn from Super Punch, the two temporary appointees just swapped offices and titles. Career special agent Brian “the Drizz” Driscoll, originally tasked by the presidential transition team to be the deputy serving under the acting director exchanged roles with the intended individual, and against the backdrop of the purging of civil servants executed the order to dismiss senior executives and compile a dossier of thousands of others taking part in investigations linked to the January Sixth insurrection, including Driscoll himself and boss-cum-adjutant, though not without some laudable resistance. Though toning down the rhetoric during hearings and promising that there would be no political retribution, Patel has expressed enthusiasm bout weaponising the umbrella organisation of the Justice Department to pursue Trump’s opponents and to turn the Hoover Building headquarters in to a museum on the misdeeds of the Deep State.

synchronoptica

one year ago: renovating Hamburg’s air defence bunker (with synchronoptica), animator Jordan Belson plus assorted links worth revisiting

seven years ago: concentration camp chic

eight years ago: more links to enjoy 

nine years ago: tax-havens, gas prices at record lows plus persistence of vision

ten years ago: Beatles LoTR, TTIP and TAFTA plus even more links

 

zona-free hamster oocyte (12. 202)

Routinely created for two reasons: avoidance of legal issues for working with pure human embryonic stem cells and to assay the viability of donor males for in vitro fertilisation—the hybrid cells used to map and predict genetic traits and inheritance—and to test for infertility on the part of prospect fathers, what’s colloquially known as the hamster test is considered highly unreliable yet remains a benchmark test in the US and UK. Sperm subject to assessment are incubated with hamster ova which have had the outer cell coat removed (zona pellucida, the protective membrane in place to only allow species specific penetration to occur) and considered to have passed muster if they fuse with the eggs. Generally destroyed during the conclusion of this rather monstrous exercise (like the early Friedman Test for pregnancy that involved sacrificing a rabbit or culling male chickens and the GOP’s preoccupation with being bathroom monitors) and not allowed to continue dividing, the unviable chimeric embryos are referred to as humsters.

sears, roebuck & co (12. 201)

On this day in 1925, the retailer which had previously focused exclusively on mail-order sales, opened its first brick-and-mortar department store on the massive campus it had acquired and maintained as a city-within-a-city on the westside of Chicago—the complex hosting the company’s warehouses, catalogue printing, prototyping and product-testing laboratories, fashion studios and employee amenities—with its own fire and police departments and on-site private bank.

Despite its remote location on the outskirts of the city, it proved popular with customers, owing the increased car-use and leading to the development of shopping malls and its later reputation as an anchor store—pivoting from traditional urban flagship stores (see previously) and catering to motorists. During the height of its success in the 1960s and 1970, Sears was the largest retailer in the world and moved its headquarters to the Sears Tower in 1973, the world’s tallest building briefly, surpassing New York’s World Trade Centre. Over the next decade, the company began its slow-decline, diversifying its portfolio away from retail into brokerage and real estate, a credit card—Discover—and an online subscription venture with IBM called Prodigy. Divesting itself from ancillary operations and eventually declaring bankruptcy in October of 2018, it was acquired by a private equity firm called Transform Holdco, with the remaining stores leveraged for their property value before being shuttered in 2022.

synchronoptica

one year ago: top-charting seventeenth century ballads (with synchronoptica), The Point (1971) plus a craving for compass liquor

seven years ago: French brutalist apartment blocs, postcards from Mars plus attacking the Deep State

eight years ago: a documentary on the making of Psycho

nine years ago: CS Lewis’ The Abolition of Man, assorted links worth revisiting plus US presidential candidate Ted Cruz

ten years ago: the Lost Generation plus eight or nine wise words about letter-writing

opsophagos (12. 200)

Mapped onto all sorts of anti-social behaviour and privations of gluttony, the real and reputed ὀψοφάγοɩ, gourmandise of ancient Greek culture with a penchant for relish or horsd’œuvre as anything that might compliment a staple dish were leveed with a fish addiction, the most desirable morsel of a repast—we learn via Strange Company. There are many accounts of overindulgence by the wealthy and philosophers alike, wishing almost self-destructively for the gullet of cranes and pelicans for devouring the food—the poet Philoxenus of Leucas, for example, an enthusiastic banqueter and seafood lover who caused his own death by gorging on a giant octopus—and the conspicuous consumption was linked in the public’s mind to all sorts of vices, immediate gratification and moral failings, and indeed the spectacle or the rumour of the fish market became a moral panic of the day. More from JSTOR at the link above.

disposition of a government (12. 199)

Flooding the zone was intentional, and there are too many uncontrolled blazes to keep track of and there’s but as a reminder of the ongoing events of the coup d’état, Trump announced the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency, to be co-chaired by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (who left before the project began to further his political career) as an outside consulting firm to make recommendations on spending-cuts and restructuring. Contradicting the original scope of the commission, Trump instead took an obscure technology unit within the executive established in 2014 by Barack Obama to improve digital services and federal websites (also to sign up for health insurance exchanges under the Affordable Care Act) and renamed it US DOGE Service (DOGE itself is a temporary organisation and not an executive department as that requires the approval of congress and cannot be accomplished by diktat) and embedded and with a veneer of authority (however challenged and lawless), Musk and his team infiltrated the Treasury Department, the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration, which manages government office space, laptops and connectivity—VPN included. Senior officials are being dismissed, relieved of duty or otherwise sidelined over access to sensitive and comprehensive information on civil servants (previously) and remittance systems which is being migrated to outside servers—ostensibly to process the data with artificial intelligence for guidance on which funding and employees to cull, as earlier attempts at a blanket bans for duly appropriated monies for programmes were halted by judges and workers weren’t taking a phoney, leveraged “buy-out” with the promise of an eight-month farewell that runs counter to the Anti-Deficiency Act.