Beavers beat Comets in girls’ basketball – Midland Daily News

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BEAVERTON Molly Gerow scored a career-high 34 points on 13-of-17 shooting from the field and 8-of-10 from the line in Beaverton's 67-33 win over Coleman in nonleague girls' basketball on Monday.

Gerow also had five steals while Kait Maxwell scored 15 points for the Beavers, who are 3-1 overall.

"We set some rebounding goals, which was critical (after a loss to Harrison on Friday)," Beaverton coach Renee Inscho said. "Our outside (shooters) did a good job of getting the ball inside, and Molly (Gerow) took advantage."

For the Comets, Kylie Herkel had 13 points and seven rebounds, Havahna DeJongh had seven rebounds and three assists, and Makayla Rogers had three blocks.

"We still have some things to work on, but were improving and getting more confidence in attacking the hoop," Coleman coach Nick Katzinger said. " ... We came into the game shorthanded ... with six players. I'm proud of those girls for fighting the whole game. We need to get healthy so we can see the full potential of this team."

Beaverton is 3-1 and visits Meridian on Wednesday.

Coleman is 0-4 and visits Ashley on Friday.

Beaverton also beat Coleman in the junior varsity game, 45-23, led by Leiyah Mungin's 20 points.

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Beavers beat Comets in girls' basketball - Midland Daily News

How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real – The New Yorker

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Suppose youve been asked to write a science-fiction story. You might start by contemplating the future. You could research anticipated developments in science, technology, and society and ask how they will play out. Telepresence, mind-uploading, an aging population: an elderly couple live far from their daughter and grandchildren; one day, the pair knock on her door as robots. Theyve uploaded their minds to a cloud-based data bank and can now visit telepresently, forever. A philosophical question arises: What is a family when it never ends? A story flowers where prospective trends meet.

This method is quite common in science fiction. Its not the one employed by William Gibson, the writer who, for four decades, has imagined the near future more convincingly than anyone else. Gibson doesnt have a name for his method; he knows only that it isnt about prediction. It proceeds, instead, from a deep engagement with the present. When Gibson was starting to write, in the late nineteen-seventies, he watched kids playing games in video arcades and noticed how they ducked and twisted, as though they were on the other side of the screen. The Sony Walkman had just been introduced, so he bought one; he lived in Vancouver, and when he explored the city at night, listening to Joy Division, he felt as though the music were being transmitted directly into his brain, where it could merge with his perceptions of skyscrapers and slums. His wife, Deborah, was a graduate student in linguistics who taught E.S.L. He listened to her young Japanese students talk about Vancouver as though it were a backwater; Tokyo must really be something, he thought. He remembered a weeping ambulance driver in a bar, saying, She flatlined. On a legal pad, Gibson tried inventing words to describe the space behind the screen; he crossed out infospace and dataspace before coming up with cyberspace. He didnt know what it might be, but it sounded cool, like something a person might explore even though it was dangerous.

Gibson first used the word cyberspace in 1981, in a short story called Burning Chrome. He worked out the idea more fully in his first novel, Neuromancer, published in 1984, when he was thirty-six. Set in the mid-twenty-first century, Neuromancer follows a heist that unfolds partly in physical space and partly in the matrixan online realm. The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games, the novel explains, in early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks. By jacking in to the matrix, a console cowboy can use his deck to enter a new world:

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation.... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.

Gibson was far from the first sci-fi writer to explore computers and their consequences; a movement, soon to be known as cyberpunk, was already under way. But Neuromancer changed science fiction by imagining a computer-saturated world that felt materially and aesthetically real. Gibsons hardboiled prose was fanatically attentive to design and texture. A hackers loft contains a Braun coffeemaker, an Ono-Sendai cyberspace deck, and the abstract white forms of the foam packing units, with crumpled plastic film and hundreds of tiny foam beads. A spaceship is walled in imitation ebony veneer and floored with gray tilesa Mercedes crossed with a rich mans private spa. Gibsons future seemed already to have aged: the counterfeit young are marked by a certain telltale corrugation at the knuckles, something the surgeons were unable to erase. The science-fiction writer SamuelR. Delany marvelled at the novels wonderful, almost hypnotic, surface hardness. Describing a hacker about to deploy a virus, Gibson invented his own language, toughened with use: He slotted some ice, connected the construct, and jacked in.

Most science fiction takes place in a world in which the future has definitively arrived; the locomotive filmed by the Lumire brothers has finally burst through the screen. But in Neuromancer there was only a continuous arrivalan ongoing, alarming present. Things arent different. Things are things, an A.I. reports, after achieving a new level of consciousness. You cant let the little pricks generation-gap you, one protagonist tells another, after an unnerving encounter with a teen-ager. In its uncertain sense of temporalityare we living in the future, or not?Neuromancer was science fiction for the modern age. The novels influence has increased with time, establishing Gibson as an authority on the world to come.

The ten novels that Gibson has written since have slid steadily closer to the present. In the nineties, he wrote a trilogy set in the two-thousands. The novels he published in 2003, 2007, and 2010 were set in the year before their publication. (Only the inevitable delays of the publishing process prevented them from taking place in the years when they were written.) Many works of literary fiction claim to be set in the present day. In fact, they take place in the recent past, conjuring a world that feels real because its familiar, and therefore out of date. Gibsons strategy of extreme presentness reflects his belief that the current moment is itself science-fictional. The future is already here, he has said. Its just not very evenly distributed.

The further Gibson developed his present-tense sci-fi, the more mysterious and resonant his novels became. They seemed to reveal a world within the world: the real present. The approach was risky; it put him at the mercy of events. In 2001, Gibson rushed to incorporate the September 11th attacks into his half-completed eighth novel, Pattern Recognition, a story about globalization, filmmaking, Internet forums, brand strategy, and informational deluge. Terrorism turned out to fit neatly within this framework; Pattern Recognition is often described as the first post-9/11 novel. The risks could pay off.

Two years ago, in December of 2017, I e-mailed Gibson to ask if hed consent to being profiled, since his new novel was to be published that spring. He replied, explaining that the election of Donald Trump had forced him to delay the book. Ive had to get an extension, he wrote. Extrapolating from current events, he had already written into his novel a nuclear crisis involving Syria, Russia, NATO, and Turkey:

But then Trump started fucking with N Korea, here, so how scary can my scenario be? He keeps topping me, but I think I can handle it in rewrite. And if theres a nuclear war, at least I wont have to turn in the manuscript!...

Crazy times,

Bill

In March, 2018, I e-mailed Gibson again, but he had delayed the book a second time. Cambridge Analytica now requires a huge rethink, major revisions, he wrote. This is very comical in a way, but still a huge problem.

Earlier this year, we finally met, in Vancouver, to talk about the novel, Agency, which comes out next month. Gibson is now seventy-one. Bald and skinny, six feet five but for a slight stoop, he dresses almost exclusively in a mixture of futuristic techwear and mid-twentieth-century American clothing painstakingly reproduced by companies in Japan. It was late on a gray afternoon; we sat at the bar of a cozy bistrowarm wood, zinc bar, brass fixtureswhile Gibson, in his slow, quiet, wowed-out, distantly Southern drawl, described the work of keeping up with the present.

With each set of three books, Ive commenced with a sort of deep reading of the fuckedness quotient of the day, he explained. I then have to adjust my fiction in relation to how fucked and how far out the present actually is. He squinted through his glasses at the ceiling. It isnt an intellectual process, and its not prescientits about what I can bring myself to believe.

Agency is a sequel to Gibsons previous novel, The Peripheral, from 2014, which is currently being adapted into a television show for Amazon, executive-produced by the creators of Westworld. In writing The Peripheral, hed been able to bring himself to believe in the reality of an ongoing slow-motion apocalypse called the jackpot. A character describes the jackpot as multicausalmore a climate than an event. The world eases into it gradually, as all the bad things we worry aboutrising oceans, crop failures, drug-resistant diseases, resource wars, and so onhappen, here and there, to varying degrees, over the better part of the twenty-first century, adding up to androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad shit that eventually kills eighty per cent of the human race. Its a Gibsonian apocalypse: the end of the world is already here; its just not very evenly distributed. One character reacts to the jackpot equivocally: Either depressing and scared the fuck out of me or sort of how Id always figured things are?

I had real trouble coming to that, Gibson said. I couldnt really think about it. I just had to get to the point where I could write it really quickly. Afterward, I looked at it and was just... It was the first time Id admitted it to myself.

After The Peripheral, he wasnt expecting to have to revise the worlds F.Q. Then I saw Trump coming down that escalator to announce his candidacy, he said. All of my scenario modules went beep-beep-beepsuper-fucked, super-fucked, like that. I told myself, Nah, it cant happen. But then, when Britain voted yes on the Brexit referendum, I thought, Holy shitif that could happen in the U.K., the U.S. could elect Trump. Then it happened, and I was basically paralyzed in the composition of the book. I wouldnt call it writers blockthats, like, a naturally occurring thing. This was something else.

Gibson has a bemused, gentle, curious vibe. He is not a dystopian writer; he aims to see change in a flat, even light. Every so oftenand I bet a lot of people do this but dont mention itI have an experience unique in my life, of going, This is so badcould this possibly be real? he said, laughing. Because it really looks very dire. If we were merely looking at the possible collapse of democracy in the United States of Americathats pretty fucked. But if were looking at the collapse of democracy in the United States of America within the context of our failure to do anything that means shit about global warming over the next decade... I dont know. Perched, eagle-like, on his barstool, he swept his hand across the bar. Im, like, off the edge of the table.

Photographs of Gibson have tended to find him in dark rooms, surrounded by wires and gizmosa seer in his cyber cave. In fact, he has spent his writing life in a series of increasingly pretty houses on the arboreal streets of suburban Vancouver. The rambling, sunlit home where he and Deborah live now, in the citys Shaughnessy neighborhood, dates from the early twentieth century; its many windows open onto radiant greenery. His quarter million Twitter followers are accustomed to photographs of Biggles, the couples extraordinarily large cat, lounging in the library, where Gibson does most of his writing. A photograph on the living-room mantelpiece shows the Gibsons son, Graeme, in aviators and a military jacket; nearby, a drawing of their daughter, Claire, hangs on the wall. Wandering around the first floor, I could find only one futuristic object: a small glass-and-aluminum cylinder, lit from within by warm L.E.D.s. This abstract oil lamp turned out to be a wireless speaker, given to Gibson by Jun Rekimoto, Sonys version of Jony Ive.

Gibson had a distinctly American upbringing. Born in 1948, he told me that his earliest memories are of a farmhouse in Tennessee. The family lived there while his construction-manager father, William Ford Gibson, Jr.Gibson is William Ford Gibson IIIhelped to oversee the building of workers housing at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Later, they occupied the red-brick model house of a Levittown-style suburban development in North Carolina. And then we moved to a place near Virginia Beach, and while we lived there my father died, Gibson said. On a business trip, from a choking incident, pre-Heimlich maneuver. Like, if someone had known to squeeze him the right way, he might have survived. He paused. I think I was seven.

Gibson and his mother, Otey, retreated to Wytheville, Virginia, the small Appalachian town where his parents had grown up, settling in a house that had been in his mothers family for generations. Before, I was watching TV in a suburb, Gibson said. I could see out the window that it was the modern world. And then I went to this place which, from many angles, looked like the early nineteen-hundreds. In Wytheville, people reminisced about the days before recorded music; men plowed fields with mules. The mid-twentieth century leaked in, like light through the blinds. Im convinced that it was this experience of feeling abruptly exiled, to what seemed like the past, that began my relationship with science fiction, Gibson has written.

Fatherless and quiet, Gibson was often alone. One day, he crawled through the window of an abandoned house and found a calendar from the Second World War. Each month had a picture of a different fighter planea sleek machine, yellowed by time. Meanwhile, from the wire rack at the Greyhound bus station, he bought science-fiction novels by H.G. Wells, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and others. He noticed that their stories also supposed the existence of historiesreal ones that were being reconsidered (the myths of empire and the American West), or prospective ones that seemed unlikely to come true (world government, the brotherhood of man). In Wytheville, people owned books like The Lost Cause, an encyclopedic account of the Civil War, published in 1866, which depicted slavery as benign. I became someone who disassembles the past in which I find myself, in order to orient myself, or perhaps in order to relieve anxiety, Gibson told me.

His mother was literary and progressive; she helped establish a library in Wytheville. But she grew worried as Gibson developed what hes called a Lovecraftian personaintroverted, hyper-bookish. With his consent, she enrolled him in an all-boys boarding school in Arizona. Gibson, extracted grub-like and blinking from his bedroom, arrived when he was fifteen, got a girlfriend, and read the Beats. In the fall of his sophomore year, when he was seventeen, his mother died.

Probably a stroke, he said. Im not sure. She fell down dead walking somewherein those days, if an older person died, no one did an autopsy. On the flight home, Gibson struggled to think about what had happened. As a child, after his fathers death, he had fearedirrationally, he thoughtthat his mother might die, too. Now she had. Years later, he would come to see himself as doubly traumatized. In the moment, he took refuge in an odd thought: at least shed be spared the discomfort of watching him try to become an artist.

His mothers estate provided him with a vanishingly small stipend. Instead of finishing high school, he took a bus to Toronto; he slept outdoors for a night and then found a job at a head shop, where he could sleep on the floor. Gibson is reluctant to talk much about those yearsI wasnt a tightly wrapped package at that time, he has saidbut a 1967 CBC documentary features him, introduced as Bill, a real hippie, strolling through the citys version of Haight-Ashbury. (He was paid five hundred dollars to serve as a quasi-anthropological tour guide: The hippie society centers largely around this curious word love, he explains in the program.) In his early twenties, in Washington, D.C., he earned his high-school diploma. He kept the Vietnam draft board apprised of his whereabouts but was never called up. Instead, he perused the ruins of the sixties, reading Pynchon and Borges, going to punk shows. Back in Toronto, he enrolled in art school and met Deborah, a former fashion model; they moved to Vancouver, her home town. For a while, he made ends meet as a vintage picker, buying undervalued objectsantique toys, Art Deco lamps, chrome ashtraysfrom thrift shops and reselling them to dealers. Writing of the future in his third novel, Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), he might have been describing this period: The world hadnt ever had so many moving parts or so few labels.

Some speculative writers are architects: they build orderly worlds. But Gibson has a collagists mind. He has depicted himself as burrowing from surface to previously unconnected surface. His language connects contemporary jargon, with its tactical-technological inflections, to modern states of anxiety and desire. (His chapter titles include Death Cookie, Ordinary Sad-Ass Humanness, Tango Hotel Soldier Shit.) The novels register the virtual worlds micro-expressionsthe way, when were still half asleep, the first Web site of the day opens as familiar as a friends living roomand attend to the built environments we take for granted, made from Styrofoam, cardboard, glass, silicon, wood, paper, leather, stone, rubber, and plastic, each subtype of material possessing its own distinctive look, feel, smell, weight, and history. In Pattern Recognition, an American marvels at the collage that is England:

Mirror-world. The plugs on appliances are huge, triple-pronged, for a species of current that only powers electric chairs, in America. Cars are reversed, left to right, inside; telephone handsets have a different weight, a different balance.

The difference, she thinks, has to do with Britains past as an industrial nation: They made all their own stuff.... All their bits and pieces were different. Only an outsider would notice the meaning in the bits.

In his late twenties, Gibson earned an English degree at the University of British Columbia. He took a class taught by the feminist sci-fi pioneer Susan Wood; she suggested that, instead of writing an analytical paper, he might turn in a story of his own. (At her urging, he sold the story, Fragments of a Hologram Rose, to a small magazine.) He began writing science fiction in earnest only when Graeme was on the way, and it seemed to him that his career had to start, or else. Deborah was in grad school, so he took care of the baby, writing Neuromancer while Graeme napped. He learned to work iteratively. He still rereads his manuscripts from the beginning each dayan increasing burden, as each book goes onstripping away whats superfluous and squirrelling new ideas into the gaps. (Having shown a technology used properly in one scene, he might show someone misusing it in another.) His plots are Tetris-like, their components snapping together at the last possible moment until the space of the novel is filled.

Often, at the center of the story, theres a Gibson-like figurean orphaned collagist of actual or digital bits. In Count Zero, the sequel to Neuromancer, an out-of-work curator is hired to track down an anonymous artist who is creating a series of boxes in the style of Joseph Cornell. She discovers that the artist is an artificially intelligent computer built by an unimaginably rich family. The familys multinational mega-corporation has collapsed, and its space-based villa has fallen into disrepair. The A.I. has chopped the house into parts, and constructs the boxes by pulling fragmentsa yellowing kid glove; rectangular segments of perf board; an ornate silver spoon, sawn precisely in half, from end to endout of the floating cloud that the familys life has become.

The romance of the abandoned child, of the orphan on the edge of everything, can give Gibsons novels a sad sweetness. But his collages contain ugly materials, too. In his library, Gibson unfolded himself from his chair, retrieving a copy of The Lost Cause, which he had salvaged from Wytheville.

In our house, there were these objects that no one ever said anything to me about, he said. I just found them myself, and reverse-engineered what they meant. These were being sold from the very beginning of Reconstruction, and within themactually, theres another one.... He bent low, and picked up a smaller volume, blowing dust from its binding.

This is the most evil object in the house, he said. Its just, like, unspeakable! He handed it to me. The book was The Old Plantation: How We Lived in Great House and Cabin Before the War, by James Battle Avirett.

Check out the inscription, he said. It was dedicated to the old planter and his wifethe only real slaves on the old plantation.

Gibson settled on a hard-backed chair, adjusting the cuffs of his perfectly reproduced mid-century chambray workshirt. Its just the foulest revisionist text, he said. It was given to my grandmother when, I think, she was sixteen years old, signed by the author. She took me aside, on one or two ritual occasions, to try to indoctrinate me into the crucial, central significance of the War of the Northern Invasion. He grimaced. This is why the South is still so fucked upbecause this stuff never quit. It never quit! Its the formation... He trailed off.

Of our past? I asked.

Of our present, he corrected me.

Gibson was in the process of sorting through his basement archive, which he planned to donate to U.B.C. Biggles accompanied us down the stairs; beneath a set of head-height windows, an old desk and table were covered with neatly piled manuscripts, some typewritten, others dot-matrix. Gibson wanted to show me the manual typewriter on which hed composed Neuromancer: a 1927 Hermes 2000 that had belonged to Deborahs stepgrandfather. While he rummaged, I inspected the screenplay for Alien 3, which he had written in the late eighties, during a contract-screenwriting phase. (In the end, an entirely different story was used.) A paperweight on top of it turned out to be a clawa memento from the film. Biggles meowed, twining around my legs.

Cant find it! Gibson said from behind a pinball machine based on the 1995 film Johnny Mnemonic, starring Keanu Reeves. (The movie had been adapted from his 1981 short story of the same name, about a courier who carries stolen corporate data on a chip in his head.) Ill have to text Claire.

Near a rack of compact disksDrive-By Truckers; Lucinda Williams; Dock Boggs; multiple bootlegs of live performances by the goth band Sisters of Mercya legal pad was covered in interlinked bubbles charting the plot of Gibsons 1996 novel, Idoru. (A song called Idoru is featured on the forthcoming album by the future-pop musician Grimes.) One bubble read, McGuffin in bag. An orange notebook, filled with intricate time lines for The Peripheral, was decorated with a sticker bearing the logo of the niche techwear brand Outliera black swan.

Ah, Gibson said tenderly. He leaned over to open a green wooden cabinet, containing dozens of mementos: a marmoset skull, a smooth rock, a teacup from Japan. Gingerly, from behind the skull, he removed a small metal ray gun. This gun, he said. I had one of thesethe Hubley Atomic Disintegratoras a kid. Its a cap gun absolutely redolent of sci-fi romanticism! Hed lost his own, and, in middle age, obtained this one on eBay.

And these guys were very common, he went on, taking down a small plastic spaceman: red, wearing an elaborately earmuffed helmet with an antenna on top. These spacemen were dime-store toys at a timewhich I can actually remember!when cheap plastics were still weirdly novel. Like Gore-Tex or something. Youd ask, What is it made of? He looked wistful, then thoughtful. Ive decided that one of the most significant things I ever saw in my life was the arrival of completely ubiquitous injection-molded plastics. I was certainly aware of them as the onset of something new. They cost practically nothing. But no one had any idea what a disaster we were all witnessing. Now the oceans are full of it. He handed the spaceman to me. I hefted it, weightless, in my palman antique bit of misread future.

Gibson finished Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, the sequels to Neuromancer, in the late eighties. In the nineties, he achieved maximum fame for a sci-fi writer. It was a time when virtual reality promised to make cyberspace, as hed described it in Neuromancer, real, and he and Deborah were invited to lavish V.R. conferences around the world. He collaborated with sculptors, dance troupes, and performance artists, and co-wrote, with Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine, a novel that popularized the steampunk aesthetic. Movies borrowed liberally from his fiction. In 1999, four years after Johnny Mnemonic, The Matrix, also starring Reeves, remixed Neuromancer to superior effect.

Droll, chilled out, and scarily articulate, Gibson talked about the future on television. (It doesnt matter how fast your modem is if youre being shelled by ethnic separatists, he told the BBC.) He appeared on the cover of Wired, did some corporate consulting, and met David Bowie and Debbie Harry. For a time, U2, which had based its album Zooropa in part on Gibsons work, planned to scroll the entirety of Neuromancer on a screen above the stage during its Zoo TV tour. The plan never came to fruition, but Gibson got to know the band; the Edge showed him how to telnet. During this period, Gibson was often credited with having predicted the Internet. He pointed out that his noir vision of online life had little in common with the early Web. Still, he had captured a feelinga sense of post-everything information-driven transformationthat, by the nineties, seemed to be everywhere.

As the Internet became more accessible, Gibson discovered that he wasnt terribly interested in spending time online himself. He was fascinated, though, by the people who did. They seemed to grow hungrier for the Web the more of it they consumed. It wasnt just the Internet; his friends seemed to be paying more attention to media in general. When new television shows premired, they actually cared. One of them showed him an episode of Cops, the pioneering reality series in which camera crews sprinted alongside police officers as they apprehended suspects. Policing, as performance, could be monetized. He could feel the worlds F.Q. drifting upward.

Instead of fantasizing about virtual worlds, Gibson inspected the real one. Storefronts in some Vancouver neighborhoods were strangely emptythe drawback before the tsunami of global capital, as though the city itself anticipated the future. Have you been to Vancouvers downtown east side? he asked me. Its one of the poorest per-capita postal codes in the entire country, and it is absolutely brutalwell, brutal, Canadian style. Addiction, prostitution, street crime... There were, he thought, more interstitial spacesplaces that had fallen through widening civic and economic cracks. In Los Angeles, a friend drove him down a desolate street to an abandoned-looking buildingDennis Hoppers house, she said, with art worth millions hidden behind its walls. Gibson thought he detected an uptick in the number of private security guards. He registered the increased presence of bike messengersa new punk-athlete precariatand began reading their zines.

If Gibsons eighties novels imagined a fluid, hallucinatory datasphere, his nineties novelsVirtual Light, Idoru, and All Tomorrows Partiestake place in a world that is itself fluid and hallucinatory. They are set in California and Tokyo in the two-thousands. The Big One has rendered San Franciscos Bay Bridge unusable, and the government of Northern Californiathe state has split in twocant afford to fix it. Squatters, homeless after a pre-earthquake housing crisis, have used high- and low-tech materialstarps, plywood, aircraft cableto turn its decks and towers into a cool suspended shantytown. Media saturation has cloaked even the recent past in a haze; TV news programs practice counter-investigative journalism, reporting on the newsrooms to which they are ideologically opposed. Culture is globalized and high-def. Virtual celebrities are replacing real ones, and patrons in a bar called Cognitive Dissidents dance to the evangelical Islamic band Chrome Koran. Fashion is retrofitted: Chevette, a bike messenger, wears a vintage horsehide motorcycle jacket with bar codes affixed to its lapels. A womans scalp tattoo combines Celtic crosses with cartoon lightning bolts. A teen-ager puts his feet up, revealing little red lights around the edges of his sneakers... spelling out the lyrics to some song.

Futurists he knew had begun talking about the Singularitythe moment when humanity is transformed completely by technology. Gibson didnt buy it; he aimed to represent a half-assed Singularitya world transforming dramatically but haphazardly. It doesnt feel to me that its in our nature to do anything perfectly, he said. He wrote improvisationally, without knowing how his novels would end. (In All Tomorrows Parties, an assassin who bears a striking physical resemblance to Gibson is guided in his actions by the Tao.) His fiction was an artifact, he told an interviewer, akin to tombstone rubbingsthe tombstone, in this case, being our present. The trilogy culminates, obscurely, with the introduction of consumer nanotechnology through a chain of convenience stores. No one knows what to make of it; an atmosphere of WTF prevails. At one of these stores, a kid buys this Jap candy thats like a little drug lab: You mix these different parts, it fizzes, gets hot, cools. You do this extrusion-molding thing and watch it harden. It tastes just O.K., but its fun. Meanwhile, in a room on the Bay Bridgeat the top of the east tower, above the fogChevette reads old issues of National Geographic and marvels at the size of the old countries, long since broken up.

When Gibson published his first short story in Omni, in 1981, the writer Robert Sheckley took him to lunch and gave him two pieces of advice: never sign a multi-book contract and dont buy an old house. Gibson ignored the latter suggestion; on my second morning in Vancouver, a rainstorm descended, and he texted to say that he needed to check his attic for leaks, inviting my assistance. (I have a fear of doing it alone, he texted, lest the ladder fall over.)

Its coming down hard, Gibson said, when I arrived. Luckily, Ive got the perfect jacket for you. In writing Virtual Light and its sequels, hed learned to harness his obsessions, among them garments and their semiotic histories.

In the hall, he relieved me of my misjudged chore coat, and handed me a recent reproduction of Eddie Bauers 1936 Skyliner down jacket: a forerunner of the down-filled B-9 flight suit, worn by aviators during the Second World War. Boxy and beige, its diamond-quilted nylon was rigid enough to stand up on its own. When I put it on, it made me about four inches wider. Gibson shrugged into a darkly futuristic tech-ninja shell by Acronym, the Berlin-based atelier, constructed from some liquidly matte material.

You have to dress for the job, he said.

We ventured into the verdant back yard, retrieving an eight-foot ladder from the garage. Carefully, we carried the ladder through the house and up a winding, skylit central staircase. Gibsons height allowed him to casually open the attic door. I watched his rose-colored Chucks disappear into the hole. When I ascended, I found him lit by a small window, balancing gracefully on the joists, carrying a bucket heavy with water.

Thank you very much, he said, handing it to me.

As it happened, a closet in a room off the hallway contained Gibsons Acronym collection. (He is friends with the co-founder and designer of Acronym, Errolson Hugh, and was briefly involved, as a consultant, in the creation of Arcteryx Veilance, a futuristic, or perhaps merely presentist, outerwear line that Hugh helped design.) As a longtime Acronym lurkerI dont own any, but would like toI was curious to see the jackets, which enable excessive, even fantastic levels of functionality. This is something Errolson calls the escape zip, Gibson said, indicating an unusual zipper along the jackets shoulder, and demonstrating how it could be used to enact an instantaneous, overhanded dejacketing. Another coat, long and indefinably gray-green, was seductively sinisterthe most cyberpunk object Id seen in Gibsons home. This is this weird membrane that Gore-Tex makes, he said, rubbing the fabricleather-like on one side, synthetic on the otherbetween his fingers. Errolson gave it to me when they hadnt named it yet. I was trying to come up with a name....

This is what I imagine the scary hit man wearing, in All Tomorrows Parties, I said.

Oh, the scary hit man, yeah! Gibson said. Im delighted to have this jacket, but its hard to wear it. Its almost too effective. It absorbs too much light. He enjoys wearing the future, but fears full cosplay.

Satisfied, Gibson returned the jacket to the closet. Biggles watched from the landing as we carried the ladder and the bucket down the stairs. Techno-fabric and a leaky roof: the real future.

Was Gibson afraid of what the future held? Like anyone, he lived in the present, awaiting tomorrow. By the end of the nineties, hed taken up Pilates and given up smoking. Claire lived nearby; so did Graeme, who has autism, and a savant-like ability to play hundreds of musical instruments. Gibson and Deborah had helped him build a secure life. (Gibson drops by every day, and often shares Graemes birding photographs on Twitter.)

He had reason to be concerned about a rising F.Q. But he managed to keep that concern contained within his writing life. Bills always been able to shut the door in his head, Jack Womack, one of Gibsons oldest friends, said. Womack is also a Southernerhes from Lexington, Kentuckyand a science-fiction writer. For decades, Gibson has sent his drafts to Womack, whos based in New York, every few daysat first by fax, and in later years by e-mail. Ive always perceived him as someone who takes everything in before making a decision, Womack continued. Not paranoid, not suspicious. Just a good poker player. Writing near-future science fiction, Womack said, requires detachment. Its like living during the Cold War with knowledge of the bomb.

And yet Gibson seemed, at the turn of the century, to be growing dissatisfied with being detached. When All Tomorrows Parties was finished, I felt a little let down, he said. Not with how the book had turned out, but there was something about the experience.... It was beginning to seem as though I was doing something that belonged to a previous era. He wondered if science fiction, as a genre, might be yellowing with age. He was certainly aging: at fifty, hed begun cognitive-behavioral therapy, hoping to process the unconfronted experiences of his childhood. Meanwhile, he said, things were different. The world outside the window was beginning to look considerably stranger to me than the ones I was imagining for my fictional futures.

Unsure how to proceed, Gibson bided his time. He flew back and forth to London, working on a screenplay for Neuromancer, which had been optioned for a film. He spent time on eBaythe first Web site that felt to him like a real place, perhaps because it was full of other people and their junk. Through eBay, he discovered an online watch forum, and, through the forum, he developed some expertise in military watches. He learned of a warehouse in Egypt from which it was possible to procure extinct Omega components; he sourced, for the forum membership, a particular kind of watch strap, the G10, which had originally been manufactured in the nineteen-seventies and had since become obscure. (A version of it, known as the NATO strap, is now wildly popular in menswear circles.) Gibson noticed that people with access to unlimited information could develop illusions of omniscience. He got into a few political debates on the forum. He felt the F.Q. creeping upward.

The advent of the online world, he thought, was changing the physical one. In the past, going online had felt like visiting somewhere else. Now being online was the default: it was our Here, while those awkward no service zones of disconnectivity had become our There. Checking his Vancouver bank balance from an A.T.M. in Los Angeles struck him suddenly as spooky. It didnt matter where you were in the landscape; you were in the same place in the datascape. It was as though cyberspace were turning inside out, or evertingconsuming the world that had once surrounded it.

In Japan, he had learned the word otaku, used to describe people with obsessive, laserlike interests. The Web, he saw, allowed everyone everywhere to develop the same otaku obsessionswith television, coffee, sneakers, guns. The mere possibility of such knowledge lay like a scrim over the world. A physical object was also a search term: an espresso wasnt just an espresso; it was also Web pages about crema, fair trade, roasting techniques, varieties of beans. Things were texts; reality had been augmented. Brand strategists revised the knowledge around objects to make them more desirable, and companies, places, Presidents, wars, and people could be advantageously rebranded, as though the world itself could be reprogrammed. It seemed to Gibson that this constant reprogramming, which had become a major driver of economic life, was imbuing the present with a feelingsomething like fatigue, or jet lag, or loss.

The suddenness with which the worlds code could be rewritten astonished him. I was down in my basement office, on a watch site that I spent a lot of time on, Gibson recalled. Someone on the East Coast posted, Plane hit World Trade Center. I Googled itthere was nothing. I went to get some coffee. And when I came back there was a second post under the first: Second plane hit. It wasnt an accident. The attack rewrote our expectations. It made life instantly scarier. It also seemed to adjust the temporality of the world. From then on, events would move faster. There would be no screenonly a locomotive.

Pattern Recognition and its sequels, Spook Country (2007) and Zero History (2010), are set in a world that meets virtually every criteria of being science fiction, and that happens to be our world, Gibson has said. We have no future, one character concludes. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Such fully imagined cultural futures were possible only when now was of some greater duration:

For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents have insufficient now to stand on. We have no futures because our present is too volatile.... We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moments scenarios. Pattern recognition.

In a hyperconnected world, patterns can repeat in different idioms. The same ripples flow across Asia and Europe, art and technology, war and television. Even terror-hunting and cool-hunting are related. In Zero History, fashion strategists tracking a reclusive designer of otaku denim stumble into a parallel world of clandestine arms deals. Secrets are the very root of cool, one character explains, and so todays coolness flows from our modern secrets: rendition, black ops, Gitmo, Prism. Theres a reason musicians dress like soldiers. Art has become tactical. Culture and counterterror are mirror worlds.

Bill worried about Pattern Recognition, Womack told me. Gibson didnt know how people would react to his sci-fi of the present. The novels protagonist, Cayce Pollard, isnt a hacker but a brand strategist whos been hired by a viral-marketing think tank for a commercial research project. She doesnt zoom through glowing datascapes; instead, having suffered from too much exposure to the reactor cores of fashion, she practices a kind of semiotic hygiene, dressing only in CPUs, or Cayce Pollard Unitsclothes, either black, white, or gray, that could have been worn, to a general lack of comment, during any year between 1945 and 2000. She treasures in particular a black MA-1 bomber jacket made by Buzz Ricksons, a Japanese company that meticulously reproduces American military clothing of the mid-twentieth century. (All other bomber jacketsthey are ubiquitous on city streets around the worldare remixes of the original.) The MA-1 is to Pattern Recognition what the cyberspace deck is to Neuromancer: it helps Cayce tunnel through the world, remaining a design-free zone, a one-woman school of anti whose very austerity periodically threatens to spawn its own cult. Precisely because its a near-historical artifactfucking real, not fashionthe jackets code cant be rewritten. Its the source code.

Gibson neednt have worried about the novel; it spawned its own cult. Buzz Ricksons is a real company, based in Tokyo. (It takes its name from a character played by Steve McQueen, who, in Japan, is a mens fashion icon of special stature.) The companys policy of military-historical accuracy prohibits it from making inauthentic garments; actual MA-1 flight jackets, produced for about twenty years, starting in the late nineteen-fifties, were sage green. And yet, after Pattern Recognition was published, customers began e-mailing Ricksons in the hope of buying a black version. Making an exception, the company collaborated with Gibson on a black MA-1 that became, in some circles, instantly iconic. Made of a carefully re-created mid-century nylon, it is simultaneously antique and futuristic. There is now a range of Buzz Ricksons x William Gibson military outerwear. Meanwhile, a decade after Pattern Recognition, K-HOLE, a marketing think tank modelled on the one in the novel, popularized Cayces fashion philosophy in the form of normcore, a trendforecasted, then realbased on the idea of secretive, informed, intentional blankness. Normcore influenced design more broadly, shaping the aesthetics of companies like Everlane and Uniqlo. The boundary between fiction and reality turned out to be even blurrier than Gibson had thought. He had rewritten the code himself.

In earlier decades, Gibson had been lauded for imagining futuristic developments that seemed strangely plausible: a fractal knife with more edge than meets the eye; a micro-bachelor apartment built into a retrofitted parking garage in Santa Monica. Now the polarity has reversed itself. Today, on Twitter, Gibsons followers share bits of the present that seem plausibly science-fictional. Protesters in Chile use laser pointers to bring down police drones. A stalker tracks a Japanese pop star to her apartment by extracting its reflected image from a photograph of her pupil. (Everyday life can be Gibsonian, too: a woman entering the subway in a tweed blazer and camo parachute pants; kids learning dances from Fortnite.) In Agency, a customer in an otaku coffee shop watches the silent news on someone elses laptop. If it wasnt the hurricane hitting Houston, she thinks, the earthquake in Mexico, the other hurricane wrecking Puerto Rico, or the worst wildfires in California history, it was Qamishli. The novel has yet to be published, but readers with advance copies have pointed out that the fighting in Qamishli, a city on the border between Turkey and Syria, is now real.

Inspired by Cayce Pollard, Emily Segal, one of the founders of K-HOLE, runs her own alternative branding and trend-forecasting consultancy, Nemesis, in Berlin. Its easy, she said, to fall into the trap of thinking that novel things must be entirely new. Gibson, by contrast, is often looking for something elsefor things that arent especially new, but suddenly stand out as special. A changing world might reveal itself not in the never-before-seen, but in the re-seen. Once you get put in a position where people and corporations think you can predict the future, you see how much of a bullshit enterprise that is, she went on. But intuition is real, and texts and art works take on lives of their own, and sometimes it feels like technology does, too. It can seem like youre seeing the future. Really, youre just participating in history.

In Vancouver, I met a friend for dinner. We found each other in Gastown, the citys stylish old quarter, and walked east, in search of a restaurant she wanted to try. The walk seemed to go on and on. I scrutinized the street numbers and consulted my phone, where my blue dot drifted through the grid. Id forgotten what Gibson had said about brutality, Canadian style, until someone pushed a shopping cart past me. We were there: across from the restaurant, a tent city huddled in the dusk.

Not long afterward, Gibson came to New York. We had coffee at a counter in Chelsea Market, near the logoed elevators leading to YouTubes offices. Then we entered Artechouse, a high-tech exhibition space, to check out Machine Hallucination, a video installation by Refik Anadol, a Turkish artist. The installation was designed to conjure a sleek, data-saturated metropolis: computer-generated images pulsed and swam over the walls and floor of a large subterranean room, as though every surface were a screen. Instead of talkingit was impossible to converse over the synthesized soundtrackpeople posted videos from their phones. In a sage-green MA-1 with black sleevesan ahistorical, experimental makeand a wool baseball cap, Gibson leaned against a pillar, illuminated by vivid, geometric images evocative of the decades-old cyberspace of Neuromancer. Eventually, the images shifted: colorful layers of hand-size pixels suggested a Pointillist cyberspace for the neural-network age. Gibson smiled sympathetically: it was hard to invent visual metaphors for the digital world.

Leaving Machine Hallucination meant crossing a floor of radiant C.G.I. We shuffled vertiginously to one door, then another, then another, before finding the real exit and escaping to a lobby.

Jesus Christ, Gibson said, blinking. Those cyberspace cowboys, they deal with that shit every day!

Chelsea Markets retro brands surrounded usa cheesemonger, a hot-sauce emporiumeach with its own distinctive design language. Neon, chrome, veneer; historical typography, the New York of the past. It was as if, having emerged from one William Gibson novel, we had entered another.

Which way do we go? Gibson asked.

I think this way, I said, indicating a purveyor of Australian meat pies.

Make a wrong turn down here and youll be in the headquarters of YouTube, Gibson mused. Youll never get out. Never! You think Facebook is bad? Those YouTube motherfuckersthey will really fuck you up.

We took a cab to dinner at Lucky Strike, a French bistro in SoHo that Gibson enjoys. In the back seat, sitting next to him, I thought of the surprising tenderness in his recent novels: in Agency, a man works from home while taking care of his baby, as Gibson once did. (Unlike Gibson, he uses a telepresence headset.) It used to be, Gibson had told me, that a defensive membrane divided his life from his work. He could consider the future as a professional, without picturing his own life, his kids lives. I never wanted to be the guy thinking about Mad Max world, he said. I had some sort of defense in place.... Its denial, some kind of denial. But denial can be a lifesaving thing, in certain lives, in certain times. How on earth did you get through that? Some reliable part of you just says, Its not happening. The membrane, he went on, which I very, very much miss, actually held until the morning after Trumps election. And I woke up and it was gone, whatever it was. It was just gone, and its never come back.

At dinner, Jack Womack joined us. The restaurant was loud and dimly lit, its tables and chairs artfully cheap, the specials written on mirrors in white pen. Attractive drinkers, dressed in black, raised coupe glasses. At our corner table, conversation turned to the jackpot.

What I find most unsettling, Gibson said, is that the few times that Ive tried to imagine what the mood is going to be, I cant. Even if we have total, magical good luck, and Brexit and Trump and the rest turn out as well as they possibly can, the climate will still be happening. And as its intensity and steadiness are demonstrated, and further demonstratedI try to imagine the mood, and my mind freezes up. Its a really grim feeling. He paused. Ive been trying to come to terms with it, personally. And Ive started to think that maybe I wont be able to.

Womack nodded. My daughters sixteen and a half, he said. Sixty years from now, shell be in her mid-seventies. I have absolutely no idea what the physical world will be like then. What the changes will be.

Its totally new, Gibson said. A genuinely new thing. He looked away from us, into the room. Another song came on the sound system. Incandescent light gilded the mirrors. A young woman in round glasses leaned back in her chair. I felt, suddenly, that we were all living in the past.

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How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real - The New Yorker

PewDiePie Quits Twitter After Confirming YouTube Hiatus – We Got This Covered

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Having dedicated a major part of his life to creating and uploading videos on YouTube over the last decade, it appears as if PewDiePie has finally decided to throw in the towel, so to speak.

The internet star, who owns YouTubes most-subscribed independent channel, confirmed in a video titled YouTubes New Update Has A BIG FLAW that hell be taking a step back from his work commitments in the New Year. I think now is a great time as any to announce: I have a special announcement to make, he said, adding, I am taking a break from YouTube next year. I wanted to say it in advance because I made up my mind.

In reassuring fans that the timeout wont be permanent, PewDiePie, real name Felix Kjellberg, inferred that his reasons for the limited-time departure come largely as a result of fatigue stemming from uploading new videos almost every day for 10 years on the trot.

The news comes not long after YouTube outlined changes to its anti-harassment policy, which has come under heavy fire for making life incredibly difficult for genuine content creators. Kjellberg has been a vocal critic of both the aforementioned proposals and YouTubes business practices numerous times in the past and we wouldnt be surprised if recent events have contributed to his momentary departure.

As for when the stars legion of followers can expect a return to normality, Kjellberg hasnt specified an exact date and, whats more, appears to have committed to a total detox of social media. In the days since his initial shock announcement, the YouTubers Twitter profile has been scrubbed clean and abandoned, its profile bio simply reading I dont use Twitter, this account is just to prevent fake accounts.

In light of the total blackout, then, it appears fans will simply have no choice but to wait until the New Year arrives to learn when PewDiePie plans to make his return. Watch this space.

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Heavy freight: Why drop-in pitches can’t be moved interstate – Sydney Morning Herald

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Given each trip is about eight kilometres, you can imagine why relocating them some 3400 kilometres across the Nullarbor has not been considered.

"The time it was on the road, the amount of drying that would happen if it was exposed, you would actually need a week or two to settle it back down to play on it," Optus Stadium curator Brett Sipthorpe said.

"It's not like you could take one to each venue and keep it going. I don't think it's a feasible option, no."

Cricket Australia insists the punishment Hobart Hurricanes wicketkeeper Emily Smith received for innocently uploading her team's batting order onto social media won't be revoked. Smith was banned for 12 months, with nine months suspended, covering the WBBL, WNCL and even grade seasons.

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Australian Cricketers Association president Shane Watson will meet with CA chairman Earl Eddings next week to discuss how the case was handled but nothing is likely to change despite the ACA arguing CA has the power to change its own rules. What is clear is that all parties could have done things better. Smith, for one, should have had legal support in her initial hearing, and been encouraged to launch an appeal.

The ACA and CA agree Smith's actions were not linked to corruption but the punishment has angered many, including Isa Guha, the former England cricketer and now Fox Cricket commentator who said "common sense" should have prevailed.

Guha suggested it had been a case of "targetting someone who might not necessarily fight back".

"I personally didn't think the punishment fit the crime," she said. "But it's a situation that I am glad people are talking about now because that didn't happen a few years ago when a few girls got done for gambling where again it was a tricky circumstance, just the way it was handled, the way the girls were kind of ostracised from the cricket community they weren't able to set foot in the nets, turn up to games, which I just thought was horrendous.

'Bigger issues': Isa Guha has gone to bat for Emily Smith.Credit:Getty

"This has become their life. Cricket is now a viable option for women, so I was gutted to hear she was going to be out for the whole year but it looks like the ACA are providing some good support. The way I see it, Cricket Australia is using it as a deterrent. For me, there are much larger issues going on in match-fixing and gambling, just in world cricket."

The planets were aligned for Mitchell Starc's bid for a hat-trick. He had a pink ball, under lights and the jinx, broadcaster and writer Adam Collins, was nowhere to be seen at Optus Stadium.

Collins, who estimates he has attended 116 Tests and never witnessed a hat-trick, has left the Test circuit for the summer. Alas, for Starc that was not enough to seal the deal, though he does not seem to mind. "It's definitely not a goal that I have to tick off. If it happens, it happens," Starc said.

Kim Hughes has never been afraid to speak his mind, and the former Australian captain has made it clear what he thinks about the possibility of Steve Smith returning to the top role.

Tim Paine remains a series-by-series proposition, and Smith appears his logical successor, despite having served a ban for bringing the game into disrepute in South Africa last year.

"As far as Smith is concerned, he should never captain Australia again," Hughes said at the Lord's Taverners Breakfast during the week.

"Our national side is the most important [team] sport. I hope that he can concentrate on being the best player in the world and then let other people do the other things.

"It would be a mistake [for Smith to captain] even in two or three years' time."

Andrew Wu writes on cricket and AFL for The Sydney Morning Herald

Jon Pierik is cricket writer for The Age. He also covers AFL and has won awards for his cricket and basketball writing.

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Heavy freight: Why drop-in pitches can't be moved interstate - Sydney Morning Herald

Everipedia Gives Back to Children by Partnering with GIVE Nation – GlobeNewswire

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BOSTON, Dec. 17, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Everipedia, the worlds largest blockchain-based encyclopedia, and GIVE Nation, a childrens gamified wallet focused on teaching sustainable financial literacy program and altruism, announced a co-education sharing partnership!

GIVE Nation will be the first outside organization to build a custom front-end that interacts with the IQ Network. This is a major milestone for both organizations and is a perfect synergy for Everipedias mission to be the knowledge layer of not only blockchain but of web 3.0.

In this collaboration, GIVE Nation will be powering its content from a selection of Everipedia pages that are deemed age-appropriate for their audience. Furthermore, GIVE Nation will be uploading their lessons to Everipedia. The goal for this partnership is to provide a reliable platform for GIVE Nation to pursue its mission of educating children.

Everipedia currently boasts millions of monthly visitors from all over the globe who are curious about the world around them and counts Brave browser as one of their partners. GIVE Nation is providing a suite of financial literacy programs to children and encourages philanthropy through a number of activities. GIVE Nation has partnered with organizations and governments around the world to fulfill its mission.

We are looking forward to building a new ecosystem with Everipedia. This will be an essential piece of GIVE Nation's media infrastructure, empowering millions of children around the world" states Arnaud Saint-Paul, the CEO of GIVE Nation.

Everipedia Director of Partnerships and Exchanges David Liebowitz adds that We see GIVE Nation being the first of many partners that utilize our platform to foster learning for people of all ages worldwide. We are excited to be working on this together and look forward to making a substantial impact.

About Everipedia InternationalOriginally started in 2015 as a more modern and inclusive alternative to Wikipedia, Everipedia is now building the worlds first peer-to-peer encyclopedia on the blockchain, incentivizing content creators by making them stakeholders in the knowledge base themselves. With millions of monthly unique users and millions of wiki articles, everipedia.org has already surpassed English Wikipedia as the worlds largest English encyclopedia by content. Find out more at everipedia.org and follow Everipedia on Facebook and Twitter.

About GIVE NationBy focusing on community driven education and including philanthropic actions; GIVE Nation helps 518 year olds with sustainable financial literacy while positively impacting their community through the power of altruism and partnered charities. GIVE offers unique education and opportunities for children, while providing a reward system for good behavior & charitable acts. GIVE Nation's incubator retains features for our children within a safe ecosystem that's been scientifically proven to not only generate business opportunities, but more importantly; GIVE Nation's platform offers features for our children within a safe ecosystem to improve our planet and foster entrepreneurship, imagination, and altruism. GIVE's mission encourages an altruistic culture in young minds by improving the planet through promoting transparent acts of kindness. Future generations achieve happiness and sustainable financial well-being through a real-world education using digital currencies, blockchain and A.I. technology, while supporting charities. GIVE Nation is a world for kids by kids.

All trademarks and product names are the property of their respective companies. Our discussion may include predictions, estimates or other information that might be considered forward-looking. While these forward-looking statements represent our current judgment on what the future holds, they are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which reflect our opinions only as of the date of this presentation. Please keep in mind that we are not obligating ourselves to revise or publicly release the results of any revisions to these forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events.

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Everipedia Gives Back to Children by Partnering with GIVE Nation - GlobeNewswire

Jigs and fixtures by Xometry – 3DPMN

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Jigs and fixtures are often made with custom parts from Xometry. Both of these devices help engineers and manufacturers to make better products.

A jig is a device that helps support, hold and locate a workpiece by guiding the tools that are needed to execute a manufacturing operation. Well-made jigs can have a major impact on the repeatability and accuracy of a manufacturing process. Jigs are used in uni-dimensional processes like drilling, tapping and reaming. Jigs also can have installed components, like bushings, which can come into contact with the cutting tool. An example is a drill bushing, which keeps drills in the right position and at the right angle to perform their work. 3D printing jigs is common practice due to the process ability to create conformal shapes and off-angle features without expensive tooling and setups.

Unlike jigs, which help to guide tools, fixtures help to hold workpieces in position so that they can be machined accurately. Examples include blocks of raw materials fixed inside machines and vices or clamps that hold workpieces in place. Most manufacturing facilities use fixtures to enable automation to increase production speed. For example, Xometry builds automotive fixtures for BMW that are used for aligning a vehicles front end during assembly. This helps BMW to manufacture their vehicles more efficiently and reduce operational error though repeatable work holding and installation solutions. BMW uses 3D printing services, urethane casting and CNC machining services to produce custom fixture assemblies.

Jigs and fixtures are both used to increase the productive time of mass production processes. But there are key differences between the two. Jigs always help guide a tool, while fixtures hold and locate the work, but do not guide tools. Fixtures are usually heavier and are bolted directly to the machine table, while jigs are usually lighter and are not affixed directly to the table. Jigs are also generally more complex to design and more expensive to produce than fixtures.

Both jigs and fixtures can be made with CNC Machining or 3D Printing, though it is more common to see 3D printed jigs since they are lighter. 3D printing can be a great choice with parts with complex geometries since they can often be expensive or challenging to machine. 3D printed jigs can be significantly cheaper than machined ones, so its worth getting a quote in 3D printing as part of your process.

Designing a fixture or jig begins with the application in mind as well as the quantities needed. There are three main processes used when making jigs or fixtures.

1. CNC machining is great for producing low to medium complexity shapes that require high stiffness, extreme environments and precision tolerances. Delrin (Acetal), Garolite, PTFE and PEEK are the most common polymers used for machining jigs and fixtures. In metal, typically Aluminum 6061-T6 is the most common, which can be enhanced by finishes like metal plating, color anodizing and chemical conversion coatings. CNC milling is the best approach for quality check fixtures, due to its ability to achieve precision tolerances and surface finishes.

2. Additive manufacturing or 3D printing can produce low to very high complexity shapes with ease. Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) is heavily used in making fixtures because of a build area up to three feet and the ability to make lightweight parts using sparse infill. Handheld jigs, such as surgical drill guides, may utilize processes like Carbon DLS or Stereolithography due to a good combination of precision and durable parts. PolyJet 3D printing is useful for laser marking fixtures because of its ability to produce soft-touch, non-marking holders using multi-material 3D printing, similar to a rubber overmold.

3. Urethane casting combines the design freedom of 3D printing with high-wear, urethane-based materials. Urethane casting can produce low volume production parts that can be color-matched, hit a specific durometer and are non-marring for holding finished products and ornamental pieces. Cast urethane parts are often flexible or rubber-like but can also be highly stiff depending on the material used.

Each jig or fixture is custom, and specifically designed for its application. There is no right way to make or combine parts together but there are best practices that will help guide your thought process. The tips below aid in design best practices for fixtures and jigs.

1. Make a mockup if you do not have the part yet. 3D printing is by far the best means to get a rapid prototype of a part to be fixtured. Even before the design process, a physical model to reference can be a powerful tool to inspire a design approach. 3D printed parts can also be robust enough to trail fixture or jig setups, including drilling, part marking and running automated inspection like CMM.

2. Limit your touchpoints in the design to those which critically support the object as well as indicate or index its orientation. This will reduce the complexity of the jig or fixture and save headaches when the digital design meets realitywhere minor deviations may occur from manufacturing.

3. Give clearances to corners and bends when designing conformal jigs and fixtures. Many manufacturing processes may have small radii in sharp internal corners. Instead of risking an interfering fit, it is best to design generous pockets or clearances around those features. For fixturing bent tubing or sheet metal components, it is best to design for the maximum condition of the curve or avoid touchpoints in that area altogether. This is due to deviations from the CAD which can often occur in the bent or formed locations.

4. Split up large parts to reduce manufacturing costs and increase the flexibility in the design. For example, you can build a 30 fixture, but it may be 2-3X less expensive to build smaller components only where the touchpoints are requiredespecially if the fixture will be mounted to a threaded plate.

5. Make the parts lightweight by using ultralight or sparse infills with FDM, or by designing features like pockets, ribs and holes to reduce the material used. This is particularly useful for jigs, where it is very common they will be handheld. Lighter parts will reduce fatigue over time and can be easier to store between uses.

6. Mix materials and processes to get a specific function out of the jig or fixture. It is not uncommon to see 3D printed components cover the highly custom contours of a jig or fixture while other features are generated using precision milling or other processes. Each process has its strengths and trade-offs, and with manufacturing as a service models (MaaS) like Xometry there are very few restrictions to what process and materials can be used.

7. Use COTS frequently to reduce costs on standardized components like handles and clamps. COTS stands for commercial off the shelf and is a catch-all term for anything you can buy without needing to custom design it (screws, pins, handles, rails, etc.). COTS components are almost always cheaper than custom manufactured pieces, often by orders of magnitude in costs. The custom components machined, cast or additively manufactured should be specific to the application need. Adding threaded inserts or tapped holes to the custom components prepares them for custom COTS integrations.

8. Prepare for benchtop adjustments by incorporating adjustable features. For example, metal shims between screw-mounted components are extremely common to compensate for tolerance deviations in assemblies. Using slots for table top-mounted fixtures allows minor adjustments to be made without heavy rework. Spring-powered pogo pins, whether custom or off-the-shelf, are also useful for giving firm mounting while allowing for small deviations between parts.

With online machine shops and online 3D printing services available today, it has never been easier to produce single and low volume custom jig and fixtures. Xometry has the benefit of providing the most common services and materials used for producing custom guides and work holding solutions with short lead times and low costs. Xometry can even build custom assemblies on-demand as it does for BMWs automotive line. Getting started is easy by uploading the 3D models for the jig or fixture to Xometrys Instant Quoting Engine.

This article was published in collaboration with Xometry.

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Jigs and fixtures by Xometry - 3DPMN

Amazfit GTR is the Best First Smartwatch for Watch lovers – International Business Times

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Amazfit GTR is a smartwatch that doesn't look like a smartwatch (Jeff Li/IBTimes)

Being a watch enthusiast, I find myself struggling to appreciate smartwatches as timepieces.

They feel much more like extensions to my phone that straps to my wrist, and I think the main reason for that is not because they can't tell time as well as traditional watches. In fact smartwatches are connected to phones which gets it's time from an atomic clock through GPS, which means when in sync, its accuracy is unbeatable by any traditional watches.

The main mental block that prevents me of thinking of smartwatches as timepieces pertains mainly to its craftsmanship, its aesthetics, and the fact that they need to be charged too often when compared to traditional watches.

After using the Amazfit GTR for the last few weeks, I'd have to say that my mental block is crumbling down over time. This is a Smartwatch that has been beautifully crafted out of premium material, and balances its functionality with its aesthetics, plus having a large user base who are watch lovers and having the ability to be customized; it is a package that cannot be equaled by any other smartwatches on the market right now.

Polished Stainless Steel case with a Ceramic bezel: What else do you need? (Jeff Li/IBTimes)

Premium build

There are not many smartwatches on the market that I would call premium build, and I certainly did not expect this from the GTR mainly due to its price point. However taking it out of the box, the first thing I noticed is that it handled exactly like a traditional watch. Its weight, cold and polished metal body and dimensions felt oddly familiar. At first touch, I immediately thought Huami has struck some kind of perfect balance in the build to make this Smartwatch not feel like a Smartwatch at all. I bet if someone gave me a blind test, I would not be able to pick it out by feel next to other traditional watches.

On closer inspection, the stainless steel case did not disappoint. Its curves and finish are precise and exudes strength and class. They did not skimp out on the two buttons either which are both clicky and felt as premium as the case.

Curiosity did strike me when it came to the bezel though, as it is a ring of matt finish with hourly markings but also has a polished chamfer. After inquiring the Huami team, they confirmed that the bezel is actually made of ceramic (Specifically microcrystalline zirconium ceramics according to the website, like the ceramic edition of the iWatch). This I thought was very promising, because the Gorilla glass surface recesses below the ceramic bezel and would be strong enough to be its protection from scratches.

Leather outer, rubber inner - my perfect combo (Jeff Li/IBTimes)

Going to the back of the watch, the back of both the watch and the leather strap is synthetic, which for me, I was completely ecstatic. One of the biggest challenges I face with watch wearing is sweat corrosion and unpleasant smells. Name a trick online, and I've tried it all on my leather straps, and nothing have worked. Not only is the leather strap of the GTR rubberized, it is also ribbed, allowing for extra air flow. In the weeks of testing this watch, I have not experienced any odor issues. I'm also a fan of the synthetic back of the watch for similar reasons. I have started to like synthetic backs since trying out the Suunto Traverse, and the back on the GTR is just as inert and sweat resistant - exactly how I like it.

Amazfit itself has plenty of good looking watch faces, but there's even more (Jeff Li/IBTimes)

Watch loving community generated watch faces

This is arguably the best thing about Amazfit watches, and the GTR in particular; the watch enthusiasts behind it. The Amazfit somehow got all the planets aligned, where it:

Because of not one, not two, but all three of these things combined, what you get is a Smartwatch that can load beautifully made watch faces made by watch lovers, of which a considerable library is already available.

When I realized this, I immediately found an app to customize the watch face and started trying out them out. I felt like a giddy teenager who just discovered Windows Vista sidebar and widgets for the first time! Compared with any other smartwatches that I know of, the Amazfit GTR has the most extensive and high quality custom watch faces that I have seen, thanks to the community of watch lovers behind it.

(Caution: Do use unofficial watch faces at your own risk. Like any computer device, uploading unregulated, user generated software always come with an unavoidable risk and may cause damage to your device if there are malwares. If you want to play safe, the Amazfit app itself has plenty of well-built watch faces to choose from)

You only need to see this once a month (Jeff Li/IBTimes)

24 Days Battery life

Not sure if this was a tongue in cheek statement, but instead of a 24 hour battery life - which is quite typical for smartwatches, the GTR has a 24 day battery life. When put into daily use, this makes a day and night difference. After its first full charge, enduring all my watch face uploading, synchronizing, and all the screen-on time for gawking at new watch faces - I haven't needed to charge the watch, not even once.

Magnetic 'puck' for charging (Jeff Li/IBTimes)

When you do need to charge it, the GTR charging system is easy enough that you might as well charge it every night. With a magnetic puck, it attaches itself (Like the good'o Magsafe chargers on the Macbooks) and the way it goes.

Who is the Amazfit GTR for?

What sets this smartwatch apart is not its software, and Huaimi knows it. They made a conscious decision to put a considerable effort into getting the hardware just right, and after using it for a few weeks, I'd say it paid off big time. From the premium build, to the long battery, to the possibilities of loading on sophisticated watch faces, the Amazfit GTR has become in my mind the first compelling Smartwatch that belong in my timepiece collection.

David is a tech enthusiast/writer who is often on the move and is on a mission to explore ways to make his overhaul flights more enjoyable. This is a contribution to an ongoing IBTimes review series on gadgets for Business Travellers.

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Amazfit GTR is the Best First Smartwatch for Watch lovers - International Business Times

This decade in Elon Musk: SpaceX, Tesla, The Boring Company, and more – The Verge

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As the decade has gone on, the occurrence of Elon Musk events has increased, and a brief glance back at the timeline shows this isnt just a psychological phenomenon: Elon really is Elonning more often.

Cast your memory back, if you will, to the reaches of Very Recent History. At the beginning of this decade, Tesla had just one car: the Roadster. SpaceX had not yet secured a commercial crew contract for NASA. Neuralink, the company attempting to create commercialized brain-machine interfaces, didnt yet exist, nor did the Boring Company, Musks tunneling concern.

Back then, Musk was still best known for getting fired from PayPal. And while Tesla had built the Roadster in 2008, wowing car nerds with its acceleration, it was still a niche product. Plus, both SpaceX and Tesla nearly went bankrupt in 2008. So while its possible Musk was saying as much weird shit as he would say later on, he didnt have the same kind of spotlight on him; the stakes were lower.

Then, in 2010, three significant Elon events occurred, which would set the stage for more to follow: in June, SpaceX launched the first version of the Falcon 9, and Tesla went public. In October, Tesla took occupancy of the former NUMMI factory in Fremont, California.

From here, the pace of Elon-related activity would only accelerate. Some of this was inevitable: SpaceX and Tesla were taking on new business challenges, launching new products (literally, in SpaceXs case), and becoming more popular. That meant Musks pronouncements took on a new weight and received more media coverage. It also meant that Musk was trotting himself out more often: because Tesla doesnt advertise, promoting the brand meant Musk had to serve as a celebrity hypeman.

After the initial 2010 launch of the Falcon 9, SpaceX became the first private company to dock at the International Space Station in May 2012. The Dragon spacecraft went on to be a major way that NASA delivered supplies to the ISS. By April 2015, SpaceX had flown seven missions to the space station. In 2014, NASA deepened its relationship with SpaceX, contracting the company to develop a version of its Dragon capsule for people.

Things began shifting in 2015. In December, SpaceX landed its first rocket. Before this, thered been some skepticism about Musks idea of a reusable rocket as a possibility at all and some skepticism still exists about whether its a reasonable cost-cutting measure. (Refurbishing a rocket is expensive.) But after this initial landing, SpaceX so routinely landed its first stages that people began to take them for granted. In December 2017, SpaceX launched and landed its first reused rocket. In 2018, SpaceX flew the first Falcon Heavy, sending Musks Tesla Roadster into orbit.

The launches did not go entirely smoothly. In June 2015, a Falcon 9 exploded a few minutes after launch when a strut failed in the rockets upper stage liquid oxygen tank. The second rocket blew up during fueling in September 2016 and this time, there was a whiff of scandal, as sabotage was considered among the reasons for the explosion. This explosion was ultimately chalked up to a problem with the helium tanks, carbon fiber composites, and solid oxygen. The two explosions delayed SpaceXs other planned launches as the company investigated to determine their causes. There was a third explosion in 2017, but this one didnt slow the slate of flights since it was just an engine on a test stand. A fourth explosion happened in April 2019 when a test version of the Crew Dragon the SpaceX vehicle meant for people blew apart. Leaky valve, propellant, boom.

In September 2016, Musk presented plans for his proposed attempt to create a Mars settlement. In an hour-long presentation heres a truncated version Musk introduced the Interplanetary Transport System: a spaceship and rocket. (There were, obviously, a lot of unanswered questions left after the presentation.) This system was updated in 2017, and Musk said he planned to put all of SpaceXs resources into the Mars mission; this does not seem to have happened yet.

As SpaceX was flexing, the rocket launch market began to change. The commercial market for launching satellites into geostationary orbit was very soft in 2017 and 2018, SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said. That threw a wrench into SpaceXs plans. In financial documents dating from 2015, which were obtained by The Wall Street Journal, SpaceX had projected more than 40 launches; there were actually 20. In 2019, SpaceX had estimated 52 launches one every week and there were, in fact, 12, with two more scheduled before the end of the year.

The slowing market for commercial satellites and the smaller number of rockets needed to launch them meant that SpaceX needed to retool its plans. Now, since SpaceX is a private company and doesnt have to make its planning public, I can only speculate about what that entailed.

It may be why SpaceX dipped its toe into space tourism. In 2018, Musk announced that Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese billionaire and founder of Zozotown, Japans largest online clothing retailer, will be the first private customer to ride around the Moon on the companys future ship, which was rebranded from the Interplanetary Transport System to Starship. But betting on the billionaire might not be such a good idea since he tweeted in May that he was broke. SoftBanks Yahoo Japan has since acquired Maezawas Zozo, an online fashion retailer, for $3.7 billion. So, presumably, the trip is still on.

Space tourism isnt SpaceXs only moneymaking strategy. SpaceX is also venturing into the realms of telecommunication with its Starlink venture, which may begin offering broadband services as early as next year. (Take that projection with a grain of salt: in 2011, Musk said hed put a person in space in three years. It is 2019, and a human has yet to fly aboard a SpaceX rocket.) Starlink is a proposed constellation of at least 12,000 satellites in low Earth orbit, though the company has asked for an additional 30,000 satellites. Astronomers have some misgivings about this effort.

SpaceX launched 60 of those satellites in May, and some of them have failed; a second launch in November sent up 60 more. The 2015 SpaceX financial estimates The Wall Street Journal got ahold of projected the Starlink business would dwarf the rocket launch business and now, as a result of the slowed pace of launches, Starlink seems like a make-or-break business for SpaceX. (Again, this is all guesswork; its sort of hard to figure out whats going on financially with a privately traded company.) In any event, in October, Musk tweeted that he was going to send a tweet using the Starlink system. Whoa, it worked!! he wrote.

If Starlink is successful, then the 2020s will truly be a new era for SpaceX: it will be a consumer business.

Teslas initial public offering was in June 2010; the company raised $226.1 million during the first IPO of an American carmaker since Ford went public in 1956. Tesla badly needed the cash. The company had teetered on the edge of bankruptcy during the 2008 financial crisis. It had only one car, the Roadster, and it had never made a profit. This would all change over the course of a decade, and thanks to the ready availability of information on publicly traded companies, Teslas travails would prove easier to track than SpaceXs.

For better and sometimes worse, this decade was the decade of the Tesla factory in Fremont, California. Every Tesla car built this decade came from Fremont. Without that plant, it seems unlikely Tesla would have been able to begin its deliveries of the Model S (in November 2012), the Model X (September 2015), or the Model 3 (July 2017).

The Model S, priced between $57,400 and $77,400, was supposed to go into production in 2010, but production didnt actually start until 2012. These kinds of delays would be a common refrain: the Model X, an SUV that started at $132,000, was introduced in February 2012 and was initially scheduled for production in early 2014; deliveries started in September 2015.

Then there was the matter of the Model 3. At its unveiling in March 2016, Musk said the Model 3 would be his affordable, mass-market electric car: the base model would cost $35,000. A week after Tesla started taking orders, the company said 350,000 people had reserved the cars.

That raised some manufacturing questions since the Fremont factory had delivered fewer than 51,000 cars total in 2015. Part of Musks initial plans for making the Model 3 involved turning the factory into an alien dreadnaught, a machine to build cars, he said in a 2016 earnings call. This did not turn out as planned. In 2018, Musk admitted that Tesla relied too much on robots to build the Model 3s, which is why there were manufacturing delays leading up to the cars introduction in July 2017.

But even after the Model 3 began production, there were bottlenecks. The Fremont factory was bursting at the seams. The catch-all for this, of course, was production hell. So Musk built a tent in 2018. And that tent became another assembly line.

The Fremont plant was also where workers complained about their conditions. According to reporting from The Guardian, ambulances had been called more than 100 times to the Fremont factory between 2014 and 2017 for fainting spells, dizziness, seizures, abnormal breathing, and chest pains. Hundreds more were called for injuries and other medical issues, the report said. Another report from 2017 showed that Tesla workers were injured at a rate of double the injury average. Workers in the tent in 2019 said they were pressured to take shortcuts to hit production goals.

Worker unrest meant the possibility of a union arose; unions are common in car manufacturing, after all. A Tesla employee, Jose Moran, wrote a 2017 Medium post complaining at length about working conditions and saying thats why he thought Tesla should unionize. At first, Musk claimed Moran was an employee of the United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW), rather than Tesla. By 2018, the National Labor Relations Board was involved, reviewing Musks tweets (Why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing? he tweeted in May 2018), among other evidence. In September 2019, Tesla and Musk were found to have violated labor law.

Even as Fremont was the primary Tesla site, Musks manufacturing ambitions led to several new factories. The unfinished Gigafactory 1 opened in Nevada in July 2016; it was 14 percent complete at the time. The August 2016 acquisition of SolarCity would give Tesla what would later be known as Gigafactory 2. In January 2019, Tesla broke ground for the Shanghai Gigafactory; by October, Tesla claimed it was ready for production. A fourth Gigafactory is planned for Berlin.

The Gigafactories have also given rise to some controversy. In 2018, Business Insider reported that batteries at the Gigafactory were getting scrapped (or reworked) at a rate of 40 percent. The man who was blamed for the leak was an assembly line worker named Martin Tripp, and Musk characterized him as engaging in extensive and damaging sabotage in an email to staff, Bloomberg reported. Litigation between Tripp and Tesla is ongoing. A former security manager named Sean Gouthro alleges in a whistleblower report with the Securities and Exchange Commission that Tesla behaved unethically in its search for the leaker. Tesla maintains it terminated Gouthro for poor performance.

Then theres Gigafactory 2. New York (the state, not the city) spent $958.6 million on the factory and wrote that down to about $75 million though that figure doesnt capture the plants economic value to the surrounding area, The Buffalo News reported. Some workers there have said they found the work environment hostile.

Of course, the 2016 SolarCity acquisition was more than just a factory; it was a new line of business and possibly a conflict of interest. (The shareholder lawsuits are still out there, and they allege SolarCity was going broke before the acquisition, and conflicted fiduciaries negotiated an inflated price on SolarCity shares. Tesla and Musk have denied these claims.) SolarCitys founders are Lyndon and Peter Rive, Musks cousins. Musk was chairman of both companies when Tesla bought SolarCity; he was also SolarCitys largest shareholder.

At the time, SolarCity was the biggest player in residential energy. Since then, its been passed by Sunrun and Vivint Solar, Marketwatch reported in June. Maybe that was because most of Teslas resources were being sucked up by Model 3 production, as Musk said in a deposition. (Tesla has said that the number of batteries supplied by Panasonic is a fundamental constraint.) Maybe people got tired of waiting for the Solar Roof, a product announced by Musk at the same time as the acquisition which still hasnt seriously surfaced as a consumer product three years later. It is perhaps also worth mentioning the hair-raising litigation from Walmart now dropped about a series of solar panel fires.

Energy storage and solar panels may be a Tesla business we see grow over the course of the next decade or so. After building the largest battery in the world in Australia to help buttress the electric grid, Tesla may soon be building an even bigger one in California. The company has also introduced a new industrial storage pack. In California, several energy companies have been cutting power to avoid wildfires, and those blackouts are unlikely to stop anytime soon. That may provide an opportunity for Teslas consumer energy business as well.

At times, the pressure from Tesla appeared to be getting the better of Musk. The most significant stress period occurred in August 2018. On August 7th, Musk tweeted: Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured. By August 24th, Musk had abandoned this plan. Then, a month later, the SEC sued him over the funding secured tweet: In truth and in fact, Musk had not even discussed, much less confirmed, key deal terms, including price, with any potential funding source, prosecutors wrote in the complaint. Two days later, the suit was settled: Musk would step down as chairman of Tesla, and both he and Tesla would pay $20 million fines. Also, there was a provision about tweeting, which got relitigated this year because Musk will never log off.

In any event, Tesla carved out its first back-to-back quarterly profits in the last two quarters of 2018. In the second quarter of 2019, Tesla made and delivered the most cars in its history, though the company still posted a loss for the quarter. It made its first profit in 2019 during its third quarter. One consistent theme throughout Teslas existence has been skeptics whove said the business doesnt seem sustainable. Despite the naysaying and some close calls, Tesla is still in the ring. With the Model Y (a compact SUV) and Cybertruck coming in the next decade, Tesla has the opportunity to prove naysayers wrong or undergo another production hell. Strap yourself in because, whatever happens, its likely to be a fascinating ride.

Musk launched two new ventures this decade: Neuralink, a company for brain-machine interfaces, and the Boring Company, a tunnel-boring venture. The two companies appear to have much less day-to-day attention from Musk. At his Twitter defamation trial in December 2019, Musk described Tesla and SpaceX as occupying 95 percent of his time. Still, both ventures are worth mentioning at least in part because they seem to expand Musks science fiction-influenced worldview.

Neuralink was founded in 2016, about a decade after the first clinical report of a person using a brain-machine interface to move a cursor on a screen. Neuralink was publicly unveiled in 2017, and Musk gave more details on the companys ambitions: to give people who are disabled a way to command computers as a compensatory aid, allow for telepathic communication, and graft human thought onto AI systems.

Well, Musk usually dreams big.

In 2019, we got some more details on the design of the Neuralink technology: flexible threads to be embedded in the brain. Also, a monkey has used the technology to control a computer with its brain, Musk announced, to the surprise of his team. The company is still in early stages, and biotechnology usually takes more than a decade from initial research to sale on the market, with lots of studies in between to help characterize the technology.

The Boring Company is moving faster, probably because it doesnt require brain surgery. In January 2017, Musk tweeted about Los Angeles traffic driving me nuts. He said he had a new venture in mind: the Boring Company.

Musk wasnt kidding. The Boring Company began as a hole in the SpaceX parking lot. Financed by hats and Not-A-Flamethrowers, plus an equity raise, the tunnel-boring concern debuted its test tunnel with a party in December 2018. At that time, three other potential projects were in the works: one for a Dodgers Stadium in LA, one in Chicago, and one in the DC area. (A potential tunnel on the west side of LA was canceled after a group of residents and community groups sued.)

In 2019, Chicago got a new mayor, and, suddenly, the Boring Company project was placed on the back burner. But Las Vegas, which is no stranger to quixotic transit projects, stepped into the breach: the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority entered into a $48.6 million contract with the Boring Company to build a people mover. That project broke ground in November 2019, and its expected to be completed by CES 2021.

Musks Twitter account exists in an ongoing state of epistemic uncertainty. Sometimes he tweets things that seem like jokes and arent a lot of these things pertain directly to the Boring Company, which seems to be something of a catch-all for Musks whimsy and sometimes he really is just joking. (I dont think hes going to build a volcano lair.)

There are, however, some more general things that Musk was up to during the 2010s, of which, the most significant were his involvement with OpenAI and the hyperloop.

The hyperloop was first revealed to the public in 2012, with more details following a year later. Musk said publicly that he had no plans to build his design, but that didnt stop a lot of other people from forming hyperloop companies. The basic plans called for pods traveling at 800 miles per hour to send people quickly from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Musk did build a test track thats about a mile long outside his SpaceX headquarters, and in 2015, he began hosting a pod-racing competition for students. These events seem to be largely hack-a-thons, which may also serve as recruiting pools for engineering talent. Next year, Musk says, the test track will have a curve. And an actual hyperloop may eventually be built in India.

There is also the matter of artificial intelligence. While many AI experts have come to believe that artificial intelligence is likely to be limited, Musk has warned about hyper-intelligent, human-hating AI: we are summoning the demon, he said in 2014. (As of 2018, hes still anxious about it.) So Musk was one of the founders of OpenAI, which is meant to build friendly AI. The foundation initially raised about $1 billion from various tech companies and executives, including Musk. In February 2018, Musk stepped down from the foundation since there might be some conflicts between his attempts at Tesla to build self-driving cars and OpenAIs work, but he said he will remain a donor. The CEO remains Sam Altman who was formerly the president of Y Combinator.

If this all seems a little far-fetched, there may be an explanation: Theres a billion to one chance were living in base reality, Musk said onstage in 2016. Musk has apparently done a great deal of thought about the possibility that were all living in a simulation, and my brother and I agreed that we would ban such conversations if we were ever in a hot tub. The notion of a base reality may be a reference to a 2003 hypothesis put forward by philosopher Nick Bostrom, though it appears a bit more certain than Bostroms line of thought. It is a view echoed by some computer scientists, though the most effective rebuttal Ive seen is, essentially, well, so what if we are? This is a distinction without a difference.

Musk also poured $2 million into a satire company, Thud. In March 2018, Musk announced the venture on Twitter with some former Onion staffers on board who said at the time, We can confirm that we have learned nothing from prevailing trends in media and are launching a brand-new comedy project. By December 2018, however, Musk told the group that no further funding would come from him; the group then had six months to launch and figure out a monetization strategy before the money ran out. Ambitious projects, like DNA Friend, a 23andMe satire, were quickly rushed out the door. Thud was shuttered in May.

In somewhat less amusing news, Musk also stood trial for defamation in December 2019. The suit was brought by Vernon Unsworth who helped rescue a soccer team and their coach whod been trapped in a cave in Thailand. Musk had also attempted to assist with the rescue, by building a minisub, with the notion that it could be used to ferry the children from the cave. In an interview with CNN, Unsworth said the tube was a PR stunt with absolutely no chance of working and that Musk could stick his submarine where it hurts. (Musks lawyers would later pressure Unsworth to apologize for some of the comments he made in this interview during the suit.) Musk then called him a pedo guy on Twitter.

Musk apologized for and deleted the tweets, but Unsworth felt hed been defamed. In a week-long trial in Los Angeles, both men laid out their cases; Musk won. That weekend, he celebrated by going to celebrity hot spot Nobu in his Cybertruck prototype with his girlfriend, pop star Grimes.

Theres probably some stuff Ive missed here, but thats just because theres so much stuff. It does seem, looking back, that the pace began to accelerate around 2015. One question I get most often about Musk from friends, family members, neighbors, and my editors is Okay, but is this dude for real? Well, the rockets are real, the cars are real, the Not-A-Flamethrower is real, and so is the tunnel starting in the SpaceX parking lot. The lawsuits are varying degrees of real. The timelines Musk gives himself on the products he makes are almost always wishful thinking, and not all of his ideas work in reality.

For most of the rest of it, your guess is as good as mine. It may turn out that he was serious about that volcano lair after all. Because with Musk, the spectacle is also the point: hes not just a CEO; hes an influencer. I mean, he smoked weed on The Joe Rogan Experience; beefed with the president, the press, and Azealia Banks; spent time taunting his haters; and sent his Roadster into space and then live-streamed it.

The rise of the social media influencer as a new form of celebrity in the 2010s seems to have suited Musk. Hes leaned heavily on YouTubers and, like many other influencers before him, engaged in a popular crossover event. He has a devoted army of fans, just like Taylor Swift or PewDiePie. Like most influencers, he seems to enjoy spectacle. And also like most influencers, hes used social media and his own celebrity as a valuable form of marketing. Thats especially important for Tesla (which has arguably become the car brand for YouTubers) since Tesla doesnt engage in paid advertisements. Sure, some Elon activity is decidedly spontaneous, but even that works in favor of the marketing since it makes his fans feel closer to him. I mean, how many big-deal CEOs besides Musk tweet about Rick and Morty, or engage with random followers? To borrow a turn of phrase from Jay Z: Elon Musk isnt just a businessman; hes a business, man.

Musk seems unlikely to stop Elonning anytime soon. We do not yet have the technology to predict cycles of Elon activity, thus allowing us to forecast heavy Elon seasons. I sincerely hope someone is working on this, but, until then, I suppose wed all better keep an eye on his Twitter account: he appears more often there than anywhere else.

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This decade in Elon Musk: SpaceX, Tesla, The Boring Company, and more - The Verge

Why Elon Musk’s SpaceX Is Launching Cannabis and Coffee to Space in 2020 – Inc.

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It wasn't long ago that SpaceX chief Elon Musk was criticized for smoking marijuana on Joe Rogan's podcast,The Joe Rogan Experience. Now, Musk's team will be flying cannabis to the International Space Station (ISS).

In a planned flight in March, SpaceX will be bringing cargo to the ISS. In addition to its regular payload, the cargo will also include hemp and coffee,Newsweekreports,after talking to the companies behind the decision. According to the report, Front Range Biosciences is partnering with SpaceCells USA and BioServe Space Technologiesto determine whether space travel and the environment in space in any way genetically mutatethe plants.

Hemp is a federally legal strain of cannabis that's used in a variety of ways, including in clothing, shoes, rope, and more. It has an extremely low level of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), which means it can't produce the psychoactive effects common in marijuana. On a federal level, marijuana is still illegal. Some states, however, have made it legal for recreational use, medicinal use, or both.

Bringing hemp and coffee cell cultures to space could have important and profound effects on our broader understanding of agriculture. Chiefly, the scientists want to know whether space in some way materially affects the plants and how they can be used in the future for a variety of products. Certain beneficial changes could create new discoveries in plant-based products.

Similarly, the scientists toldNewsweekthat they want to examine the plants when they get back to Earth to determine whether they can genetically modify them to grow in harsher environments. Indeed, the researchers hope that they candevelop ways to ensure plants can survive in different environments as climate change furtherimpacts the world. A trusted plant-based food source at that time could be critical.

To achieve that and get some real insight, however, the plants will need to be in space for 30 days. The scientists are sending 480 plant cultures into orbit andthen evaluating the plants when theyreturnto the planet.

For its part, SpaceX is acting as little more than the courier, bringing the plants to and from space. The researchers were quick to note, however, that if their efforts are successful, many more plant-based trials will be conducted aboard SpaceX vehicles to develop hardier plants.

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

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Why Elon Musk's SpaceX Is Launching Cannabis and Coffee to Space in 2020 - Inc.

Elon Musk Is Talking About Powering All of America with Solar – Futurism

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Solar U.S.A.

Elon Musk is talking, again, about his idea to turn 10,000 square miles in the U.S. desert into a solar farm that can power the entire nation. In a Saturday Twitter reply to an article by Treehugger about Bill Gates questioning the efficiency of solar power, Musk fired back that all you need is a 100 by 100 mile patch in a deserted corner of Arizona, Texas or Utah (or anywhere) to more than power the entire USA.

He first talked about the idea in 2015, and reiterated them in 2017, as Inverse points out. The batteries you need to store the energy, so you have 24/7 power, is 1 mile by 1 mile, Musk said at the National Governors Association Summer Meeting in Rhode Island in 2017. One square-mile. Thats it.

Musk also linked to a University College London blog post, in which energy researcher Andrew Smith did some back-0f-the-envelope calculations, finding that a 10,000 square kilometer area far smaller than the 100 by 100 mile patch to be clear could generate about 500 Gigawatts at 21 percent efficiency, the average in Northwest Texas. Thats more than the U.S. annual average consumption of 425 GW.

But it would be an extremely expensive mega project as well. If you were to cover the patch with Teslas solar panel-covered Roof tiles, it would still cost about six trillion dollars, according to Popular Mechanics which is about the GDP of Japan.

READ MORE: Elon Musks Plan for One Giant Solar Farm Is a Little Insane, but Not Completely Insane [Popular Mechanics]

More on the idea: Elon Musk Tells National Governors Association How We Could Power the U.S. With Solar

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Elon Musk Is Talking About Powering All of America with Solar - Futurism

Elon Musk Works For Tesla For Free But Thanks To A Highly Unusual Compensation Plan He Could Earn $100 Billion – Celebrity Net Worth

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Can you imagine working for free? That's exactly what Elon Musk does. Now, of course, he has $23 billion reasons to not need any more money, but still! He owns 20% of Tesla. The company's current market cap is $60 billion, so $12 billion, or a little more than half comes from his electric car company. The other $10-ish billion comes from his majority stake in the private company Space X. Musk does not accept a salary at either company. It's not as nuts as it sounds, because if Musk meets certain goals laid out by the board of Tesla two years ago, he could take home $100 billion. Let's take a look at how that works.

First, it needs to be pointed out that Musk also has $500 million in debt. He recently claimed to be cash poor, something we can relate to and we don't have a million dollars, let alone $23 billion. Basically, 99% of his personal wealth is tied up in shares in Tesla and SpaceX. He has $209 million in debt owed to Morgan Stanley. At least $60 million of that is the mortgage on his home(s). About $213 million is debt owed to Goldman Sachs. Nearly 50% of his Tesla shares have been pledged as collateral to Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Musk reportedly burned through all of his liquid cash from the sale of his previous companies to start SpaceX.

TOBIAS SCHWARZ/AFP via Getty Images

Now, back in January 2018, the board of Tesla presented a compensation plan for Musk that could be worth $100 billion. Musk will receive up to $100 billion in stock options over a decade if he (and Tesla) meet certain goals called tranches. There are 12-tranches to this plan. He gets the first chunk of options when Tesla hits a market cap of $100 billion. At the time the plan was announced, Tesla had a market cap of about $50 billion. Today is has a market cap of $60 billion. After that, Musk gets another of the tranches every time Tesla's market cap increases by $50 billion. If Musk can grow Tesla to a $650 billion market cap, he would earn the entire $100 billion.

However, if Musk doesn't achieve any of the goals, or tranches, he gets $0 in compensation for the reportedly 80-hour work weeks he puts in. Because he declines his base salary of $56,380, he gets no compensation at all until he hits the $100 billion market cap. He would then get $10 billion as long as Tesla maintains that market cap for 12 months. So really, he gets the compensation a year after achieving the goal. That's one way to keep someone motivated!

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Elon Musk Works For Tesla For Free But Thanks To A Highly Unusual Compensation Plan He Could Earn $100 Billion - Celebrity Net Worth

Peugeot and Fiat Chrysler Tie the Knot – Is Elon Musk Getting Worried Yet? – TheStreet

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With Peugeot (PUGOY) and Fiat Chrysler(FCAU) - Get Reportannouncing that they are tying the knot in a $50 billion deal that will create the worlds fourth biggest carmaker, one has to wonder: Is Teslas(TSLA) - Get ReportElon Musk getting worried yet?

The answer, for the short term, is a definitive no.

While the mega, trans-Atlantic merger positions both Peugeot and Fiat Chrysler to take on the inevitable shift to electric vehicles and other new people-moving technologies, there is no immediate plan the Italian-French car-making duo to immediately plug in to Teslas turf, according to preliminary statements from the companies' boards.

The longer-term picture, however, is absolutely.

With the likes of Ford F, General Motors(GM) - Get Report, BMW (BMW.DE) , Daimler AG (DAI:GR) , and others allworking on shifting their combustible engine-focus to electric, it is only a matter of time before Peugeot/Fiat Chrysler or any of the other large automakers comes up with a Tesla-beating offering.

The Peugeot-Fiat Chrysler deal, when completed, will create an auto-making giant selling 8.7 million vehicles a year with revenue of nearly 170 billion ($189 billion).

It also marks an around-the-world trip for what was once America's dead-last automaker, saved only by the ingenuity and foresight of Detroit legend of Lee Iacocca, who had the foresight to introduce smaller, lighter engines and vehicles that guzzled less gas - and an iconic convertible that both rebranded and reinvigorated the ailing company.

One cant leave it to chance that Iaccocas legacy still doesnt linger within Fiat Chrysler, and that another mass Tesla-challenging hit wont emerge from the newly combined company.

For Musk's part, he has publicly stated that he welcomes innovation in the staid auto industry, and would love to see the competition bring it on.

Besides, none of them will have Tesla's soon-to-be-built Cybertruck.

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Peugeot and Fiat Chrysler Tie the Knot - Is Elon Musk Getting Worried Yet? - TheStreet

Elon Musk appeared at The Game Awards to support girlfriend Grimes – Business Insider

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Elon Musk appeared on Thursday night at The Game Awards, an awards show for the video-game industry and one of the biggest events of the year for gaming culture.

The camera found Musk in the crowd following a performance by Grimes, the award-winning pop star who's been in a relationship with Musk since 2018. Grimes debuted a song, "4AEM," which later was released on streaming services.

Grimes' performance, which featured intense CGI visuals and special effects, had a "Cyberpunk 2077" theme. The game, set to be released in April, will feature music by Grimes, and she'll also voice a character, a pop artist named Lizzy Wizzy.

Musk sat and clapped for a few moments before getting up to give Grimes a standing ovation.

Musk giving Grimes a standing ovation after her performance. YouTube/IGN

Grimes' performance was announced in advance, and many people predicted that Musk would accompany her in some way.

Musk is an avid gamer and a big fan of games like "Overwatch" and "Mass Effect" that feature futuristic aesthetics and combat. "Cyberpunk 2077" definitely falls into this category to the point that Musk has even hinted at putting Tesla's new Cybertruck in it.

This was Musk and Grimes' only appearance at The Game Awards.

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Elon Musk appeared at The Game Awards to support girlfriend Grimes - Business Insider

Was Elon Musk Really in ‘Rick and Morty’? – Showbiz Cheat Sheet

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No one can expect things to be normal in any episode of Rick and Morty, which makes it continually popular with fans this year into a wild fourth season. One thing about the show is they dont typically go the route of The Simpsons and have cameos from real people.

They did make one exception, though, only because the notable person they used happened to be friends with the shows creators.

If anyone thought it was only a rumor Elon Musk appeared on Rick and Morty, its more than true. This wasnt any ordinary cameo either. His particular cameo wasnt as his usual self either, something only R and M fans will understand.

What were the details behind this bizarre appearance? Having him appear seemed apropos for the style of the show, not including celebrating Musks own mysteriousness.

One would think Musk is more than ripe for being satirized to death by the Rick and Morty creative team. The creators (Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon) just so happen to be big fans of Musk and his scientific advancements. Musk has returned the friendship, leading to hangouts with Roiland and Harmon. Latter two later managed to convince Musk to do guest voice work playing himself.

While recorded a while ago, the episode just aired recently on Adult Swim as part of Season Four. In the episode, fans saw Rick and Morty encounter an alt-reality Musk whos known as Elon Tusk.

Yes, the name is literal and has the animated guise of Musk wearing real tusks.

Earlier in the year, Musk changed his Twitter handle to Elon Tusk in celebration of his involvement, even though nobody knew what the reference meant at the time. It was a typical move by Musk, who always wants to stay mysterious and more than a little oddball.

Since Musk is a cannabis user, he might have had a history of watching Rick and Morty while fully imbibed.

Any fan of this show must have realized any cameo from someone famous wasnt going to be the usual. After finding Elon Tusk, Rick and Morty realize hes the head of a company called Tuskla that uses tusks on all of his inventions.

Other than this, it was the same Elon Musk, proving the hilarious concept of one alternate universe possibly having one slight variation into the absurd. Anyone who really believes in alternate realities might think something just as crazy could truly exist. Regardless, the world of Rick and Morty is already like smoking cannabis with Musk himself.

Theres every reason to believe the creators of Rick and Morty have done exactly this with Musk based on the disturbingly surreal story lines they create each season. Not that anyone can argue its not the most creative animated show around.

Landing Musk might have been a major coup, but what does it portend for future celebrity cameos on the show? Theyve already brought in famous voices without necessarily portraying themselves.

Those whove followed the show along from the beginning will know various celebrities have come on to voice specific guest-star characters. Everyone from Susan Sarandon to even Werner Herzog have done cameo voice work. Paul Giamatti is yet another upcoming.

None of these celebs have played a version of themselves, unlike Musk. Lets assume this might change the longer Rick and Morty stays on the air. After all, its almost a pop culture privilege for a celeb to portray themselves on The Simpsons. Rick and Morty is almost on the same level now, making it more likely some notable will show up in an animated guise.

Then again, with Harmon and Roiland once saying John Lithgow turned them down vehemently, there may still be some trepidation by a few A-list stars based on how relentlessly weird the show continues to be.

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Was Elon Musk Really in 'Rick and Morty'? - Showbiz Cheat Sheet

Why Are We Still Fighting Nixon’s Losing ‘War on Drugs’? – In Homeland Security

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Note: This is the fourth article in a series on In Public Safety that discusses the necessity of crafting laws that have both solid moral underpinnings and reasonable methods of enactment in order to gain public compliance. Start the series here.

By Dr. Gary Deel, Faculty Director,School of Business,American Military University

What has been the result of the war on drugs? The same as Prohibitionthe public generally rejects these restrictions and people still use drugs more or less as they please. However the resulting criminal activity and penalties for individuals have put a tremendous strain on society.

As a result of drug criminalization,nearly a half million people are incarcerated in the United States for nonviolent drug offenses. That amounts to approximately one in every five inmates nationwide. Its estimated that the U.S. has spent at least one trillion dollars on the war on drugs since Nixon began the offensive.The federal government currently spends nearly $9 million per day on incarcerated drug offenders.

Criminalization and incarceration have also had a disproportionate effect on minorities. Despite evidence indicating no difference in propensity for drug use among races, minorities are incarcerated for drug use at a much higher rate than whites.Blacks and Latinos account for about 80 percent of inmates convicted of drug charges in federal prisons, and 60 percent of inmates convicted of drug charges in state prisons.

Most people simply dont take anti-drug laws seriously. As with alcohol during Prohibition, if people wish to use drugs, they will do so regardless of whether it causes self-harm or is against the law.A 2017 poll indicated that most Americans have tried marijuana in the past, and nearly half of those who have tried it continue to use it recreationally.Yet, in that same year, nearly 30,000 people overdosed and died from using synthetic opioids like fentanyl. So these laws have failed to deter both relatively innocuous drug use as well as the use of extremely dangerous drugs.

[Free eMagazine:A Public Health Perspective on the Opioid Crisis]

Its also worth considering the lost societal benefits from the legalization of drugs. Making certain drugs legal would not only allow for greater safety through regulation, but also contribute to public funding through taxation. For example,Coloradowhich legalized recreational marijuana use in 2014has already generated more than one billion dollars from marijuana sales tax. It uses this additional public funding for a variety of positive initiatives, including mental health services and youth drug-prevention programs.

In light of these factors, blanket prohibition laws simply dont make sense to most of the general public.

This isnt to say that there is no place for anti-drug laws in our society. Again, every drug is different in terms of its potential risk. Perhaps particularly dangerous drugs like fentanyl ought to be tightly regulated. Perhaps recreational use of such extremely dangerous substances should remain banned outright. Each and every substanceincluding heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, LSD, magic mushrooms, and othersdeserves a thoughtful analysis and discussion to adopt a classification strategy that, one, makes good sense and, two, earns the acceptance of society.

But given that less harmful drugs like marijuana cant hold a candle to the societal harm caused by, say, the opioid crisis, its clear that the current status quo does neither.

Fortunately, in recent years some states have begun to acknowledge the irrationality of the war on drugs and federal drug policies. Some state legislatures have legalized marijuana for medical and/or recreational use in their states.

Given the societal support for legalized marijuana, the federal government under President Obama adopted a policy of non-enforcement, allowing Colorado and other states to experiment with marijuana legalization. In fact, in the last 10 years the legalization movement has gained significant traction. As of 2019,11 states have legalized marijuana for recreational use, and another 21 states have legalized it for medical use with a prescription.

However, because marijuana is still illegal at the federal level, these liberal state laws could hypothetically be overturned bythe Supremacy Clauseof the Constitution. President Trump originally aimed to enforce the prohibition on marijuana across all 50 states. However, his administration recentlyreversed course and announced that it will continue to permit state legalization.

This was probably a sensibly political move. If Trump had tried to turn the clock back on marijuana legalization, he would have undoubtedly faced significant resistance and backlash from the millions of people who currently use marijuana for medical or recreational purposes.

It should also be noted thatin 2018 the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) removed hemp from the list of controlled substances, allowing for the unrestricted sale of cannabidiol (CBD) oil and other popular products made from hemp.

Hemp and marijuana are different in that hemp is a category of cannabis varietals with 0.3 percent or less tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), whereas marijuana varietals have more than 0.3 percent THC (THC is the psychoactive compound that creates the high in marijuana). However, because of the close association between the two types of plants, the new freedoms surrounding hemp have further fueled efforts to legalize marijuana.

Many believe the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) will eventually reclassify marijuana to a controlled, but recreationally legal substance. For students of history, its astonishing thatin light of lessons learned nearly a century agoit has taken the federal government this long to turn the corner on this issue. It took just over 10 years to repeal Prohibition, yet the government has been actively fighting the war on drugs for more than half a century. However, in this case, late is certainly better than never.

In the next installment of this series, I will tackle another hotly debated area of criminalization: prostitution.

About the Author: Dr. Gary Deel is a Faculty Director with the School of Business atAmerican Military University. He holds a JD in Law and a Ph.D. in Hospitality/Business Management. He teaches human resources and employment law classes for American Military University, the University of Central Florida, Colorado State University and others. To contact the author, emailIPSauthor@apus.edu.For more articles featuring insight from industry experts, subscribe toIn Public Safetys bi-monthly newsletter.

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Why Are We Still Fighting Nixon's Losing 'War on Drugs'? - In Homeland Security

New cannabis legislation is a start to restoring Black America after the War on Drugs – The Real Chi

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I became discouraged, as I was on track to earn a Ph.D and go far in my career, Drane recalled about not completing her masters.

But she had not hit bottom. Not until she applied to be an Uber driver but was denied due to being a felon that same year.

Yet, despite the setback, Drane decided to create a new career path for herself. In 2014, the Englewood native, decided to create her own opportunity and founded the Englewood Walk & Run 5K: Ditch the Weight & Guns. At the time of the first 5K race, 4,000 people participated, including former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel. Drane says, Working out and working within the community was my therapy. I was still using my criminal justice background to empower Englewood to ditch the weight and guns.

Seven years later, another opportunity for a new career path came serendipitously.

After attending National Expungement Week Chicago this past September, hosted by Element 7 and the National Diversity and Inclusion Cannabis Alliance (NDICA), Drane welcomed investors to her community for a tour, which included a potential cultivation center. After the tour, the investors made an offer for Drane to become a social equity partner.

Drane explains, Now, we are partners, and I own 51 percent of the company. I wouldnt have been able to do this without investor partners because the cost to open a dispensary is too expensive.

Barriers to entry into the cannabis industry are multi-faceted, according to Drane. For starters, the cannabis dispensary application is difficult for some people to understand who need support.

The State of Illinois should have done a better job of community outreach, letting the public know where to apply, get help, and financing, Drane comments.

The cannabis dispensary application fee alone is $5,000.

During the December Town Hall Meeting on Adult Use Cannabis Law, in Chicagos Austin neighborhood, State Sen. Heather Steans (D-7th) was asked, How are cannabis dispensary applicants from low-income Black neighborhoods supposed to afford the $5,000 application fee? Steans suggested options including application sliding scale rate, applying as social equity applicant, and Cannabis Business Development Fund.

Dranes story seems like a one in a million, and for many Black Americans who will never experience a full circle moment, that reality appears to be intentional based on the policies created during the War on Drugs.

Its a slap in the face when white communities are profiting from cannabis and people of color have felonies, Drane declared. Black dispensaries, Black cultivation centers, and Black Cannabis Transportation create generational wealth. And we are more likely to give back to our community than White counterparts. My plan is to create jobs for the community.

Although the War on Drugs first impacted Black America many decades ago, its echoes can still be felt today.

In 1971, former President Richard Nixon announced a War on Drugs political campaign. Recently, though, Nixons Domestic Chief Policy, John Ehrilchman, confessed that it was never about the drugs.

During a 2016 interview, Ehrilchman confessed, "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies [and Blacks] with marijuana and Blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

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New cannabis legislation is a start to restoring Black America after the War on Drugs - The Real Chi

It is time finally to unwind the war on drugs in Illinois – Chicago Sun-Times

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It was an emotional, near overwhelming moment.

Recently, it was my honor to stand alongside others who helped move Illinois new cannabis law through the Illinois General Assembly as Cook County States Attorney Kim Foxx read a list of more than 1,000 people whose convictions for marijuana offenses were being expunged.

It was the first step in what ultimately will be tens of thousands of records being erased.

For me, this was the culmination of months of work, miles of travel, hours of meetings and countless sleepless nights alongside heroes and colleagues to push this important piece of reform from hopeful concept to the law of the land.

Because this process the act of removing the burden of an unnecessary criminal offense from a thousand people in our County is what matters.

In this setting, I felt moved when Gov. J.B. Pritzker said that the purpose of this gathering was to honor the victims of the war on drugs. Mr. Governor, you are right. And in the days since we gathered, it is clear to me that we cannot be satisfied when the war on drugs has claimed so many more victims.

It is time finally to unwind the war on drugs in Illinois.

The drug war was not limited to marijuana, and it does not end with legalization. Our work to repair the damage done by the over-criminalization of drug use must be expanded. Our new cannabis law is just a first step, not a final destination.

The governor can be the champion on this issue. Others, including his immediate predecessor, claimed to back criminal justice reform. Now is the time to truly move the issue forward.

Criminal justice reform advocates have urged us for some time to end felony penalties for simple possession of a small amount of all drugs. Such an approach would allow us to take resources we currently squander investigating, arresting, charging and prosecuting people who use drugs, and shift these resources to public health approaches proven to reduce fatal overdose, and expanding access to drug rehabilitation and mental health care programs.

And, it must be noted that many of the thousands of people who will have their cannabis convictions expunged will not enjoy the full benefit, because they may have been in possession of some other drug. We must work to free as many people as we can from the harmful collateral consequences of the war on drugs.

More important, this one simple step would reduce the number of people entering our state prisons each year, reducing mass incarceration in Illinois, and assuring that our loved ones and neighbors should never be imprisoned or burdened with a felony record because of a health issue.

Like all elements of the war on drugs, we know that prosecutions and convictions for simple possession of drugs other than marijuana fall disproportionately on people and communities of color. Entire neighborhoods in our city and communities all across the State have been devastated by having so many of their community members swallowed up by the justice system.

Even when these individuals finish their sentences, they are limited in the ability to find jobs, get loans and even seek an education.

In short, the war on drugs has been a war on those who are black and brown.

We can do better, Mr. Governor, with your leadership. You embraced cannabis reform, and in your first months in office we made it a reality. Your leadership made it possible not just for Illinois residents to access and use marijuana legally on Jan. 1, but also to make better the lives of those harmed by years of reckless enforcement of pot laws.

Lets take the next step together. Lets start the work, with your leadership, of fixing all of our drug laws by ending felony penalties against people who possess a small amount of any drug. This approach will need the vision of someone who understands that there have been victims of these laws. You showed that vision this month. Lets work together and do more to make our communities whole again.

Im ready for all the work, for all the meetings and for all the negotiations. Because as we both know, that work can yield real results for the lives of thousands. It is worth it. Lets join the fight.

State Rep. Kelly Cassidy, D-Chicago, was appointed to the Legislature in 2011.

Send letters to: letters@suntimes.com.

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It is time finally to unwind the war on drugs in Illinois - Chicago Sun-Times

Why the Drug War Can’t Be WonCartel Corruption Goes All the Way to the Top – The Daily Beast

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CALI, ColombiaMexicos former security minister, who also masterminded that countrys war against the cartels, was arrested last Monday by U.S. officials in Dallas, Texas.

Genaro Garca Luna stands accused by the U.S. attorney general of accepting millions of dollars from Joaqun El Chapo Guzmn while serving as the countrys crime czar.

Thats like Al Capone bribing J. Edgar Hoover to keep the FBI off his back.

When then-President Felipe Caldern chose to militarize Mexicos fight against organized crime, he tasked Luna with drafting the strategy. An engineer by training, and having never served in the armed forces or law enforcement, Luna drafted a controversial plan that involved deploying the Mexican Army across the country to fight the cartels.

While Luna allegedly got rich taking bribes from El Chapo, tens of thousands died in the ongoing violence, with 2019 set to be the worst year on record. Luna is also wanted in Mexico for his crimes.

Court documents unsealed this week in Brooklyn revealed the allegations, which include conspiracy to traffic cocaine. Hes also charged with lying about his criminal background when he applied for naturalization in the U.S.

Prosecutors say that on two occasions Luna accepted suitcases full of cash containing about $5 million each. In exchange, he provided Chapo's syndicate with security and access for shipping drugs into the U.S., as well as intel on official investigations and the doings of rival cartels.

The whiff of narco gangrene isnt limited to Mexico.

Luna has maintained his innocence, referring to the allegations when they first surfaced as: "Lies, defamation and perjury."

According to U.S. prosecutors, Lunas assistance allowed El Chapos Sinaloa Cartel to conduct business with impunity in Mexico for more than a decade.

The arrest of Garca Luna highlights just how significant of a challenge Mexican president Manuel Lpez Obrador faces in rooting out corruption among government officials, wrote Maureen Meyer, the Mexico director at the Washington Office on Latin America.

The sole fact that cases like Luna's are being heard in the U.S. and not Mexico points to significant weaknesses in Mexicos criminal justice institutions, and how political influence has tainted investigations for far too long.

Think about it: The presidents right-hand man was working with the countrys largest mafia.

Investigative Journalist Emmanuel Gallardo

Mexican journalist Emmanuel Gallardo, who specializes in covering the cartels, said this was indicative of a larger pattern in Mexico, in which the drug war is a farce waged against peasants while wealthy businessmen and politicians profit on the side.

Think about it: The presidents right-hand man was working with the countrys largest mafia. This is another example which shows the narcos can exist only because the state allows them to, Gallardo said.

This proves the corruption goes all the way to the top of the Mexican government.

A Strong Incentive for Collusion

If this were but an isolated incident, it would still be an outrageous scandal. But, sadly, corruption like Lunas has become a common feature of the drug war in Mexico and much of Latin America.

Official statistics are hard to come by. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime issued a report in 2017 that indicates further study into the link between drug trafficking and corruption is needed. But one stat in the report stands out: In low-income countries the percentage of public officials, judges, and police officers taking bribes can exceed 50 percent.

And the anecdotal evidence suggests that, as with Secretary Luna, the drug war rot goes straight to the top in many countries.

Long considered one of the most corrupt countries in the Americas by groups like Transparency International, Mexico has been rocked by a number of high-profile corruption cases of late. Public figures like athletes, musicians, and a string of wealthy state governors have all been implicated. And recent accusations similar to those that brought down Luna have also surfaced against former president Enrique Pea Nieto (more on that later). But the whiff of narco gangrene isnt limited to Mexico.

Organized crime is much harder to fight than an insurgency or terrorist group. ... Youre fighting an enemy whose main mode of operation is to corrupt and penetrate [your allies].

Adam Isacson, Washington Office on Latin America

Last June, a Brazilian military officer traveling as part of President Jair Bolsonaros official G20 delegation was arrested in Spain for attempting to ferry 39 kilos (about 86 pounds) of cocaine in his suitcase. Earlier this year, Colombias National Director of Anti-Corruption was busted in a DEA sting in Miami after he attempted to solicit a bribe in exchange for sabotaging an investigation into another corrupt official. Also in Colombia, an unrelated DEA agent was rolled up for attempting to commit deceit, craft, and trickery on behalf of a drug lord who had plied him with cash and prostitutes.

The cartels are powerful and dangerous, and the probability of punishment for cooperating with them is still too low. That creates a strong incentive for officials to tolerate or collude with criminals, said Adam Isacson, a colleague of Meyers, and the director of WOLAs Defense Oversight program.

Welcome to the Narco-State

The Central American nation of Honduras is perhaps the most striking example of the tendency toward criminal collusion among Americas ostensible drug war allies. After the democratically elected president was ousted in a military coup in 2009, the country became home to one of the highest homicide rates on earth. Its also a major way station for drugs passing from South America to Mexico and the U.S.

In August of this year, a 44-page document filed by prosecutors in New Yorks Southern District Court identified Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernndez and former President Pepe Loboalong with other prominent politicians and family membersas co-conspirators in a plot to leverage drug trafficking to maintain and enhance their political power."

Prosecutors in that case also alleged that some $1.5 million of drug money was used to help Hernndez win the presidency in 2013. His re-election in 2017 was also tainted with charges of tampering, though the Trump administration chose to look the other way. Also in 2017, ex-President Lobos son was sentenced to more than two decades in U.S. federal prison for cocaine trafficking.

Honduras descent into a full-fledged narco-state is all the more worrisome given its long history as one of the White Houses staunchest allies in the war on drugs, and the recipient of millions of dollars in controversial military and security assistance.

Grahame Russell, director of the US-based NGO Rights Action, which maintains a full-time presence in Honduras, criticized Washington for ignoring all those mis-spent tax dollars:

President Hernndez, many government officials, military and police officers have been implicated in or charged with drug trafficking and money laundering, Russell told The Daily Beast. Yet there has been no change whatsoever in the political, economic and military support that the Honduras regime receives from the U.S.

The same could be said of Mexico, which has received almost $3 billion to fight the drug war over the last 12 years, regardless of human rights violations and corruption charges accrued during that span.

Russell said the lack of oversight by the White House actually empowers greed-driven elites in Latn America, and accused the Trump administration of being willing to maintain relations with governmentsno matter how corrupt, anti-democratic or repressivethat promote the interests of international corporations, investors and banks.

WOLAs Isacson agreed that graft has led to America keeping some strange, drug-war bedfellows.

U.S. administrations need to be much more careful about who their friends are in the struggle against organized crime, he said.

Organized crime is much harder to fight than an insurgency or terrorist group because youre fighting an enemy whose main mode of operation is to corrupt and penetrate [your allies]. Any U.S. strategy that loses sight of high-level corruption is doomed to failure.

A Politician Whos Poor is a Poor Politician

U.S. prosecutors first got wind of what Luna had been up to during Chapo Guzmns trial in New York, when a key witness recounted how the cash-filled luggage had been delivered to the defense secretary. The AG pounced on that evidence, leading to Lunas arrest this week, but even more shocking allegations also surfaced during the trial.

Another witness called in Chapos defense, in January of this year, was Alex Cifuentes, who worked with Guzmn in Mexico from 2007 to 2013. During that time, as revealed in Cifuentes sworn testimony, penultimate Mexican President Pea Nieto asked that Chapo suborn him to the tune of $250 million. In return for the enormous kickback, according to Cifuentes, Nieto promised that Chapo wouldnt have to hide anymore.

As per the trial transcripts, the sitting president at the time eventually settled for $100 million and the payment was delivered. Nieto then went on to have Chapo captured twice, finally resulting in extradition to the U.S.

Nieto, for his part, tweeted at the time that the charges laid out by Chapos witness were false, defamatory, and absurd.

But since the testimony from Chapos trial netted them a successful indictment against Luna, might U.S. prosecutors also probe Nieto?

Only time will tell, said WOLAs Meyers.

U.S. prosecutors will be responsible for deciding to investigate all allegations against Mexican officials raised in [Chapos] trial, which could also be complemented by information that Garca Luna might choose to provide, she said.

Theres a saying in Mexico: A politician who is poor is a poor politician, said Gallardo. In Mexico politics is a business.

A very dirty business indeed.

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Why the Drug War Can't Be WonCartel Corruption Goes All the Way to the Top - The Daily Beast

In East Jerusalem’s war on drugs, residents say police are on the wrong side – Haaretz

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An unprecedented conference took place Friday in the Shoafat refugee camp in East Jerusalem. After prayers, hundreds of men headed into a large hall. Representatives of all the families living in the camp sat up front; on stage stood teens in gold vests bearing a logo of a fist smashing a hypodermic needle.

As dramatic music played in the background, one of the teens read a declaration signed by all the family representatives: I resolve to put family security above the drug dealers. I resolve to boycott them, to not give them respect, to not invite them to weddings and not to attend their funerals.

It was the first community gathering of its kind in Shoafat's war on drugs. The speakers included notable camp residents, former addicts, a physician who explained the dangers of the newest generation of drugs and a preacher from Al-Aqsa Mosque. The conference was the climax of a rolling campaign by social activists and local East Jerusalem leaders against drug purveyors. Ahead of the conference, young people organized confrontations with drug dealers, helped commit addicts to rehab centers, and hung anti-drug posters throughout the camp's streets.

Residents of East Jerusalem say that there was always a serious drug problem, but now it has become an absolute plague. In almost every neighborhood, residents know where to find the local dealer, where the addicted lay helpless and recount stories of the drug-related violence that erupts periodically.

Many blame the Israel Police and Shin Bet security service. Residents say that the Israeli authorities prefer that the youth of East Jerusalem be busy with drugs rather than firebombs that drugs are part of the security services' toolbox to maintain quiet in the eastern part of the city.

This isn't a new claim, but it seems that over the past few months the situation has further deteriorated. The East Jerusalem drug market has been flooded with cheap drugs like Nice Guy and Mabsuton, and dealers have started to market the stuff to teens and children. According to a number of East Jerusalem sources, a child can get a dose of Nice Guy for 10 shekels ($2.88) or less. Some dealers give out the first dose for free to hook clients.

Sources in the camp say traffickers will simply drop small baggies of drugs into schoolyards, and tell of a package containing 72 such packets that was found in one of the camp's schools. "Once the traffickers had some shame, they had principles; today, nothing. They sell at school entrances and no one says anything to them," says Nasser Hashan of Shoafat, a leading anti-trafficking activist.

Its around 200 meters from my house to school, he continues. In that distance my daughter sees an addict strewn on the ground, a drunk, a dealer selling to someone, maybe ten incidents like that.

We felt that people were deliberately throwing [drugs] into the schools, they don't care about anything, just sell their quantity and bring more," Mohammed Malham. The question is who has their back? Who can deal like that in the middle of the street without the police coming?

Almost all those interviewed say the police ignore, if not encourage, the problem. For example, in the refugee camp, it is widely claimed that drug dealers enjoy unofficial shelter at the checkpoint separating Shoafat from the city. They sell at the checkpoint and if they see anyone [of the anti-drug activists] approaching, they run to stand next to the border policemen because then they know no one will touch them, says one of the activists at the camp.

In the Silwan neighborhood, residents claim that dealers photograph kids who buy drugs and give the pictures to police. Police later use the photos to coerce the drug users, who are often minors, into becoming informers for security related matters.

Around a month ago the A-Tur neighborhood held a similar conference of youths and family heads against drugs and drug dealers, but it was forcibly dispersed by the police, who even fired tear gas at attendees. The police reported that theyd broken up the event because of disorderly conduct.

It seemed to the public that the police had shown up to help the dealers, like here, where the dealers feel safest near the checkpoint," says Issam Johan, a former addict who has worked many years in rehab and in anti-drug programs in the Palestinian Authority and in East Jerusalem.

If we catch a drug dealer who is from the West Bank we send him back and the Palestinian police deal with him, but if he is Israeli [meaning an Israeli citizen or a resident of Jerusalem] we can't touch him. He would immediately complain [to security services]," says Omar Elkam, who lives in the refugee camp.

Elkam says that the day before the Shoafat conference there were policemen and municipal inspectors issuing tickets to illegally parked cars. I went over to them and told them there were drug dealers here, they should deal with them. Ticketing cars is important, but this is more important but they told me to stay out of it, he says.

On Sunday three of the organizers of the conference in the refugee camp were summoned for questioning to Room 4, the room of the minorities division and the Shin Bet in Jerusalem Police headquarters. Every resident of East Jerusalem knows that the detectives in Room 4 arent interested in drugs, but in terror-related crimes.

The detective said he wants to help me. I told him that youre the Shin Bet, your whole head is in security and you are bringing me to Room 4. What does Room 4 have to do with drugs? says Hashan. I said if you want to help me, bring me to the unit that deals with drugs.

On Saturday afternoon, the day after the conference in the refugee camp, activists and young people from Silwan and Abu Tor gathered for a protest event that included a joint lunch in front of the home of the man they claim is the biggest drug dealer in the area. The home is surrounded by no less than 10 security cameras. Drugs have been sold from this house for 25 years, the neighbors say.

Show me where in West Jerusalem or in Tel Aviv a man would put cameras on his drug den? asks Khaled Zeir, a Silwan resident. He knows they wont do anything to him. If anyone touches him he would come with his weapon and shoot. The police know, everyone knows and no one does anything. Nobody dares touch him.

According to Silwan residents, minors reported in two cases that during their questioning by police or the Shin Bet, they were shown pictures of themselves buying drugs. The security forces threatened to expose them unless they cooperated.

Bilal Elkam, a refugee camp resident, was addicted to hard drugs for 28 years. Hes been clean for the past four years and works as a counselor at the camp's rehab center. Heroin withdrawal takes three or four days; with Nice Guy you can have withdrawal symptoms for 25 days. Its a drug you use once, after that it uses you, he says.

The recovering addicts in the center, among them Arabs from Israel's north, are blocked from the outside world by two sets of locked doors. But when the doors are opened after long weeks in rehab, re-entering the world is not easy. The rehab center sits on the camp's main street, a 30-second walk from the junction identified as the center of the drug trade. "A man walks out the door and there's immediately there's someone there to give him drugs," says Elkam.

The police said in response: As part of the ongoing fight against drugs, the police are constantly using overt and covert enforcement, particular against drug manufacturing and trafficking, by exposing, arresting and prosecuting the perpetrators. The police operate regularly throughout Jerusalem and especially in the eastern part of the city. As a result, in the past year alone, a number of agents were planted and dozens of drug dealers were arrested, some of whom were detained until the end of the proceedings."

With regard to the dispersal of the assembly in Abu Tur," the police said, apparently referring to the anti-drug event broken up by police in A-Tur, "there was a protest there during which a number of rioters started to disrupt public order. In response police had to disperse the rioters in order to allow the protest to take place in a legal, orderly fashion. The Israel Police will continue to allow legal free expression and protest, but will not allow violations of order, disregard for police instructions and disproportionate harm to residents daily routine.

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In East Jerusalem's war on drugs, residents say police are on the wrong side - Haaretz

Afghanistan: Another Failure of the Drug War – The National Interest Online

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The Washington Post has just published a deep dive into the war in Afghanistan, including the war on opium. These newly released documents expose in stark terms the dramatic failures of our century-long war on drugs. Of all the aspects of the Afghan quagmire, the war on opium has been among the most indefensibly foolish. Metaphorical wars against inanimate objects (drugs, alcohol, etc.) or vague ideas (crime, poverty, etc.) have an extensive history of failure. Continuing to pursue them is nonsensical at best, and deadly at worst.

U.S. opium poppy eradication efforts have cost nearly $9 billion since 2001. In 2001 US airstrikes targeted a network of clandestine opium production labs that U.S. officials said was helping to generate $200 million a year in drug money for the Taliban, but aerial efforts were abandoned after many of the suspected labs turned out to be empty, mud-walled compounds[and] the U.S. military concluded it was a waste of resources to keep blowing up primitive targets with advanced aircraft and laser-guided munitions.

American officials struggled with the question of how to address Afghanistans status as the worlds leading opium supplier. According to the Washington Post article, military leaders under the Bush administration saw [fighting opium production] as a distraction or hindrance to their primary mission of fighting terrorists. Under the Obama administration officials began recognizing the role of opium profits in funding insurgents but were also concerned that acting could alienate poppy farmersor U.S.-friendly warlords who profited from opium trafficking, which would alienate US allies on the ground.

The tipping point in the war on poppies came when US military and intelligence officials began to perceive drug trafficking as a financial boon for terrorists. The drugs themselves were not a cause of terrorism, but prohibition made them a highly profitable and lucrative source of income for the US enemies. Therefore, in the eyes of US officials, fighting opium and fighting terrorism were intrinsically linked.

One striking illustration of the folly of strategies developed by the US and its allies was paying farmers large sums to destroy opium crops. The Post reports:

In the spring of 2002, British officialsagreed to pay Afghan poppy farmers $700 an acre a fortune in the impoverished, war-ravaged country to destroy their crops.

Word of the $30 million program ignited a poppy-growing frenzy. Farmers planted as many poppies as they could, offering part of their yield to the British while selling the rest on the open market. Others harvested the opium sap right before destroying their plants and got paid anyway.

In a Lessons Learned interview, Anthony Fitzherbert, a British agricultural expert, called the cash-for-poppies program an appalling piece of complete raw naivete, saying that the people in charge had no knowledge of nuances and [I] dont know they really cared.

U.S. officials said the British wanted to be seen as doing something, even though they had little confidence the program would work. Michael Metrinko, a former U.S. diplomat who served in the embassy in Kabul at the time, said the results were predictable.

Years of failed policy have proven that victory in the war on drugs, as with the war on terror, will not come easily. But one approach will unlink drugs and terror: legalize the production, sale, and use of drugs. Competition in legal markets will drive prices down, thus eliminating drug trafficking as a means to fuel terrorism. The U.S. has no reason to continue a costly, ineffective prohibition when history has shown, time and again, that it does not work.

This article by Jeffrey Miron and Erin Partin

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Afghanistan: Another Failure of the Drug War - The National Interest Online