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"With each interaction, Alexa is training to hear better, to interpret more precisely, to trigger actions that map to the user's commands more accurately, and to build a more complete model of their preferences, habits and desires. What is required to make this possible? Put simply: each small moment of convenience - be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song - requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data. The scale of resources required is many magnitudes greater than the energy and labor it would take a human to operate a household appliance or flick a switch. A full accounting for these costs is almost impossible, but it is increasingly important that we grasp the scale and scope if we are to understand and govern the technical infrastructures that thread through our lives. III The Salar, the world's largest flat surface, is located in southwest Bolivia at an altitude of 3,656 meters above sea level. It is a high plateau, covered by a few meters of salt crust which are exceptionally rich in lithium, containing 50% to 70% of the world's lithium reserves. 4 The Salar, alongside the neighboring Atacama regions in Chile and Argentina, are major sites for lithium extraction. This soft, silvery metal is currently used to power mobile connected devices, as a crucial material used for the production of lithium-Ion batteries. It is known as 'grey gold.' Smartphone batteries, for example, usually have less than eight grams of this material. 5 Each Tesla car needs approximately seven kilograms of lithium for its battery pack. 6 All these batteries have a limited lifespan, and once consumed they are thrown away as waste. Amazon reminds users that they cannot open up and repair their Echo, because this will void the warranty. The Amazon Echo is wall-powered, and also has a mobile battery base. This also has a limited lifespan and then must be thrown away as waste. According to the Ay

"My long-term vision for a better rural farm policy in the future would include new wildlife corridors, agroforestry, walking paths and bike trails, natural prairies, restored wetlands, and a return to naturalized rivers. This would require returning some private land back to public land, of retiring a percentage of today's Midwestern farmland. These things would support wildlife, outdoors activities, and provide greater tourism opportunities in the Midwest. These things would protect the soil, water, and help with biodiversity compared to what it is today. They would also help to enhance the quality of life for those who are living in the Midwest and they would entice others to move there for new opportunities. And, more kids could grow up doing the outdoor activities that I did."

"That said, there's another factor driving the reaction of Clinton's supporters, and the best way I can find to approach it is to consider one of the more thoughtful responses from that side of the political landscape, an incisive essay posted to Livejournal last week by someone who goes by the nom de Web "Ferrett Steinmetz." The essay's titled The Cold, Cold Math We'll Need to Survive the Next Twenty Years, and it comes so close to understanding what happened last Tuesday that the remaining gap offers an unsparing glimpse straight to the heart of the failure of the Left to make its case to the rest of the American people. At the heart of the essay are two indisputable points. The first is that the core constituencies of the Democratic Party are not large enough by themselves to decide who gets to be president. That's just as true of the Republican party, by the way, and with few exceptions it's true in every democratic society.  Each party large enough to matter has a set of core constituencies who can be counted on to vote for it under most circumstances, and then has to figure out how to appeal to enough people outside its own base to win elections. That's something that both parties in the US tend to forget from time to time, and when they do so, they lose. The second indisputable point is that if Democrats want to win an election in today's America, they have to find ways to reach out to people who don't share the values and interests of the Left. It's the way that Ferrett Steinmetz frames that second point, though, that shows why the Democratic Party failed to accomplish that necessary task this time. "We have to reach out to people who hate us," Steinmetz says, and admits that he has no idea at all how to do that. "

"Understand how to navigate the platform landscape, once and for all."

"I will tell you without ceremony what the future actually holds for the inhabited terrain of North America. The big cities will have to contract severely and the process will be fraught and disorderly. The action will move to the small cities and small towns, especially the places that have a meaningful relationship with farming, food production, and the continent's inland waterways. The suburbs have three destinies, none of them mutually exclusive: slums, salvage, and ruins. The future has mandates of its own. If we want to remain civilized, we will be compelled to return to a landscape composed of relationships between town and country, at a scale that comports with the resource realities of the future. These days the failure of American imagination, especially at the university level, is epic."

Because thinking minds are different from evolving organisms and self-assembling molecules, we cannot expect them to use the same means-mechanisms like genetic drift and thermal vibrations-to overcome deep valleys in the landscapes they explore. But they must have some way to achieve the same purpose. As it turns out, they have more than just one-many more. But one of the most important is play.

Actions taken to mitigate the threats of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) to human life and welfare have inadvertently resulted in a natural experiment offering unanticipated insight into how human behavior affects animal behavior (1). Worldwide, elective quarantine and stay-at-home orders have reduced use of public spaces and transportation networks, especially in cities. Anecdotal media accounts suggest that restricted movement has elicited rarely observed behaviors in commensal and peri-urban animals (2). Though not all of the reports have proven to be accurate (3), widely publicized observations like coyotes crossing the normally heavily trafficked Golden Gate Bridge in the San Francisco (SF) Bay Area (California, USA) have provoked widespread fascination with the prospect that animals rapidly move back into landscapes recently vacated by humans.

Most recent macro trends - cloud compute, social, mobile, crypto, AI - that have reshaped the technology landscape are rooted in new technical capabilities or pushing the frontier of product form factors. Another shock to the system is emerging today, driven not by the underlying technology, but by an evolution in customer buying behavior. For shorthand, we think of this trend as "growth+sales": the bottom-up growth motion eventually layered with top-down sales.