steve jobs in his home, sitting beside his tiffany lamp with a few records to listen to (1982)
he famously lived without furniture for a good while because of his obsessive commitment to quality products.
the man responsible for the ipod and the global domination of low-res MP3 files also had a serious love for hi-fidelity music.
neil young said in 2012, “steve jobs was a pioneer of digital music. but when he went home, he listened to vinyl.”
🚨BREAKING: Jensen Huang just EXPOSED Dario and Altman’s "Rogue AI" grift to avoid getting sued into oblivion under EXISTING law
“Don't let this doomsday narrative cause somebody to relieve them of the laws that currently exist.
Go and read between the lines. They're actually not asking for more laws; they're asking to be relieved of the laws we do have.”
ABSOLUTE TRUTH NUKE
The curse of discipline is that every day looks the same.
The curse of indiscipline is that every year does.
Neuroplasticity wires whichever one you repeat.
The baby in this video spent the last months of pregnancy eating that white coating.
It's vernix caseosa, Latin for cheesy varnish. The fetus starts making it around week 20 from the oil glands in its own skin. Flakes come loose into the amniotic fluid, the liquid it floats in, and near the end of pregnancy a fetus swallows 200 to 500 millilitres of that fluid a day, vernix included. Researchers who study it call vernix the first solid meal a human ever eats.
About 80% of the stuff is water. The rest is fat and protein. A study in the journal Pediatric Research found 41 separate proteins in vernix, 25 of which nobody had found in it before. 39% belong to the innate immune system, the defences you're born with rather than the ones you build up by getting sick. 29% kill microbes directly. In a study of 82 newborns, 65 of the vernix extracts stopped Group B Strep growing in a dish, the bacterium behind a large share of newborn bloodstream infections.
The fat does a different job. Around 30% of the fat chains in vernix are branched rather than straight, a shape rare in human biology and common in bacterial cell walls. Roughly 180 milligrams of those branched fats reach the gut in the final month before birth, and only about 16 milligrams turn up in the baby's first stool. The rest gets used, and the theory is that it feeds and steers the first bacteria to arrive. In newborn rats, adding the same fats cut cases of necrotising enterocolitis, a gut disease that kills premature babies, by more than half.
On land this is a human thing. No other land mammal makes vernix, primates included. In 2018 a team found the real thing on California sea lion fetuses, one reason a few researchers still argue humans once lived partly in water.
Now the cloth in the video. The WHO has said since 2012 that the first bath should wait 24 hours, six at the absolute minimum, and that vernix shouldn't be wiped off at birth. A 2022 review pooling 16 studies and 39,020 newborns found that waiting past six hours cut hypothermia, a dangerously low body temperature, cut low blood sugar, and raised breastfeeding rates. The reviewers still called that evidence low certainty, since no large trial splitting babies into groups at random exists. Last year a team in Ankara collected vernix from 105 newborns and put it on their mothers' C-section cuts. At day ten those scars scored 9.0 on the Manchester Scar Scale, where a higher number means a worse scar, against 12.6 for the placebo group.
Nobody arrives brand new. That baby is wearing twenty weeks of its own work, it has been eating the stuff for months, and it would have absorbed the rest over the next day if nobody had rubbed it off.
🇵🇱 JUST IN: Poland is preparing for war with Putin. “We know he is plotting something”
The most important task now is to prepare the country for various scenarios, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said.
“Poland and the Polish people cannot, under any circumstances, afford to be naïve or engage in wishful thinking. We must base our actions on facts, and those facts are unequivocal,” the politician stressed.
Ça fait une semaine que je suis à Paris et je vois partout le même business model : vendre des petits luxes à une classe moyenne qui n’a plus les moyens du luxe.
Quand tu gagnes 1 900 €, que le plein dépasse 100 € et que les vacances, les meubles ou les vêtements de qualité deviennent inaccessibles, tu ne renonces pas à tout plaisir. Tu réduis l’unité d’achat.
Tu n’achètes plus le sac à 800 €. Tu achètes le latte à 6 €, le cookie fourré à 7,50 € ou la brioche feuilletée au Nutella à 8 €.
8 €, c’est un prix absurde pour une pâtisserie.
Mais c’est un prix très bas pour avoir, pendant 20 minutes, l’impression de s’offrir du luxe.
Voilà pourquoi ces business cartonnent alors que beaucoup se serrent la ceinture. Ils ne vendent pas seulement du café, du sucre ou une pâtisserie instagrammable. Ils vendent une récompense encore accessible à des gens qui ne peuvent plus se permettre les grosses.
Le déclassement ne tue pas la consommation.
Il la fragmente en petits plaisirs très chers.