March 18, 2025

METAPHOR ALERT: Artist Crushes Tesla With Colossal Olmec Head Sculpture.

Sculptor Chavis Mármol has never owned a car, but that’s never inhibited his drive. Earlier this month, the 42-year-old Mexico City-based artist (who travels largely by bicycle) dropped a nine-ton replica of an Olmec head onto the roof of a blue Tesla Model 3 in a crushing display posted to Instagram on March 11. Mármol told Hyperallergic that his intention was “to satirize the Tesla brand and its creator.”

Made of quarry stone, the large-scale sculpture is a copy of the ancient Olmec Colossal Heads — distinct archaeological remnants of the Olmec civilization that once flourished along Mexico’s gulf coastline around 3,000 years ago. Mármol’s untitled destruction performance, which took place on March 5, was the third and final part of a series called Neo-Tameme involving the stone replicas and contemporary objects.

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“I didn’t just want to crush an expensive car. I know there are more expensive cars out there,” Mármol said. Pointing to the impossibility of acquiring the electric vehicle for many Mexican residents, the artist said that the overall goal of the project was “to crush an object that represents a sinister figure like Elon Mollusk,” intentionally misidentifying the Tesla billionaire.

I’m pretty sure Ayn Rand didn’t intend for The Return of the Primitive to be a how-to guide:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 30

CHUCK SCHUMER CENSORED: Will his experience of being roundly denounced for not shutting down the federal government result in the Senate Minority Leader reconsidering his previous enthusiasm for the Left’s cancel culture? Richard Pollock takes a look and notes Schumer blocked Senate consideration of the Antisemitism Awareness Act passed by the House of Representatives.

Posted at 12:03 pm by Mark Tapscott 27

CONSEQUENCES:

Teslas have more cameras than a 7/11. Only a moron or a lefty would vandalize them, but I repeat myself.

Posted at 12:03 pm by Glenn Reynolds 56

PRIVACY: Everything you say to your Echo will be sent to Amazon starting on March 28.

Since Amazon announced plans for a generative AI version of Alexa, we were concerned about user privacy. With Alexa+ rolling out to Amazon Echo devices in the coming weeks, we’re getting a clearer view of the privacy concessions people will have to make to maximize usage of the AI voice assistant and avoid bricking functionality of already-purchased devices.

In an email sent to customers today, Amazon said that Echo users will no longer be able to set their devices to process Alexa requests locally and, therefore, avoid sending voice recordings to Amazon’s cloud. Amazon apparently sent the email to users with “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” enabled on their Echo. Starting on March 28, recordings of every command spoken to the Alexa living in Echo speakers and smart displays will automatically be sent to Amazon and processed in the cloud.

Attempting to rationalize the change, Amazon’s email said: “As we continue to expand Alexa’s capabilities with generative AI features that rely on the processing power of Amazon’s secure cloud, we have decided to no longer support this feature.”

Those large language models don’t grow large on their own, you know.

Posted at 11:41 am by Stephen Green 104

SPACE: Mars could have an ocean’s worth of water beneath its surface, seismic data suggest.

Persuasive new evidence supporting the possibility of liquid water deep underground on Mars has come to light in a new analysis of seismic data from NASA’s InSight lander.

In 2024, researchers proposed that the deep subsurface of the Red Planet, particularly between 7.1 and 12.4 miles (11.5 and 20 kilometers) down, is soaked in liquid water, a conclusion they base on the velocities of seismic waves detected during marsquakes.

Now, researchers Ikuo Katayama of Hiroshima University and Yuya Akamatsu of the Research Institute for Marine Geodynamics in Japan have found supporting evidence for this claim of liquid water deep inside Mars. “Many studies suggest the presence of water on ancient Mars billions of years ago,” said Katayama in a statement. “But our model indicates the presence of liquid water on present-day Mars.”

Potentially a very big deal.

Posted at 10:39 am by Stephen Green 76

THIS IS SOLID ADVICE, DEMS. PLEASE HEED IT:

http://twitter.com/bonchieredstate/status/1901722417984356726

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I don’t know why this link isn’t embedding as usual, but here’s the screenshot:

Posted at 9:37 am by Stephen Green 113

#JOURNALISM:

Related:

Posted at 9:07 am by Glenn Reynolds 65

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Israel Opts to Put Hamas on the 72 Virgins Express. “The consensus of the sane people in the world is that the ‘war’s goals’ should definitely involve the complete elimination of Hamas. Israelis are at risk as long as any of them are still roaming around Gaza. Even if there are just a few, they’ll get right to work grooming young Gazans for the next generation of attempts to wipe Israel off the map. Those same innocent Gazans that spoiled American college students are using as excused to become latter-day Brownshirts.”

Posted at 9:06 am by Stephen Green 60

CHANGE? China vows to ‘vigorously boost consumption’ to revive weak economy.

Financial authorities in Beijing on Sunday released a 30-point “special action plan” with priorities including boosting incomes, halting the fall of property prices, stabilizing the stock market and providing child-care subsidies. They ordered local governments to “expand domestic demand in all directions.”

“There is still a lot of work to be done to boost consumption, expand domestic demand and better meet the people’s needs for a better life,” Li Chunlin, vice chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, the government agency in charge of economic planning, said at a news conference Monday.

Analysts said the plan was light on specifics and will do little to fix China’s bigger problems. “The basic takeaway is that these are very incremental and limited steps,” said Logan Wright, a partner at Rhodium Group, a research group focused on China’s economy.

Wright said the bigger risks for the country are persistent deflation, unemployment and low household income. “These are structural problems that are not easily solved with a few subsidies here and there,” he said.

Beijing has been promising to boost consumer spending for at least a decade but little has ever come from those promises. People would much rather save than spend in authoritarian countries.

Posted at 8:35 am by Stephen Green 111