Aerogels are ultralight materials made of carbon nanotubes; they're incredibly cheap to manufacture in bulk, and each one can have different properties, depending on the deposition and geometry of the 'tubes. The tech is described by Hong Kong Polytechnic University's Xi Shen in *ACS Energy Letters*:

pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsen…

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You put the gel in some salt water (which can also be contaminated with pathogens, apparently) and it acts as a porous evaporator, causing pure water vapor to rise out of the mass, which can be condensed and drunk. It's not clear how many times you can do this with a given aerogel, but it's exciting stuff.

Moving from aerogel to air travel: an Air Canada passenger named Linda Royle was forced to check her carry-on on a stopover in Toronto.

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Someone stole her bag and Air Canada refused to compensate her for it (they disqualified her because she couldn't provide original receipts for the shoes she'd bought five years previously).

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That's frustrating, of course, but what happened next is a lot weirder: she got a call from a pharmacist in St John's, Newfoundland who had been entrusted with her missing bag by Air Canada, on the grounds that they didn't know who it belonged to, and they thought the pharmacist could use the labels on her prescription meds to track her down.

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That's not even the weird part! When Linda Royle recovered her bag, she discovered that someone had stolen a bunch of stuff out of it, and replaced it toilet bags belonging to two strangers, a knife, and an Air Canada ticket scanner:

cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundlan…

After this hit the news, Air Canada suddenly discovered that it was allowed to reimburse her for her stolen stuff even though she hadn't saved all her receipts.

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This is all about par for the course with Air Canada, an airline that is violently allergic to both checked baggage and customer service.

Air Canada is the airline that was discovered to have a *warehouse* full of "lost" bags next to Toronto Pearson Airport, none of which they bothered to reunite passengers with, donating the bags to local charities instead:

ca.news.yahoo.com/air-canada-p…

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Air Canada passengers complain of lost luggage and say they can't get through to customer service as thousands of bags pile up at Canada's biggest airport

Insider spoke with Air Canada passengers who said the airline lost their bags, and who complained that they weren't able to get help in finding them.

^{Abby Wallace (Yahoo News)}

Despite this, the airline registered very few customer complaints. That's because they've fired so many of their customer service reps and replaced them with AI chatbots whose florid "hallucinations" give fliers all kinds of wrong advice, which Air Canada refuses to make up for unless passengers pursue them through several rounds of appeal and then escalate to a government ombudsman:

forbes.com/sites/marisagarcia/…

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Can't register complaints if you fire all the customer service reps and replace them with malfing dogshit chatbots, amirite?

But you don't have to fire all your customer service reps or invest in chatbots to create an all-consuming accountability sink that can absorb all the risk you create by screwing over your customers.

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The easiest way to do that is to stick a "binding arbitration" waiver in your terms of service that takes away a customer's right to sue, no matter how much harm you inflict.

It's getting harder to move through the world without surrendering your legal rights these days. I've had to walk away from doctors, dentists, taxi companies, solar installers, and car rental companies because they wanted me to click away my right to sue as a condition of doing business with them.

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What's the point of a system of civil justice if everyone in a position to harm you can force you to swear off using it?

It would be different if arbitration was *fair*, but "he who pays the pipe picks the tune" - that is, arbitrators almost always rule in favor of the corporation that's paying them, no matter how they've screwed over the other party.

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There are a few exceptions, but things have to be *really* egregious for this to be the case - as with the Fox show *Bones*, whose cast were so *utterly* screwed by Fox that the arbitrator awarded them $179m, issuing a scathing ruling that called out individual Fox execs for their scumbag conduct:

variety.com/2019/biz/news/fox-…

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Fox Ordered to Pay $179 Million in 'Bones' Arbitration

Arbitrator Peter Lichtman blasted top Fox executives, accusing them of lying in testimony and awarding $128 million in punitive damages.

^{Gene Maddaus (Variety)}

But while the corporate-friendly judiciary has a long history of forcing everyday people into arbitration when they get maimed or cheated by a capitalist enterprise, these same judges are always happy to set aside arbitrator's judgements when they go in favor of the little guy, which is exactly what happened with Bones:

variety.com/2019/biz/news/bone…

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Judge Overturns $128 Million 'Bones' Judgment

Judge Richard Rico handed a huge win to Fox, striking a $128 million punitive damages award in a profit participation case.

^{Gene Maddaus (Variety)}

That wasn't the last judge to experience a sudden attack of skepticism for arbitrators' decisions in the face of an adverse outcome for some corporate scumbag. This week, the Eight Circuit overturned a $5m arbitration award that Mike "Mypillow" Lindell was ordered to pay after he lost a bet about whether the 2020 election was stolen:

creditslips.org/creditslips/20…

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Lindell offered $5m to anyone who could prove the 2020 election wasn't stolen. A software developer named Robert Zeidman analyzed the voting machine logs that Lindell used as the basis for his claims and showed that Lindell was full of shit. An arbitrator agreed, and ordered Lindell to pay $5m.

The Eight Circuit, meanwhile, decided that the arbitrator "exceeded their powers" and set aside the award.

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As Credit Slips' Bob Lawless writes, it would be nice if this meant that the next time you were hurt by a dentist, a doctor, a solar installer, a rental car agency, or a taxi company, you could get out of arbitration, but he's not holding his breath: "Something tells me, however, that might not be the case in a more routine consumer dispute."

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The house always wins. That's true even when the player is trying to build a casino! In her latest newsletter, Ann Pettifor writes about how "Capitalism Devours Crypto":

annpettifor.substack.com/p/cap…

Pettifor's writing about the institutional formalization of "Stablecoins," a form of wildcat money that is a modern update of the "narrow bank" notes that triggered a series of financial panics in the 1830s, wiping out a sizable fraction of the US economy.

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Capitalism Devours Crypto

… by blowing up and looting DeFi to enrich TradFi

^{Ann Pettifor (System Change)}

The GENIUS Act, which brings Stablecoins into a legal framework, has helped inflate a crypto bubble worth $4t.

Key to this bubble is to make crypto into a form of government-backed (but only barely regulated) asset, with one of the primary beneficiaries being World Liberty Financial, a company owned by the President of the United States.

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Other beneficiaries include Michael Saylor's "Strategy" (formerly Microstrategy), whose actual *strategy* is to sell shares and bonds to buy bitcoin, then use the rising price of bitcoin to issue more paper that it can use to buy more bitcoin, and so on. This is *exactly* how the South Sea Company ran its operation, leading to yet another global financial cataclysm:

ft.com/content/45d7c547-f686-4…

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A technology regulated by the US government and heavily manipulated by the US president is the polar opposite of the libertarian rhetoric in Satoshi's original bitcoin white paper, which bitcoin bros cite as gospel when explaining how they're doing something truly different this time.

Pettifor says that crypto *is* different from Beanie Babies and other bubbles - because this time, the president is in on the scam.

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Speaking of the crypto bubble, one striking feature of the bubble is how many of its key players are also pumping the AI bubble. The AI bubble is a different kind of sleaze from the crypto bubble, but it's every bit as sleazy.

Ever since Openai and Trump's splashy announcement of the $500b "Stargate" plan to build AI data-centers, Ed Zitron, one of the great tech debullshitifiers, has been taking pointed notice of just how vaporous this plan is. In his latest investigation,

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Zitron shows how the supine tech press has played credulous stenographer to Sam Altman and Softbank in helping to sell a clearly bogus claim about Softbank's investment in Stargate:

wheresyoured.at/softbank-opena…

Everyone from the *Wall Street Journal* to *Bloomberg* on down took Sam Altman at his word when he claimed that a new data-center in Abilene, TX was a) part of Stargate, and b) funded by Softbank.

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Is SoftBank Still Backing OpenAI?

Earlier in the week, the Wall Street Journal reported that SoftBank and OpenAI's "$500 billion" "AI Project" was now setting a "more modest goal of building a small data center by year-end.

^{Edward Zitron (Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At)}

The thing is, neither of these are true. As confirmed by the data-center's own developers, "Softbank is not and has not been involved in the funding for its construction." Softbank is the exclusive trademark holder for Stargate, and Stargate has *no legal entity* apart from this trademark, so this data-center is not part of Stargate, despite widespread press coverage to the contrary.

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What's more, there are *no other* data-centers on the horizon that are part of Stargate. Which is to say that Stargate, the $500b AI data center program, doesn't actually exist.

Zitron:

> Stargate does not exist other than as a name that Sam Altman gives things to make them feel more special than they are, and SoftBank was never involved. Stargate does not exist as reported.

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One of the reasons I love Zitron's work so much is that he actually *really likes technology* and aspires to a world where the promise of technology as a force for human thriving and betterment can be realized.

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That's what animates me, too, which is why I was so excited to read "Designing Sousveillance Tools for Gig Workers," a paper by a group of computer scientists who worked closely with gig workers to create a design framework for technology that helps workers get the upper hand over their bosses:

arxiv.org/pdf/2403.09986

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