James' World 2

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On the next U.S. census and future federal government forms, the list of checkboxes for a person’s race and ethnicity is officially getting longer.

The Biden administration has approved proposals for a new response option for “Middle Eastern or North African” and a “Hispanic or Latino” box that appears under a reformatted question that asks: “What is your race and/or ethnicity?”

Going forward, participants in federal surveys will be presented with at least seven “race and/or ethnicity” categories, along with instructions that say: “Select all that apply.”

After years of research and discussion by federal officials for a complicated review process that goes back to 2014, the decision was announced Thursday in a Federal Register notice, which was made available for public inspection before its official publication.

Officials at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget revived these Obama-era proposals after they were shelved by the Trump administration. Supporters of these changes say they could help the racial and ethnic data used to redraw maps of voting districts, enforce civil rights protections, and guide policymaking and research better reflect people’s identities today.

“These revisions will enhance our ability to compare information and data across federal agencies, and also to understand how well federal programs serve a diverse America,” Karin Orvis, U.S. chief statistician within OMB, said in a blog post.

Most people living in the U.S. are not expected to see the changes on the census until forms for the next once-a-decade head count of the country’s residents are distributed in 2030. But a sea change is coming as federal agencies — plus many state and local governments and private institutions participating in federal programs — figure out how to update their forms and databases in order to meet the U.S. government’s new statistical standards.

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In 1957, Nashville’s all-white Hattie Cotton Elementary School was destroyed by dynamite blast when black kids integrated the school.

—On September 9, 1957, as 19 Black six-year-olds integrated all-white elementary schools in Nashville, Tennessee, white church members—including one local minister—organized a persistent and violent campaign to oppose the integration of Nashville public schools. Outside Fehr Elementary School, one person held a sign that read “God is the author of segregation” and pursued two Black children walking to the school. Outside three different elementary schools that same morning, Fred Stroud, a white minister, sought to dissuade white parents from allowing their children to be educated alongside Black children by preaching damnation for those who did not uphold segregation.

The next day, 100 sticks of dynamite were thrown into Hattie Cotton Elementary School and exploded. Patricia Watson, the one Black elementary student who had been in class the previous morning, did not return. No Black children returned to Hattie Cotton Elementary School the following year, and no one faced criminal charges for the bombing.

Though Brown v. Board of Education determined in 1954 that school segregation was unconstitutional, for three years white residents in Nashville relied on intimidation and organized political resistance to maintain segregation in the public schools. In 1957, Nashville finally developed a “stair step program” which permitted a few Black elementary school students to enroll in eight elementary schools in their zones.

Throughout the summer of 1957, white segregationists in Nashville held intimidation rallies to terrorize Black families. In the days leading up to the first day of school, as Black parents pre-registered their children for school, mobs of white church members gathered outside buildings with signs calling segregation the “will of God.” One leader declared that “integration can be reversed” and that “blood will run the streets” before Nashville’s schools were integrated. tangie

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Watch live with us as a total solar eclipse moves across Mexico, the United States, and Canada. Weather permitting, people throughout most of North and Central America, including all of the contiguous United States, will be able to view at least a partial solar eclipse. See views of the eclipse from sites along its path.

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NASA Eclipse 2024

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Leading AI companies have a favorite phrase when it comes to describing where they get the data to train their models: They say it’s “publicly available” on the internet.

Why it matters: “Publicly available” can sound like the company has permission to use the information — but, in many ways, it’s more like the legal equivalent of “finders, keepers.”

“That phrase confuses people,” developer Ed Newton-Rex tells Axios. “It’s probably designed to confuse people.”

• Newton-Rex spent years building AI audio systems before resigning from Stability AI, citing concerns about generative systems built with copyrighted material.
• “Publicly available” doesn’t mean anyone has given permission for use in the training of an AI system, Newton-Rex notes.
• “Essentially all they are saying is, ‘We have not illegally hacked into a system,’ ” says Newton-Rex, who now runs Fairly Trained, an organization that certifies models built on either licensed or public domain data.

Zoom in: The term, perhaps by design, sounds like “public domain” — which refers to information that is no longer subject to copyright protection or otherwise made freely available.

• Lots of information is “publicly available” but subject to various protections, including copyright.
• Large collections of pirated content have been made “publicly available” without the permission or consent of the creators.

“Many of the ‘publicly available’ books they took were from websites known for pirated content,” Clarkson Law Firm partner Timothy K. Giordano tells Axios. “The receipt and subsequent commercial misuse of stolen property won’t play well before a jury.” (Clarkson has brought several suits against AI companies.)

• Authors, publishers, and copyright holders have brought a number of suits arguing that AI companies are engaging in massive copyright infringement, both in the training and operation of their products.

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Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios

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Streetsblog reported last week that Park Slope’s Fifth Avenue Open Street, one of Brooklyn’s most popular, has lost its sponsor and is now in search of a new one in order to open as planned this year. Another, Vanderbilt Avenue in Prospect Heights, will be cutting its overall operating hours by 40 percent, reducing its season by two months (from May to September instead of April to October), and ending five hours earlier on Sundays. The programs, which close blocks to traffic to create more public space, have been celebrated, somewhat controversial, and undeniably successful. They are also expensive to maintain.

The Department of Transportation funds Open Streets, but local business groups and volunteers share costs for staffing and programming. With the expiration of pandemic grants, those partners say coming up with the money to run a thriving Open Street has become a challenge. The head of the Fifth Avenue Business Improvement District, which is bowing out of the program, told Streetsblog that the group had to kick in about half the costs of the open street. Last year, that was $40,000. “All those pots of money have gradually dried up,” the group’s executive director, Joanna Tallantire, told Streetsblog, “so we don’t actually have any money to do the program this year.” (Another group is trying to step in and raise funds, and the Department of Transportation says it intends to find a new partner.) The head of the Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council cited a similar strain, telling Streetsblog that the funding it receives from the city “is only a fraction of what’s necessary to run something like Vanderbilt Avenue.” The people behind the 31st Avenue Open Street in Astoria told me they would likely also have to scale back this year. “We may need to consider operational changes,” they wrote in an email. “We’re collecting donations from the local community and taking out personal loans to keep the Open Street going as strong as possible while waiting for the city funds to come through.” (Others, like Jackson Heights’ 34th Avenue Open Street, which is owed $20,000 from last year, are waiting for reimbursement from the city, according to Streetsblog.)

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Photo: Photo: New York City Department of Transportation/Flickr, Mural: Cara Lynch

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When The Sims debuted in February 2000, the average house price in the U.S. was just over $200,000. I was 8 years old, and I would spend hours at my best friend’s house, taking turns on her PC to design our dream homes.

The Sims felt like a trial run for adulthood, exploring how you’d make use of your future autonomy. Much of this validated the importance of personal space: how to lay out a room, how to choose a sofa that balanced aesthetics and comfort, how to make a house a home.

My friend and I made liberal use of the cheat code, granting limitless funds. Rosebud, we’d type whenever the coffers were running low. Rosebudrosebudrosebud. Or else, when we were really strapped: motherlode.

Today, the average price of a home is nearly $490,000. The ratio of home price to median household income has jumped from 4.33 to 7.57 (as of November). Everything is more expensive, and wages have failed to keep pace. Roughly half of millennials in the U.S. are still renting, a far larger share than in past generations. Forget cheat codes and vibromatic heart beds, the likes of which I splurged on for my Sims. Adulthood, for me and many people my age, has been defined by moving from rental to rental. My childhood dream of designing a dwelling that reflects me from top to toe has instead, for years, been squeezed into shared living spaces and whittled down by prescriptive leases. I’ve not even been able to hang things on the wall without my landlord’s permission.

When I learned that The Sims had recently released a For Rent expansion pack enabling people to play as tenants or property managers, I felt the kind of commingled hurt, umbrage, and morbid curiosity that you might experience when confronted by a cynical remake of your favorite childhood film.

The official trailer for The Sims 4: For Rent emphasizes the potential of “multiunit life,” promising “ample opportunity … [for] eavesdropping, snooping, or even breaking and entering”—a description that instantly evoked memories of my worst roommates.

Its view of landlords, on the other hand, is benevolent, exhorting players to “be more than a property owner—be a community builder” (with the reassurance that, should your community be late with rent payments, “you can even take their stuff!”).

The original Sims seeded a fantasy of independent adulthood across an entire generation. Why would millennials, unable to own their own places, sully the site of our nostalgia by playing as landlords? Was turning the tables, if only in our imaginations, meant to be somehow cathartic?

EA declined to put forward a game designer for interview but did extend to me For Rent for review—and so, for the first time since I was a child, I returned to the simulated world that had made me so anticipate adulthood.

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The Australian psychologist was living in Northern Ireland at the time and had always wanted to witness the spectacle in person.

She was in between her Masters and PhD studies in her 20s when, in 1999, the path of totality happened to cross nearby over the southern coast of France.

“I thought it was going to be just my first – my only – experience of an eclipse,” Ms Russo said. “Something you haven’t experienced, and then you do, and you’re like, ‘that’s pretty cool.'”

Instead, what she saw that day changed her life forever, sparking a life-long journey of studying and chasing solar eclipses around the globe.

On Monday, Ms Russo will watch her 14th total solar eclipse, this time in Uvalde, Texas. She is one of many eclipse chasers who have arrived in North America in recent days.

Experts estimate that more than a million people from inside and outside North America will travel towards the path of totality.

Many are individuals who have combined their love of astronomy, exploration, science, and travel into a mission to see as many eclipses in their lifetime as possible.

Some are driven by their love of space and desire to understand the universe around them. Others, like Ms Russo, pursue the indescribable feeling that comes with seeing a total solar eclipse in person.

The 51-year-old recalled how standing in the shadow of the moon for the first time was an “immersive and emotional” experience.

A total solar eclipse, by definition, occurs when the moon’s shadow covers the sun’s rays entirely, plunging those in the shadow’s path into darkness for a few minutes.

But Ms Russo said experiencing it was much more than that.

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Australian psychologist Kate Russo has seen 13 total solar eclipses since 1999

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Day 1

MY FIRST GLIMPSE of Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, from the window of an approaching Miami cab, brings on a feeling of vertigo, nausea, amazement, and distress. I shut my eyes in defense, as my brain tells my optic nerve to try again.

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ICON of the SEAS

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A few years ago, President Xi Jinping started warning that a 100-year big storm is coming. As is typical of the early days of a hurricane, one can now feel it. The circumstances and the mood in China have indisputably changed to become more threatening. These changes are mostly due to big cycle forces.

The most joyous and productive environments are ones that have freedom, civility, and creativity, and ones in which people can make their dreams into great realities with prosperity that is shared by most people. This happened in China from around 1980 until around five years ago. It is quite typical for such booms to produce debt bubbles and big wealth gaps that lead the booms to turn into bubbles that turn into busts. That happened in China at the same time as the global great power conflict intensified, so China is now in the post-bubble and great power conflict part of the Big Cycle that is driven by the five big forces that have changed the mood and the environment. In this piece, I will first describe in brief how the Big Cycle has transpired over roughly the past century, and then I will explain the current picture of what is happening today, with a focus on the challenges that China is facing. This history and these dynamics are complex and important to world history and the global order—everything I write here is how I see it based on my own experience, relationships, and research.

In the 1930-45 period, there was the last 100-year big storm, which was driven classically by the confluence of 1) a debt bust that triggered a global depression, 2) a civil war in China between the rich rightist-capitalists and the poor leftist-communists (which ended in 1949 when the Communists won), 3) an international great power conflict-war that ended in 1945 when the United States (and, to a much lesser extent, Great Britain and Russia) won, creating the American-led world order, 4) many disruptive acts of nature, and 5) big technological changes. That period ended in the classic ways they end, with a debt and economic collapse, one side winning over the other in the great international war and the new world order beginning (in 1945), and one side winning over the other in the civil war and the new domestic order beginning (in 1949).

From 1949 (the year the new domestic order was created via the PRC being formed) until 1978 (the year Deng Xiaoping came to power), there was a typical post-war consolidation period led by Mao in the way he wanted via a domestic economic policy that was communist, a domestic political policy that was oppressive (dictatorial and designed to purge the opposition), and a foreign policy that was isolationist. That and big disruptive acts of nature led to many big challenges and big bad periods and few economic and technological advances. Mao and that era died in 1976.

When Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978, he reduced the one-man control and repressions, increased collective leadership, replaced hardcore autocratic communism with more free markets and increasingly larger doses of capitalism, and opened China up to foreigners to learn and earn from them. It was like sprinkling water on fertile ground that led to a great blossoming. From 1978 until Xi came to power, there was a classic capitalist rejuvenation that led to a boom in which the economy, living standards, and debt all grew greatly. At the same time, China was not perceived by other countries to be a threat to the leading great power (the United States) and its world order. As a result, China had a joyous and productive environment in which there was a relatively large increase in freedom, civility, and creativity, and in which people could make their dreams into great realities and most people benefited, though the rich benefited more than the poor. As is typically the case, these policies also produced greater wealth gaps and greater amounts of corruption. That began to end when Xi came to power, not because he came to power but because of where China was in its Big Cycle and how the new leadership approached it.

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People look at an exhibition featuring Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Military Museum in Beijing on March 3, 2024. Greg Baker—AFP/Getty Images

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