James' World 2

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If you stop to think about it, society is pretty fragile. A lot of it’s just agreements between total strangers to do certain things in certain ways all the way down, and if enough people stopped honoring those agreements, everything would collapse pretty fast. Most of those agreements are unwritten and unspoken—like not playing the bongos at 3 a.m. while your neighbors are sleeping—but many are enshrined in a written contract. And we should all be using contracts more in our lives, because they remove uncertainty.

A contract is just a legally binding agreement between two or more parties that sets out the terms of an agreement. You don’t need to be a lawyer (or hire a lawyer) to write one, and they can protect you and the other party in a variety of ways. Any time you enter into an agreement that involves money or property, you should have at least a simple contract in place to make sure things go smoothly—because if they don’t and you need to take someone to court (even small claims court), having a contract will significantly strengthen your position and improve the odds of things going your way.

Contract basics

First, you have to know a few basic things about writing a contract. You don’t need fancy language, formatting, or specific legal terms in there, but the contract does have to include a few basics to be considered legally enforceable:

• Consideration. There has to be an exchange of value, like when you pay someone to perform a service for you.
• Clear acceptance. What’s being offered (e.g., a fee and a service) has to be very clear, as does the other party’s acceptance of the terms.
• Legality. A contract that has illegal terms can’t be enforced, so forget about legally binding someone to commit crimes for your benefit.
• Capability. Both parties in the contract have to be competent, of legal adult age, and capable of understanding what they’re agreeing to.
• Mutuality. Everyone has to agree that they are, in fact, entering into a contract and agree to be bound by its provisions. In other words, you can’t trick someone into signing a contract.

Contracts don’t have to be lengthy, but they do have to be clear—any confusing wording or imprecise terminology may come back to haunt you. There are a lot of free downloadable contract templates out there, however, which you can either use as-is or alter to your needs. And if you have any doubts about your ability to craft a contract, you can always pay a lawyer to either write one for you or review one you’ve created yourself.

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The German historian Oswald Spengler considered our age the age of abstraction. Nowhere is this more apparent than in programming, where abstraction isn’t just a conceptual convenience but an absolute necessity. Programmers like to talk about their tools (rather abstractly) as a “stack.” At the top of the stack—the surface most of us encounter first—are simple markup languages, HTML being the best known. At the bottom are the “bare metal” languages of the machine. Thus, there is a hierarchy, and the further down in the stack you go, the less abstract—and, in a way, more difficult—programming gets.

It’s not really metal down there, of course. It’s sand—impossibly thin layers of silicon dioxide that conduct electrical impulses in ordered patterns we experience as a screen showing us a rectangle with text on it, flickering images, and so on. Still, you can see how Spengler, though he died before the era of digital computing, was on to something. None of us are keeping 1s and 0s etched in sand in our head, and yet we all manipulate them every day using friendly, high-level abstractions.

The danger of living in this Spenglerian moment is that it’s easy to mistake such abstractions for the world as it really is. This, I think, is why programmers often dive deeper into the stack as they progress through their careers. We think that maybe when we reach bare metal, our world will finally be real.

I started, like most, at the top of the stack. HTML. 1995. Geocities. Angelfire. Blink tags. Marquee. I’ll admit it: I loved me some marquee tag, which scrolled text across the screen. I loved marquee so much, I ran straight out of HTML and into the welcoming arms of Flash. Blame the Matrix website. Coolest animation ever.

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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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