For thirty years, Wenzhou Dinggu Technology Co. made molds for manufacturers of bathroom fittings. In 2018, they decided to do their own thing and lean into design, forming a spin-off called AIM Faucet. The company now does OEM/ODM design and manufacturing for other brands.

The strategy has paid off, and this year the company's won an iF Design Award for their deconstructed three-section kitchen faucet:

The faucet features a tri-sectional rotating system, where the faucet body, connecting arm, and spout move independently. This allows 360° sink coverage, reaching every corner of the sink and handling large pots or containers effortlessly.

Each segment can be adjusted freely, ensuring flexible kitchen faucet operation and eliminating the blind spots typical in conventional faucets.

Beyond its striking aesthetics, the faucet improves efficiency and usability, reducing countertop cleaning frequency while offering a premium dual water flow experience.

The question is: Now that this former moldmaker has bagged a coveted design award, how long until they become a brand in their own right, able to compete with Kohler and Grohe on the global market?

It’s worth having a discussion over Mamdani not dropping his attacks on Benjamin Netanyahu as a war criminal, saying he would like to arrest Netanyahu upon his entrance to New York, and admitting that while he does not in fact have that power, the U.S. should arrest Netanyahu upon entry to the United States and send him to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

Now, this description of Netanyahu is absolutely true, whether you want to dicker about whether what has happened in Gaza is a “genocide” or not. Personally, I think the academic definitions of this term are pretty lame–as a friend of mine who is a scholar of fascism notes, most of the people particularly concerned about this are Holocaust scholars defining everything that was not the Holocaust as not genocide. Fundamentally, genocide is a political term and within that context, the mass deaths of Palestinians in Gaza and the open calls to take over much of that land is ethnic cleansing or genocide or whatever, but it’s deeply evil and should be unacceptable for any nation. A decent country, were we one, would absolutely arrest that war criminal and deliver him over to the same process that Slobodan Milosevic went through, dying in prison.

To me, somewhat more interesting is how uncompromising Mamdani is on this because he knows he has the politics behind him. It’s things like this, as well as the war he’s declared on the Democratic establishment in New York, that has the New York Times conducting interviews with him with barely disguised hostility (the best part of this interview is him asking the interviewer what her favorite park is in the city, she replaying “Central Park of course” and him laughing in her face as a symbol of how out of touch Times people are). Like, he could not say these things at this point and his life would probably be easier. But that’s not what he is going to do. He believes in justice. He can’t run for president because he’s not born in the U.S., but he can be a huge mouthpiece for the left. As of this time, he’s been enormously successful. He clearly sees no personal downside in demanding justice in Gaza, something that no major American politician has been able to articulate for decades. And so far, he’s been right about everything important, at least from a political sense. It’ll be interesting to see how this sort of thing evolves.

The post Mamdani and Netanyahu appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

I am not saying this to take any position in the Michigan Senate primary — the candidate I most liked from afar dropped out and I am happy to defer to Michigan voters about the other two — and I don’t mind a little harmless pandering. But this is really not harmless:

• The larger idea that you can fund a Scandinavian-style welfare state by only taxing BILLIONAIRES is a dangerous lie that fundamentally plays into Republican anti-tax tropes. The kind of safety net El-Sayed wants — which includes universal public health insurance more ambitious than Canada’s — requires higher taxes not only on the wealthy but on the middle class.
• Current tax levels aren’t enough to properly sustain even the relatively modest social welfare commitments of the US right now.
• Of all the groups to exempt from tax increases, seniors are the least deserving — this is flat-out upward wealth redistribution on balance. Moreover, providing incentives for seniors to stay in houses that could be used to house young families instead of downsizing is insanely bad housing policy.
• It’s the least important point, but to me there’s something particularly amusingly unserious about “just tax the billionaires” as a universal solvent in the context of local property taxes. Can’t fund schools or police because your property tax base is shrinking? Just tax every billionaire living in Flint or Saginaw! Problem solved!

This is pernicious, reactionary bullshit, and if he’s the nominee I hope someone can convince him to cut it out.

The post The slopulist tendency in American politics appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

If there’s one message that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign to redefine healthy eating has imparted, it’s that Americans need to eat their beef. In January, the health secretary rolled out the new food pyramid—with a marbled rib eye in the pole position. Weeks later, Kennedy modeled good beef-eating behavior, posing for a pic on his 72nd birthday while tucking in to a bone-in steak decked out with candles. In February, he dropped by the trade show CattleCon and begged the assembled ranchers to increase the size of their herds. “I eat beef every day, twice a day,” Kennedy boasted to the hooting crowd.

The secretary’s beef-intensive diet, which is shared by other members of the Cabinet, including Vice President Vance, is informed by the idea that people should be eating as our prehistoric ancestors did. When the Department of Health and Human Services put out its update to the food pyramid, it also published a 90-page document laying out the “scientific foundation” for the new advice. The report cited several papers on the benefits of the Paleo diet. One specifically endorses eating wild game, and argues that every person should strive to change their diet to “become a 21st-century hunter-gatherer.”

This mode of thinking can be traced back to at least the 19th century, but its current incarnation—the version that has wormed its way inside the U.S. government—dates to the 1970s, when the growing plague of heart disease and obesity was starting to receive sustained attention on Capitol Hill. That’s also when a Seattle gastroenterologist named Walter Voegtlin published a pale volume with a drawing of a loincloth-wearing hominid on the cover. His book was called The Stone Age Diet, and on the title page was a modest proclamation: “It’s Safe, It’s Sane, It’s Simple, and It Really Works!”

Voegtlin’s approach to nutrition may not have been any of those things, but it set the model for the glut of Paleo-diet books that were to come. The book laid out its author’s odd ideas and strong opinions, such as his profound loathing of “baleful salads” and especially the garlicky Caesar, which he regarded as a “gastric atrocity.” Beef, on the other hand, is an excellent source of protein, Voegtlin said. He noted that the man who eats a roast-beef sandwich gets all the amino acids he needs while the peanut-butter-sandwich eater does not. But Voegtlin wasn’t wedded to any single flavor of carnivory. In fact, he had some beef misgivings. Eating cows might not be sustainable, he argued, in a world teeming with billions of slavering Homo sapiens.

Perhaps another beast could be used for making hamburgers instead. Voegtlin had a notion: Instead of land cows, we should eat sea cows, or manatees. And he was not the first American scientist—and far from the most famous one—to hit on this very notion. In fact, schemes to radically expand the nation’s deli counter have been a strange motif in U.S. history.

Voegtlin’s book laid out the premise for the modern Paleo diet. According to its basic theory,  Homo sapiens as a species moved so rapidly from hunting and gathering to buying food at supermarkets that our genes never caught up. We’re Stone Agers on the inside, built to eat whatever could be plucked from the bushes or clubbed to death on the savanna, but now we’re marooned in a sickening landscape of nachos and pizza. The goal, for Voegtlin and the people he inspired, was to get back to eating whatever it was that our primitive ancestors ate. The challenge was to figure out what exactly appeared on the caveman food pyramid.

Given the patchy nature of Paleolithic evidence, this matter has provoked many disagreements, which began long before the publication of The Stone Age Diet. In his 1913 book, My Life With the Eskimo, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, an Arctic explorer and anthropologist, described how he believed an Inuit community he’d met in Canada’s far North provided a window into the lifestyles and dietary habits of our Stone Age ancestors. Stefansson’s polar adventures made him famous, especially for the all-meat diet he ate while camping in an igloo: seal flipper and whale tongue; raw and boiled caribou; grizzly-bear jerky and polar-bear steaks; blood soup and tallow-dipped ptarmigan feathers; and, on one desperate occasion, his own bootlaces.

[From the November 1945 issue: Vilhjalmur Stefansson reports on the dental benefits of an all-meat diet]

Tales of Stefansson’s gastronomical feats circulated at a moment when Americans were also exploring new kinds of food. The First World War brought meat shortages and a national austerity campaign, launched in 1917, that encouraged “Meatless Tuesdays” and “Porkless Thursdays.” For years, naturalists with the American Museum of Natural History, which funded some of Stefansson’s expeditions, had been arguing that Americans should really eat more whale. During the war, the U.S. government got on board, promoting the consumption of fresh and canned leviathan and explaining that because these sea monsters were mammals, their flesh tasted like beef or venison, not fish. The feds published a bulletin with 32 cetacean recipes, including “Stuffed Roast Whale,” “Whale Croquettes,” and “Corned Porpoise.” And the museum hosted a widely publicized “whale steak luncheon,” which more than one newspaperman described as sweet revenge for poor Jonah.

[Read: I ate whale meat]

Meanwhile, Alexander Graham Bell, the renowned inventor and a co-founder of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, was out with a related plan for solving America’s meat crisis. In a statement published in the Journal of Heredity, Bell suggested that the government should look into the possibility of domesticating manatees. Although Florida lawmakers had recently criminalized the killing of these charismatic animals, which one 1891 children’s-book author had called “as amiable, mild, gentle, playful, kindly a creature as ever drew breath,” Bell noted that the sea cow offered “many points of superiority” over even such a promising candidate for husbandry as the pygmy hippopotamus, which the journal had previously considered. “Dr. Bell wants to see the south dotted with manatee ranches,” The Augusta Herald reported in an article about the idea that included recipes for broiled, stewed, and curried manatee, and explained that the sea cow’s tail was usually pickled and served cold.

This was not a bonkers notion. Manatees had been a coveted food source for the Seminole peoples and for southern Americans extending into even the 20th century. “The fattest, juiciest Tennessee beef is by no means equal to it and I doubt if there is anything in the animal kingdom that is so utterly delicious,” one manatee enthusiast wrote in 1885. Bell’s scheme, presented in a journal devoted to eugenics and geared toward optimizing dietary protein, would later resurface at another moment of food anxiety, when Walter Voegtlin was inventing the Paleo diet in the 1970s.

After training as a doctor and specializing in gastroenterology, Voegtlin had devoted most of his career to trying to find a cure for alcoholism. But on the side he was a nutritional contrarian, arguing in talks that human digestion is better suited to a diet rich in fat and protein than one based on carbohydrates. To prove this point, he cited Stefansson’s tales of Stone Age eating and his own early lab research on dogs.

Voegtlin’s anti-starch opinions spread, at first, on the basis of these lectures. By the 1950s, they were being touted in Prevention, a magazine known for its back-to-nature ethos and openness to vaccine-skeptical views. The Stone Age Diet, his first and only published work on caveman nutrition, did not come out until 1975, just months before his death. Voegtlin saw Mother Nature’s food chain in simple terms: Herbivores eat plants, and carnivores eat herbivores. Humans are in the latter group, with digestive tracts that are “practically identical” to those of dogs, he said. (Voegtlin conceded that omnivores exist, but he argued they are merely “transitional forms.”) But if man is a “pure carnivore,” as Voegtlin claimed, he is flexible as to what kinds of meat ought to go in the tank. Bugs, snails, worms, snakes, leeches, monkeys, lizards, the stomach contents of sharks: All are regarded as delicacies by some human societies, according to the book.

Indeed, for Voegtlin, the future of the species might depend on man’s willingness to broaden his horizons with respect to meat. Writing at a time when concerns about the impending human “population bomb” were widespread, Voegtlin thought the world was not harvesting enough protein to fend off malnutrition. He argued that people might need to start eating up the world’s predators, because they competed with humans for flesh. “There are four thousand tigers left in India and each tiger eats six thousand pounds of meat each year,” Voegtlin noted with alarm. Alligators, crocodiles, lions, tigers, and bears might have to become supper. Ocean predators such as the seal, whale, dolphin, and walrus would be hunted down and made into supermarket steaks. And in the brutal, man-eat-dog world of the book’s imagination, human populations, too, would need to be controlled: Voegtlin proposed that reproduction should be limited to “superior types of individuals” under the watch of an “omnipotent Bureau of World Census.”

As for nature’s mermaid—the gentle, seagrass-chewing sea cow—she might carry on her lineage in water farms, domesticated as a novel form of floating livestock. “This marine mammal, as does its dry land counterpart, eats only vegetation, totally unfit for human consumption,” Voegtlin noted. Sea cows are superior to land cows, Voegtlin suggested, because land cows eat grains, which humans could survive on in a pinch. Since manatees live on baleful sea-salads and don’t deplete the world’s meat supply, they could live alongside humans in peace—until such time as they were ground into meatballs.

Voegtlin’s book did not initially garner much attention. One of its few reviews, in the journal Medical History, described it as full of “opinions that oppose accepted belief and substantiated fact.” Academics who promoted Paleolithic nutrition in the 1980s called for plenty of plant foods in the diet and ignored Voegtlin, perhaps on account of his endorsement of eugenics. But by the time the Paleo world was coalescing online in the ’90s, Voegtlin’s book was cited as a pioneering work. Its message would be channeled through the 2010s as the Paleo lifestyle became associated with zealous meat-eating and an emerging band of popular “meatfluencers.”

But as it turned out, the archaeology would prove Voegtlin wrong: It wasn’t true that Stone Age humans never touched a processed grain. Starch residue found on 30,000-year-old grinding stones indicates that Paleolithic peoples may have eaten bread. Ancient bits of DNA suggest that genes for starch-digesting enzymes might have been proliferating as early as 800,000 years ago, when cave-chefs started roasting primordial potatoes. Marlene Zuk, an evolutionary biologist and the author of a 2013 book that debunked some of Voegtlin’s arguments, recalled how the Paleo community dealt with this evidence that challenged their largely carb-avoidant worldview. “They liked the word tuber,” Zuk told me. “The word tuber was very popular because it sounded more caveman-y.”

[Read: How close are manatees to extinction?]

Even for its time, The Stone Age Diet missed the mark with its sharp dichotomy between herbivores and carnivores (and its bizarre denial of omnivores). These distinctions can be fuzzy: Crocodilians, for example, may eat kumquats and pond apples in the wild, while cows and sheep will snack on baby birds. Even the kindly Florida manatee, connoisseur of bayou seagrass, sometimes flies into a carnivorous rage, snapping up fish and gnashing them in its terrible teeth.

Yet no branch of science has debunked the idea that humans are neglecting lots of opportunities for ingesting animals. Indeed, the notion that we should be eating strange meats has been backed by a range of influential authorities. Voegtlin got his vision of sea-cow cuisine not directly from Bell but from Scientific American, which had proposed that we domesticate not just the manatee but also the “palatable” capybara, and from The Journal of the American Medical Association, which lent its weight to the idea of building enormous blue-whale farms in the Pacific Ocean, fenced in by coral reefs. More recently, advocates of livestock alternatives have zeroed in on smaller animals: In 2013, the United Nations released a report on global food security that argued for the mass cultivation of edible insects. The report noted that various groups have made a habit of consuming beetles, caterpillars, wasps, mealworms, and dragonflies.

I’m not here to suggest that the logic of evidence-based nutrition demands that we consume more manatee meatloaf or chili con capybara or dragonfly dumplings. But there’s something ho-hum about the fact that a norm-breaking MAHA administration, led by a carnivorous health secretary who has boasted that he’s a “very adventurous eater” and will “eat virtually anything,” has stuck so monotonously to beef. It’s not as if beef has been shown to be healthier than any other meat. Examined through a political lens, though, Kennedy’s bovine-forward dietary approach makes perfect sense, Amy Bentley, a food historian, told me. The burger is the quintessential American meal, and beef-related imagery calls to mind the virile cowboys who drove cattle and made America great by filling its larders with sirloin. There’s a resonance between this sentimentality for the Old West and the Paleo-nostalgia that animates the carnivore community, she said, in that both are romantic fantasies about a time when men were unapologetic warriors. “When gender roles are being questioned, there’s often renewed interest in the vitality-giving properties of animal flesh,” Adrienne Bitar, a food scholar who has written about Voegtlin, told me.

Proposals to put manatees or mealworms on the food pyramid would face challenges. On the left, a plan to farm sea cows would enrage conservationists, even though Trichechus manatus has in recent years been downgraded from “endangered” to “threatened.” On the right, the UN’s edible-insect report sparked an “I will not eat the bugs” campaign from skeptics of climate-driven policies. Perhaps that’s why, for all of the MAHA bluster about remaking the American diet, the architects of our new dietary guidelines have turned out to be picky eaters when it comes to meat. We’re all a bit afraid to try new things. That tendency, which may have been with us since the Stone Age, today serves the interests of our cumbersome friends in the Florida Everglades. For now, at least, pickled manatee tail is off the table.

Photographs by Lawren Simmons

The U.S. capital has been outfitted of late with visual trappings that many associate with authoritarianism, such as banners depicting Donald Trump’s face and featuring his slogans. So perhaps it was only a matter of time before the president erected his own Potemkin village: the Great American State Fair, where almost nothing is what it pretends to be. 

Stretching across a large swath of the National Mall, the fair has dozens of pavilions for 56 states and territories and numerous executive-branch departments, in addition to a Ferris wheel, a rodeo, and other displays from companies and organizations, many of them Trump-aligned. It’s advertised by Freedom 250, the White House–created group behind many semiquincentennial events, as a “world-class exposition and modern-day World’s Fair.”

For a president enamored with the gilded and the grand, the exterior of this fair is surprisingly austere. Trompe l’oeil sheets cover slapdash structures lining both sides of the Mall with an illustration of architecture that is supposed to be beaux arts but is so stripped down that it makes the nearby brutalist buildings look practically baroque. A boxy model of Trump’s proposed triumphal arch in the center of the Mall appears as if it could have been designed in Minecraft and ordered from CVS for same-day pickup. 

Perhaps because of this aesthetic of illusions, the earnest state pride evident in some of the pavilions turns out to feel especially delightful. Consider: the Science Museum Oklahoma’s president going on about how hers is “the most surprising state you’ll ever experience,” or the Ohioan dispensing with midwestern cheer state-shaped tattoos and tokens for free Frosties through the end of the year. Here and there, the big, proud personalities of the states shine through (see: Idaho’s potato-sack dress). Together, they nearly instill an appreciation for this eclectic batch of states that have united into a country. But like any sense of patriotism these days, it’s complicated just as quickly. Right as I was about to crack open a bag of potato chips from Michigan, with “Take Me Home, Country Roads” stuck in my head from a karaoke video game in the West Virginia booth, I wandered into the State Department pavilion, where I was offered a paper replica of the limited-edition Trump passport. 

In a certain sense, the Great American State Fair bottles the central tension of federalism: a push and pull between irrepressible state personalities and the federal government. But it’s also not that academic. Put simply, the president is bringing down the mood.

Propaganda has a way of being blissfully unconcerned with material reality, and the state fair is no exception. When I arrived Thursday morning, workers were still assembling fencing, and I spotted bits of metal on the floor in Kentucky. North Carolina had no power. At one point in the afternoon, the “Faith & Family” pavilion—where the booths included the Museum of the Bible, Hillsdale College, and an evangelical-Christian stall labeled The Great Awakening—was entirely in the dark. 

Danny Villanueva, who had worked for a subcontractor on the site, told me while we were waiting in line that he enjoyed what he saw as being a part of history but that the exterior carpentry wasn’t very good. “I see the vision of how this should have been,” he said. 

Several states, including almost all of New England, did not officially show up, citing high costs and, in at least one case, the politicization of the affair, which opened Wednesday night with a Trump rally. Most absentee states received the same treatment: two chairs in front of a photo board showing state highlights, which gave dentist-waiting-room energy. Around midday, a group of disappointed Alaskans emerged from their state’s pavilion with exasperation. A teen named Emily told me that she would have liked to have seen “probably some representation of the nature, because we’re famous for it, and also maybe just, like, something in there, literally anything.” 

Some states that declined the invite had other organizations step in on their behalf. The potential perils of this were apparent in Delaware, where a Caesar Rodney impersonator was manning the booth (the Caesar Rodney Institute was the sponsor). A Founding Father who enslaved hundreds, Rodney has become something of a cause célèbre: His statue was pulled down in 2020 in Delaware, only for it to be remounted this year by the Trump administration in Washington, D.C.’s Freedom Plaza. The impersonator told me that he had come here because his state, in not participating, had politicized the event.

Maybe it was the dizzying experience of meeting the Rodney impersonator, seeing an Abraham Lincoln hologram (in the Illinois booth, run by a local museum), and encountering an AI-generated image of George Washington riding a roller coaster at a beach (in the New Jersey booth, run by Cape May County). Or maybe it was the dehydration (water is $5). But moving among tents in the scorching heat, you can sense your grip on reality starting to slip.  

The farm animals in the rodeo area? Those are real. The life-size cows in multiple state pavilions? Not so much, although you can “milk” at least two of them. In Montana, you can stand beneath an oversize faux-dinosaur rib cage and dig up fake fossils, and then, nearby, you can look at an actual Mesozoic fossil in North Dakota. The Department of Agriculture tent is giving out edible oranges—but Florida isn’t. No, those ones on its fake tree must be plastic. Ohio brought a real-life governor: Mike DeWine was there in the flesh. Alabama, meanwhile, had a printed cutout of its own chief executive, but if you spent enough time at the fair, you’d be forgiven for saying hello.

Trump’s renovation projects have chewed up Washington in recent weeks, but they’ve had the air of a publicity apparatus puttering out. It’s hard to spin a green Reflecting Pool. The fair, with its Trump trinkets and replica arch, is also what you see: a dollar-store version of the grandiosity that Trump hopes will be his legacy. 

 At its best moments, when the states have space to do their thing, the Great American State Fair feels a little like looking at a brochure inside a strip-mall travel agency: Suddenly, you want to get away to Arizona very badly. But you can’t tell whether it’s because the highly saturated photos are really that persuasive—or whether you’d just rather be anywhere else.  

Charity Majors, writing about how high-performing engineering teams are dealing with the transition from pre-AI to AI-native development: AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy.

This is not a situation where one side is right and the other is huffing paint. (O, that it were!) Each side is grappling with a real, alarming, escalating threat to the company’s existence, and the closer they look the more (again: real, alarming) evidence they find.

The enthusiasts are not wrong. We are starting to see real, non-imaginary, discontinuous leaps in capabilities from teams that lean in hard to working with AI. And this does not feel like a normal technology cycle where you can wait for the dust to settle; teams that sit this out while competitors are hustling could be out of business before the dust settles. That’s a real, existential threat.

The skeptics are also not wrong. When you ship code faster than engineers can read it, in domains where nobody has full context, you are making withdrawals from a trust account that took years to build. Reliability degrades, institutional knowledge evaporates. You end up with systems nobody understands, products burbling into incoherence, and on-call rotations that grind people up and spit them out. That is ALSO a real existential threat.

She goes on to say that “the wins and costs are happening to two different groups of people. There is no natural feedback loop.” Interesting read.

Tags: artificial intelligence · Charity Majors · programming