timelets

Costco Wholesale Corp. joined a fast-growing list of businesses suing the Trump administration to ensure eligibility for refunds if the US Supreme Court strikes down the president’s signature global tariffs policy.

The nation’s biggest warehouse club chain is among dozens of companies to file lawsuits in a US trade court since late October challenging President Donald Trump’s use of an economic emergency powers law to impose the levies, according to court records. It’s one of the biggest corporate players to jump into a fight largely driven this year by small businesses and Democratic state officials.

White House spokesperson Kush Desai said in a statement that, “The economic consequences of the failure to uphold President Trump’s lawful tariffs are enormous and this suit highlights that fact. The White House looks forward to the Supreme Court’s speedy and proper resolution of this matter.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-01/costco-joins-companies-suing-for-refunds-if-trump-s-tariffs-fall

“Books also had a “shelf life.” In a seventeenth-century bookseller’s shop, they could wait patiently for readers to come and purchase them. But staged plays were big events that happened at set times. They required an immense investment of both funds and labor: a paid company of actors and a theater, which must be built, purchased, or rented. They also needed to bring in the broadest cross-section of society if they were going to meet expenses. This difference in the technology and marketing of these two narrative media has only grown with time. ”

-- Abbott, H. Porter. “The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge Introductions to Literature).”

“...once revealed, the action of the story of the murder of Councilman Stubbs can be described in “terms of a linear chain: A->B->C->D (where D is the Death of Stubbs).
...
Characters are, usually, harder to understand than actions. They are themselves some of narrative’s most challenging gaps.
...
..we have to move from a horizontal to a vertical analysis, descending into the character to construct a plausible sense of her complexity.”

“The model, then, for the construct“tion of character in fictional narrative might look something like this:

reader/viewer + narrative -> reader/viewer’s construction of a character

As soon as it rolls out the software update this fall, Apple will instantly make the AirPods Pro 2 into a medical device, essentially turning every pair of the company’s top-selling headphones into over-the-counter hearing aids.
...
75% of people with hearing loss let it go untreated, according to the Apple Hearing Study, a project run with the University of Michigan. In case you don’t trust medical statistics from a trillion-dollar company trying to sell you something, the audiologists I consulted told me that number sounded right.

BEIJING—Microsoft is asking hundreds of employees in its China-based cloud-computing and artificial-intelligence operations to consider transferring outside the country, as tensions between Washington and Beijing mount around the critical technology.

...700 to 800 people, who are involved in machine learning and other work related to cloud computing, one of the people said.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/microsoft-asks-hundreds-of-china-based-ai-staff-to-relocate-amid-u-s-china-tensions-b626ff8c

...dynamic processes give rise to particular growth patterns: branching out whilst foraging (to maximize coverage of territory) and forming networks once nodes have been established (to strengthen connections and facilitate the transfer of information). Branching is a fundamental strategy within myriad biological organisms and physical phenomena, from the bifurcation of river deltas, lightning strikes, tree roots and branches, to mycelial networks and in our own bodily systems including blood vessel networks and the cross channelling of neural pathways. Branching facilitates ‘the transmission and parsing of information, no less than the transfer and dissipation of energy’ and, according to philosopher Stephen Shaviro, ‘is an essential process of Nature’ (Shaviro, 2016: 220).

Drawing Processes of Life, 2024.

This past week, Musk called on his echoverse to lobby the Senate not to pass an aid package for Ukraine, in the latest example of the billionaire’s speaking out about the conflict that is dragging toward its second full year.