Daily Bafflements

• Progress in the manufacture of flying cars is agonizingly slow! One Massachusetts company has announced it might take another few years of testing miniature scale models in the MIT Wright Brothers wind tunnel “to measure drag, lift and thrust forces while simulating hovering flight, transitioning to forward flight and full forward flight.” Well, we’re jealous. Meanwhile David Graeber’s salvo “Of  Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit,” from Baffler no. 19, has a few years’ air-mileage in it yet.

• Lay down your hopes. “We’re at that stage, where our expectations have outrun the reality of the technology,” said John Markoff in conversation with Edge. “I’ve been thinking about Silicon Valley at a plateau, and maybe the end of the line . . .When the conversation turns to Uber for ‘x,’ you can tell there we’re out of ideas, that people are basically just trying to iterate and get lucky.”

• In contributing editor Heather Havrilesky’s salvo “Apocalypse Soon,” from The Baffler’s current issue, she raises the fact “data mining is one giant, thriving, multibillion-dollar exercise in the shared, worldwide suspension of disbelief.” Cue the Ashley Madison hack, in light of which Heather asks, in New York Magazine: “Do we really want to live in a world where no one is allowed to make mistakes?”

• Today in Billionaires: cave-style murder cellar, book-lite library . . .  The self-proclaimed “No. 1 King of All Fun” is moving out.