Epicene Cyborg

As drug prices soar, health care CEOs made $2.6 billion in 2018.

The high prevalence of intimate partner violence against women (IPVAW) in countries with high levels of gender equality has been defined as the “Nordic paradox.”

Don’t Let People Enjoy Things.

America’s Achilles’ Heel: the Mississippi River’s Old River Control Structure.

Why is it so unfathomable for someone, specifically a person in power, to admit when they don’t have the answer?

If The Foolish Democratic Establishment Nominates Biden, A Dinosaur, They Will Be Handing Trump A Second Term.

Biden’s Climate Adviser Earned $1 Million From Natural Gas Company.

Pangea raised $180m to buy up low-rent Chicago properties “to help poor people,” and then created the most brutally efficient eviction mill in Chicago history.

‘I’ve become very isolated’: the aftermath of near-doomed QF72. A Qantas captain’s near-death experience on the flight deck of an Airbus A330 left psychological scars and deep concern about the role of automation at 37,000 feet. Bad writing but still interesting.

Google Online Security Blog: New research: How effective is basic account hygiene at preventing hijacking. Note that much-maligned SMS is still very effective.

Children lose confidence in their potential to “be scientists,” but not in their capacity to “do science.”

The global internet is disintegrating. What comes next?

Google Uses Gmail To Track a History of Things You Buy — and It’s Hard To Delete.

Joe Biden would be a disaster for climate change.

Bleeding John Bolton Stumbles Into Capitol Building Claiming That Iran Shot Him.

A Waste of 1,000 Research Papers. Decades of early research on the genetics of depression were built on nonexistent foundations. How did that happen?

atelic.

“Shut up and go clean some toilets, you peasant, while I tell the world how much I suffer on your behalf!” is the progressive position towards immigrants. The truth stings.

‘Medicare for All’ Could Kill Two Million Jobs, and That’s O.K. Reform has a cost. But the point of a health care system is to treat patients, not to buttress the economy. If nothing changes, it’s not reform. All reform has adverse consequences.

Jeff Bezos Dreams of a 1970s Future.

Making your kids go vegan can mean jail time in Belgium. Should be the case everywhere. Or at least very large (scaled to income) fines.

Rich people in San Francisco mad that they have to look at people living on boats.

Protect Solar System From Mining ‘Gold Rush’, Say Scientists.

Democracy’s Dilemma. Democracies rely on the free exchange of ideas and information, but that freedom can also be weaponized to erode democratic debate. How can democratic societies protect—and protect themselves from—the free flow of digital information?

A thread on why Trump decision to put Huawei on the entity list is a very big deal indeed.

What to Do When You’re a Country in Crisis. Nice takedown of Jared Diamond’s BS.

A Re-Reading of “The Feminine Mystique.”

What It’s Like for Blue-Collar Guys Who Become White-Collar Later in Life. ‘I bust my ass for 20 years, and now that I sit on that same ass all day, people tend to believe I am smarter than what I used to be.’

‘Wood wide web’—the underground network of microbes that connects trees—mapped for first time.

Abortion Is Morally Good.

Single neutron star merger supplied half the Solar System’s plutonium.

How inequality makes us poorer.

apanage.

The SAT’s Bogus ‘Adversity Score.’

Our Fury Over Abortion Was Dismissed for Decades As Hysterical.

Earth System Sensitivity: On the Brink of the Anthropocene.

How glass skyscrapers took over the world–and why we need to stop building them.

As Planet Discoveries Pile Up, a Gap Appears in the Pattern.

States with the worst anti-abortion laws also have the worst infant mortality rates.

We see exceptional intelligence as a blessing. So why, asks Maggie Fergusson, are so many brilliant children miserable misfits?

Abortions Should Be Commonplace And Guilt-Free.

Fewer millennials are making it into the middle class.

Ergodicity, jail, and time scales.

In the Future, You’ll Work, Exercise, Sleep, and Die in the Same Building. This is what’s become of the American dream. Think this is very likely for most. It matches fairly well both the liberal and conservative “utopia.”

Imagine if you were really into the group Swervedriver in the mid-’90s but by 2019 someone was on CNBC telling you that Swervedriver represented, I don’t know, 10 percent of global economic growth, outpacing returns in oil and lumber. That’s the tech industry. Good analogy. The toys became monsters.

We’re Stumbling Into a Surveillance State.

Bedbugs evolved more than 100 million years ago—and walked the earth with T. rex.

With the biodiversity crisis quite possibly surpassing climate change as the greatest threat to humanity, we explore why many do not seem to realise the urgency, and reveal why this year is the crucial time for a plan ‘B’.

Europeans are free traders now? That’s rich.

When American Capitalism Meant Equality.

The Country That Exiled McKinsey.

City life damages mental health in ways we’re just starting to understand. Cities are basically dystopias.

Capturing single photons to explore fundamental physics and quantum information science.

They did their time. They regained the vote. Florida is taking it away again.

Why the Government Pays Billions to People Who Claim Injury by Vaccines. A little-known deal protects drug companies in the U.S. from being sued—and feeds conspiracy theories in the process.

To block homeless shelters, activists use California environmental law.

Millennials are Less Healthy than Gen X Members Were at the Same Age.

Resistance Exercise Training as a Primary Countermeasure to Age-Related Chronic Disease.

Identity politics is a camouflage to cover up the economic warfare waged by elites.

To Move Is to Thrive. It’s in Our Genes.

A Controversial Virus Study Shows Flaws in How Science Is Done.

Before Ethiopian Crash, Boeing Resisted Pilots’ Calls for Aggressive Steps on 737 Max.

NASA’s TESS mission spots Earth-size exoplanet.

The Corporate World Has Its Own Inequality Problem. With 10% of the companies making 80% of the money, those in the middle get squeezed from both ends.

Why Do Experiments Make People Uneasy?

Multinationals, Offshoring and the Decline of U.S. Manufacturing.

The thing about Uber is…they really do have no model for achieving profitability.

A single, moderate workout may immediately change how our brains function and how well we recognize common names and similar information, according to a promising new study of exercise, memory and aging. The study adds to growing evidence that exercise can have rapid effects on brain function and also that these effects could accumulate and lead to long-term improvements in how our brains operate and we remember.

Exercise, not vitamin pills, may help prevent dementia.

We Have No Idea How Scary Our Abortion Future Will Get.

The result will be to substitute the social contract, where people negotiate relationships and meanings with each other, with the uncontract, where relationships between humans are ruled by an algorithm.

AT&T CEO: We’ll pull TV shows, movies from rivals as we launch new Netflix-like service. Was told this couldn’t happen. Happened.

Leaked audio outs Boeing executives for ignoring pilots demands on 737 Max.

Noncompete clauses trap #MeToo victims in abusive workplaces. The FTC should ban them. Yet another reason non-competes should not exist.

Adobe Warns Customers of Potential Legal Action for Using Older Versions of Creative Cloud Apps.

Stalking the True Self Through the Jungles of Authenticity: Problems, Contradictions, Inconsistencies, Disturbing Findings—and a Possible Way Forward.

The more machines learn, the less we shall grasp.

Pholcid spider facts.

When you can be fired from your menial job because someone reported your Tweets to your employer, we are now all living the actor’s life.

Locking Eyes with a Monster. Staring at somebody’s face for ten minutes may give you nightmares. What gives me nightmares is that I am not yet in possession of my own planet.

Meta-analysis: Changing implicit biases did neither affect explicit biases nor actual behavior.

Reality Exists.

Surviving Despair in the Great Extinction. One million species of plants and animals are heading toward annihilation, and it’s our fault. How can we possibly live with that truth? We are the best pest.

The cul-de-sac isn’t isolated, though. It illuminates the triumph of automobiles, with all the global violence their preeminence requires.

Former Boeing controls engineer confirms that 737 MAX switches were indeed modified in a manner that kept pilot from disabling the MCAS system separate from own controls. Pilots were not informed and Ethiopian pilot tried to use switches in vain.

Patients with primary care clinic appointment times later in the day were less likely to be ordered for and receive guideline recommended cancer screening.

New study is first to show how two types of sand can behave like light and heavy liquids, shedding light on geological processes from mudslides to volcanos and potentially enabling new technologies from pharmaceutical production to carbon capture.

The amount of money Boeing Co. and its insurers will pay to the families of those who perished aboard two doomed jets will be dictated in part by one particularly grim calculation: How long did the victims know they were plunging to their deaths. Why is the Boeing CEO still CEO and still free?

The staff had been fending off closure hour by hour for the past several months, ever since debt for the 15-bed hospital surpassed $1 million and its outside ownership group entered into bankruptcy, beginning a crisis in Fairfax that is becoming familiar across much of rural America.

Ideas ride us into battle like warhorses. We can witness, participate in, and even lead these battles, but their true meaning eludes us. We don’t really know where ideas come from, nor how to control them.

Silicon Valley makes everything worse: Four industries that Big Tech has ruined.

Black, Hot ‘Superionic’ Ice May Be Nature’s Most Common Form of Water.

Beto’s Long History of Failing Upward.

Cats rival dogs on many tests of social smarts. Dogs are terrible.

Population Bomb Fizzles But It Won’t Save the Planet.

Cooking As A Service.

U.S. pets are responsible for 30% of the environmental impact of meat eating.

Smear frames.

Nearly half of federal assistance programs, like “food stamps” and Medicaid, now go to the middle class. Which means there really isn’t a middle class anymore.

Fuck Electability. Biden will lose to Trump.

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