Epicene Cyborg

Google backtracks on Chrome modifications that would have crippled ad blockers. Google changes stance on upcoming Chrome Manifest V3 changes as benchmark shows they lied about performance hit.

Participants able to complete more than 40 push-ups were associated with a significant reduction in incident cardiovascular disease event risk compared with those completing fewer than 10 push-ups.

“Race To The Top” education funding showed every bad tendency of contemporary liberalism….

Time to Panic. The planet is getting warmer in catastrophic ways. And fear may be the only thing that saves us.

Uncovering a “smoking gun” of biological aging.

The highly realistic nobody: Researchers take fake images to another level. I wish Baudrillard were still alive.

Still Haunted by the Shadow of the Greater Recession….

U.S. City Transit.

Despite public pledges, leading scientific journals still allow statistical misconduct and refuse to correct it.

The magical thinking of guys who love logic.

What would happen if Facebook were turned off? Imagine a world without the social network.

New NASA Mission Will Look Back at Billions of Years of Cosmic History.

Simply saying ‘no’ to its headquarters isn’t enough – Amazon should be investigated for abusing monopoly power.

Surprise findings turn up the temperature on the study of vernalization.

Amazon, Google use secret tactics to expand headquarters such as HQ2 and reap millions in tax breaks.

AI can write just like me. Brace for the robot apocalypse. Another thing that could “never happen” just happened.

The replication crisis may also be a theory crisis.

It’s hard to be selective when considering all of the ways in which American public discourse has gotten worse on account of the 2016 election, but my vote for the worst change is the now-constant recourse to grand conspiracies to explain (across the political spectrum) failures or bad behavior.

This Retailer Bankruptcy Will Lead to the Largest Liquidation by Store Count in the US.

Amazon Will Pay Whopping $0 In Federal Taxes On $11.2 Billion Profits.

The Nuclear Option. As atomic power fades, a new band of supporters argues that it is still our best source of clean, reliable, and—yes—safe electricity. Plants with newer tech are much safer. I’m for nuclear 100%.

Yet that very shrinkage of the power to devastate is precisely what makes this nuclear weapon potentially the most dangerous ever manufactured. Fulfilling the Trump administration’s quest for nuclear-war-fighting “flexibility,” it isn’t designed as a deterrent against another country launching its nukes; it’s designed to be used.

The friendly extortioner takes it all.

Huge study finds professors’ attitudes affect students’ grades.

‘Mother’ and ‘father’ to be banned on forms as French schools go gender-neutral. Neolib negation of intimate relations. Nothing to do with “equality.”

Even without explicit collusion, pricing algorithms converge on price-fixing strategies.

How Prisons Serve Capitalism.

Netflix Posted Biggest-Ever Profit in 2018 and Paid $0 in Taxes.

Society will be much improved by loosening the stranglehold of top universities on the education of elites. But how?

Damn, it feels good to be a white-collar worker. Very good essay.

Zillow Wants to Flip Your House.

When Evolution Works Against the Future: Disgust’s Contributions to the Acceptance of New Food Technologies. But I thought humans didn’t evolve?

No Link Between Violent Video Games and Increased Aggression in Teens, Study Finds.

The Haitian dollar.

Is this one black enough? Is this one feminine enough? Is this one guilty of cultural appropriation? This kind of cannibalism, the people of the left eating their own, is a good reason why liberals frequently end up fielding their second team and thus losing elections to drooling idiots, stumblebums and racists.

No, the problem isn’t “bad coders.”

An earthquake in Turkey lasted 50 days, but no one felt it.

Emotional burnout is fueled by envy. You probably can’t usher in the revolution we need to fix our exhausting reality, but you can definitely log the hell off.

Amazon and Google ask for non-stop data from smart home devices.

A record 7 million Americans are 3 months behind on their car payments, a red flag for the economy.

The Golden Rule For Judging HealthCare Reform.

Stupid Medicaid tricks: Utah figures out how to spend more to cover fewer people. As long as it punishes the dirty poor, who cares, right?

The Women Who Contributed to Science but Were Buried in Footnotes. In a new study, researchers uncovered female programmers who made important but unrecognized contributions to genetics.

Aluminum may be key to making exosolar systems with water worlds.

The Wealthiest and Poorest Counties in Every U.S. State.

The Deadly Worst-Case Scenario for America’s Xanax Obsession.

2-Billion-Year-Old Squiggles Could Be the Earliest Evidence of a Mobile Life Form. The squiggles that wiggle.

Lufthansa sues passenger who missed his flight.

So how did Trump finally get the liberal corporate media to stop calling him a fascist? He did that by acting like a fascist (i.e., like a “normal” president). Which is to say he did the bidding of the deep state goons and corporate mandarins that manage the global capitalist empire … the smiley, happy, democracy-spreading, post-fascist version of fascism we live under.

The liberal establishment has been endlessly bleating about the need to elevate women of color … and it turns out they actually meant they just wanted women with dark skin who will advance the status quo of the white imperialist patriarchy.

A 10% increase in the proportion of ultraprocessed food consumption was statistically significantly associated with a 14% higher risk of all-cause mortality.

Ideological uncertainty covaries with reduced levels of political engagement and participation in the 2012 and 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.

After promising health care execs that Medicare for All was dead, Pelosi’s team plans toothless pharma deal.

Climate of North American cities will shift hundreds of miles in one generation.

Our obsession with infant growth charts may be fuelling childhood obesity.

The political case for more free time. Some people are burnt out while others are simply exploited. We can organize around the shared interest of making our free time actually free.

A hedge fund’s ‘mercenary’ strategy: Buy newspapers, slash jobs, sell the buildings.

Scientists Are Totally Rethinking Animal Cognition. What science can tell us about how other creatures experience the world. Well, it’s a start. It’s been obvious for many years that science has been hilariously wrong about animal cognition due to anthropomorphization fears.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is under fire because she’s right.

“Having that access to meat equally across economic ladders is a part of democracy in America,” Horowitz said. “Critics of the food system need to think about inequality very much and the way inequality maps onto food choices.”

Captivating algorithms: Recommender systems as traps.

How the Electoral Map would look if only _____ voted.

Why We Can’t Fight Climate Change without an Intact Boreal Forest.

Here’s Why So Many Americans Feel Cheated By Their Student Loans. A social and financial divide is forming — between those who have student debt, and those who do not — that will have ramifications for decades to come.

Bremermann’s limit.

Insects could vanish within a century at current rate of decline, says global review. You 30-and-unders are so very fucked.

50 Years In Tech. Part 16: Be Fundraising Misadventures. I miss BeOS every day. The only good OS ever made.

Revolt of the Rich.

Privacy is a commons.

The Decline of Historical Thinking.

Elegy for a vent in a Hawaiian volcano: It blew for 35 years. It just ceased.

Oral Insulin.

The Reason Some Hyperlocal Languages Survive.

The skills gap is fixed, because there was no skills gap.

The Case for Transmissible Alzheimer’s Grows.

‘Diet drugs’ suppress mosquitoes’ thirst for blood.

Amazon’s Home Security Company Is Turning Everyone Into Cops.

What insects can tell us about the origins of consciousness.

The story behind the Colossus photo.

Google’s Sidewalk Labs Plans to Package and Sell Location Data on Millions of Cellphones.

Norway Is Far More Socialist Than Venezuela.

If Property Rights Were Real, Climate-Destroying Companies Would Be Sued Out Of Existence.

How Austerity, and a Cowardly Ruling Class, Brought About Brexit. Brexit Britain is an object lesson in how a modern nation fails. But, but, racists! Racists against white people, who are also white!

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez masterfully exposed America’s broken campaign finance system. Other than Bernie, she’s the best thing to happen to politics in a while.

Drug companies are sitting on generics—43% of recently approved aren’t for sale.

HP’s ink DRM instructs your printer to ignore the ink in your cartridge when you cancel your subscription.

At the behest and with the aid of corporate giants people police each other into the kind of ideological compliance that traditional totalitarian regimes could only dream of.

Don’t Tar Fasting by those of Normal or High Weight with the Brush of Anorexia.

The Cost of Trade With China.

Nancy Pelosi Signals Support For Environmental Causes By Placing Green New Deal Directly Into Recycling Bin. This is true news, not really satire.

If you’ve ever had a lesson in how completely you can be wiped out by the vagaries of somebody else’s attention, it stays with you.

New images of the distant Ultima Thule object have surprised scientists.

A Water Crisis Is Growing In A Place You’d Least Expect It.

Inside Wisconsin’s Disastrous $4.5 Billion Deal With Foxconn.

Social Welfare, Income Inequality, and Tax Progressivity: A Primer on Modern Economic Theory and Evidence.

Phones Are Trash. They’re disgusting and stupid and slowly murdering us all.

Active-Shooter Drills Are Tragically Misguided. There’s scant evidence that they’re effective. They can, however, be psychologically damaging—and they reflect a dismaying view of childhood.

The case for a 4-day workweek.

Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless Broadband Than Countries Without It.

The DDOS attack on the American consciousness.

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