Epicene Cyborg

The longer one spends on Twitter, adrift among the consciousness of others, the easier it becomes to lose any sense of self, afraid that abhorrent ideas might rewire your mind.

America has a bad case of poverty denialism.

Not naming mass killers is generally a good idea, but not at the expense of looking it in the face.

The federal minimum wage sets a record — for not rising.

U.S. Workforce Recovery.

That Study About the Health Benefits of Nature Comes With an Important Caveat.

This Father’s Day, dads need listen to why their daughters are so angry — and join the fight.

We are told that we are an irrational tangle of biases, to be nudged any which way. Does this claim stand to reason?

If you dare come at me about banning straws, I will throw you into the sun cannon. I’m disabled, I’m crippled, I need disposable plastic straws.

Man Annoyed At Being Mistaken For Employee Just Because He Driving Forklift Through Store. Hate it when that happens.

Astronomers Detected Signs of Our Milky Way Colliding With Another Galaxy.

The Things We’ve Lost in the Streaming Era. There was intangible value in the tangible.

a mystery to me is how anyone less rich than Scrooge McDuck is not aware that our health care system – even when it basically works, even when it basically pays for what you need – is a nightmare

The ultra-rich have no redeeming social value.

2014 marked the end of the innocent internet. It was the last time you could say “that’s just online, it doesn’t matter” and be taken seriously.

How Cars Transformed Policing. Before the mass adoption of the car, most communities barely had a police force and citizens shared responsibility for enforcing laws. Then the car changed everything.

An enzymatic pathway in the human gut microbiome that converts A to universal O type blood.

Study Finds Nearly 400 Medical Devices, Procedures And Practices That Are Ineffective.

Software below the poverty line. Open source has become a grift for large companies to obtain free labor — all is corrupted by neolib capitalist logic.

The most fundamental system we have to quantify the importance of scientific research is broken at its core, a new study reveals – and all it took was a single punctuation mark.

The Fish Egg That Traveled Through a Swan’s Gut, Then Hatched. These fish turn up in many surprising location, but this was one place scientists didn’t expect to find them.

Content Moderation Is Impossible: You Can’t Expect Moderators To Understand Satire Or Irony. Most people don’t understand satire or irony in general.

16 fun applications of the pigeonhole principle.

Facial aging trajectories: A common shape pattern in male and female faces is disrupted after menopause.

Despite popular beliefs that self-esteem plays a causal role in a wide range of both positive and negative social behaviors, research shows that it actually predicts very little beyond mood and some types of initiative.

Research uncovers elusive process essential to plant greening.

Five Lessons from History.

Why Housing Policy Feels Like Generational Warfare. To Millennials, at least. Because it is generational warfare.

States Aren’t Even Trying to Reduce Traffic Deaths.

In Stores, Secret Bluetooth Surveillance Tracks Your Every Move.

The folks who chant “diversity is our strength” tend to believe that diversity means being surrounded by people who look different but are identical to you in everything else. One of the most accurate sentences I’ve read recently; describes 99% of fellow liberals.

The technology industry is rife with bottlenecks. The US-China tech cold war is making companies more aware of them than ever.

Why We Need a Standard Definition of the Suburbs.

America Is Stuck With a $400 Billion Stealth Fighter That Can’t Fight. If we must have warplanes, we need more like the A-10 and less like this piece of junk.

In rural Iowa feud, sheriff won’t honor small town’s arrests.

The Personal Finance Industry Is a Scam.

America’s Job Listings Have Gone Off the Deep End.

The question we need to ask is not whether our data is safe, but why there is suddenly so much of it that needs protecting. The problem with the dragon, after all, is not its stockpile stewardship, but its appetite.

The State of the Canadian Debt Slaves, and How They Compare to the American Debt Slaves.

Credit Scores Could Soon Get Even Creepier and More Biased. Credit scores based on AI and non-traditional data such as your social media profile could usher in a whole new way for banks to discriminate.

The rise in resistant bugs is cloaked in widespread and chronic secrecy.

A Duplex, a Triplex and a Fourplex Can Cut a Block’s Carbon Impact 20%. The carbon savings from ‘middle housing’ are voluntary, self-financing and immense. So why are they illegal?

The Changing Structure of American Innovation: Some Cautionary Remarks for Economic Growth.

Spotify’s enormous access to mood-based data is a pillar of its value to brands and advertisers, allowing them to target ads on Spotify by moods and emotions. Further, since 2016, Spotify has shared this mood data directly with the world’s biggest marketing and advertising firm. Anyone who uses anything like this is doing a foolish thing.

Baby pterodactyls could fly from birth.

Amazon’s Ring Doorbells Creating Surveillance Network for Police.

Drooling Imbecile Rocks Back And Forth In Delight While Watching Arby’s Clap Back At Burger King On Twitter.

At-a-glance map of current planetary exploration spacecraft.

The long-awaited upgrade to the US weather forecast model is here.

A Close Look at Newborn Planets Reveals Hints of Infant Moons.

So Much for Worshipping Meritocracy.

Planet is entering ‘new climate regime’ with ‘extraordinary’ heat waves intensified by global warming, study says.

The Legacy of Amazon HQ2: Rebellion Against Corporate Welfare.

The war to free science. How librarians, pirates, and funders are liberating the world’s academic research from paywalls.

Half of Americans Are Effectively Poor Now. What The? America’s Collapsing Because it’s the World’s First Poor Rich Country.

We are in a world where moralistic mobs gather on social media and rise like a storm, falling upon newsrooms in an overwhelming blow. This requires immediate counter-measures by publishers, leaving no room for ponderation or meaningful discussions. Twitter is a place for furor, not debate. The most outraged voices tend to define the conversation, and the angry crowd follows in.

Anger at Big Tech Unites Noodle Pullers and Code Writers.

The notion of knowledge doesn’t in fact pick out anything important. It’s a crude concept we have inherited from our prehistoric ancestors, and it positively handicaps us in our dealings with the modern world.

These arguments over Smith’s ideas and identity are not new. His complicated reputation today is the consequence of a long history of fighting to claim his intellectual authority.

Letter of marque.

Boeing’s new ‘797’ could be built to fly with just one pilot on board. What could ever go wrong with that?

The fishing cats of Colombo.

The areas of the US that are more exposed to import competition have lost manufacturing jobs and have become politically more polarised and conservative, and trade shocks or technology shocks account for employment losses and for the rise of populism and anti-immigration sentiment in Europe.

World Migration Report 2018.

Female nurse who played crucial role in IVF ignored on plaque. Despite a senior colleague’s protests, Jean Purdy’s name was not included on memorial.

New study dramatically narrows the search for advanced life in the universe. I would not be so certain about this, but still interesting.

Opera, Brave, Vivaldi to ignore Chrome’s anti-ad-blocker changes, despite shared codebase. They must do this or no one — including me — would ever use their products again.

World’s Largest Plant Survey Reveals Alarming Extinction Rate.

I know I’ve said this before, but I loathe the use of the word privilege in intersectionalism. You tell some white male working class guy that he’s privileged and he shuts down immediately.

Here’s what Warren understands about the economy that the Democratic pack does not. Warren bears down on economic hardship & inequity forcing Biden to walk back his own record on Hyde & media shrugs.

Save Our Food From the Seed Barons.

Obituaries for the Recently Canceled.

To Evade Pre-Prohibition Drinking Laws, New Yorkers Created the World’s Worst Sandwich.

It’s cold in the Information Age.

The NYT dropped a serious piece of crap on Sunday based on a flawed premise about responsibility for (and, concurrently, solutions to) climate change.

An Evolutionary Perspective on Why Food Overconsumption Impairs Cognition.

A Strange Blight.

The True Story of The Holocaust Train Rescued From The Heart of Darkness – Friday, April 13th, 1945.

Against car supremacy.

Venus is Earth’s evil twin — and space agencies can no longer resist its pull. Once a water-rich Eden, the hellish planet could reveal how to find habitable worlds around distant stars.

Dietary Protein Quantity, Quality, and Exercise Are Key to Healthy Living: A Muscle-Centric Perspective Across the Lifespan.

Fixing Your Work Environment Will Not Fix Your Life. Pocket computers, overbearing bosses and the Protestant work ethic conspire to blur the lines between your job and your existence. It’s time to fight back.

Printers will always be terrible.

How Politicians and Scholars Turned Against Big Tech.

Media blockade on progressives is helping rig the Democratic primaries again.

Universal health care – in whatever flavor one envisions – is a popular idea and Democrats had success in 2018 with many congressional candidates who emphasized it. So it’s extra puzzling why the national leadership is so timid about embracing it.

The Wonderful World of Free Market Drugs.

Why Public Spaces Are Critical Social Infrastructure.

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