Epicene Cyborg

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April 5, 2020

Soixante-huitard.

In the American South, a Perfect Storm Is Gathering. In states with many uninsured citizens, few hospitals and leaders who have not required citizens to stay home, a disaster is looming.

Sneering While the South Is Dying. From Georgia to Florida, the malice and incompetence of Republican leadership will get people killed. Save your stereotypes.

Disinvestment Made Our Cities a Powder Keg in a Pandemic.

Building the Perfect Profanity.

43% of small businesses say they’ll be forced to close permanently if they don’t get help soon, survey says.

Inoculating the world may mean reviving old curbs on patents.

In Italy, Going Back to Work May Depend on Having the Right Antibodies.

Best Evidence Yet for Midsized Black Holes Found by Hubble.

April 4, 2020

Week Two of the Collapse of the Labor Market.

How much space would it take to store every word ever said?

This Venezuelan Patrol Ship Sunk Itself After Ramming A Cruise Liner With A Reinforced Hull.

Another way coronavirus will make Americans’ lives worse in the long term: More guns.

Why Western Elites Are So Incompetent And What The Consequences Are.

Does relativity lie at the source of quantum exoticism?

Yoko Tawada: ‘Language is a Living Thing.’

We Can Only Dream of the Stimulus Packages Other Countries Are Passing. From Germany to Canada to Korea, bailout cash is going to those who actually need it most — and who can actually help their flagging economies. The US is a failed state.

They made you pay for your chains.

April 3, 2020

As with any other poison, viruses are usually deadlier in larger amounts.

As Coronavirus Surges, ‘Medicare for All’ Support Hits 9-Month High.

Auto insurers are collecting billions in extra profit as Americans shelter in place.

Washington State Commandeers Bankrupt Rural Hospital.

The Coronavirus May Be a Tipping Point for Labor.

Frontier prepares for bankruptcy, regrets failure to install enough fiber. Frontier said it lost customers due to “significant under-investment in fiber.”

The era of peak globalisation is over. For those of us not on the front line, clearing the mind and thinking how to live in an altered world is the task at hand.

It’s a good thing we eliminated polio in the 1950s because there’s no way in hell we could eliminate it under the 21st century health economics conventional wisdom.

Coronavirus mutation rate is good for vaccine development.

The fight against the coronavirus has paralyzed society and the economy. Lockdown measures are fine for the short term, but they threaten to rapidly destroy the economy and erode our existing social order.

If we examine the countries that have responded best to COVID-19 (especially, the small Asian nations of the Pacific coast), we see that the factor that distinguishes them is competence.

The Military Knew Years Ago That a Coronavirus Was Coming. The Pentagon warned the White House about a shortage of ventilators, face masks, and hospital beds in 2017—but the Trump administration did nothing.

This hard truth about the mortgage markets isn’t being told.

I’ve asked to work remotely for years. It’s painful to watch companies finally comply.

Where America Didn’t Stay Home Even as the Virus Spread.

Wall Street Had Cut 68,000 Jobs and Received Trillions in Emergency Loans Prior to COVID-19 Anywhere in the World. Indeed they did. Few people know this.

The more you change, the less you feel.

The Average New Car Loan Is Now Over 70 Months Because You People Have Gone Mad.

April 2, 2020

The Relief Package Ushers In Trump’s Planned Economy.

A call to honesty in pandemic modeling.

40% of N.Y. Tenants May Not Pay Rent This Month. What Happens Then?

Post-Lockdown New Normal: Many Brick & Mortar Stores Will Not Reopen, CMBS will Default, Mess to Ensue.

As job losses accelerate, tenants across the country organize rent strikes. This is going to get ugly. Uglier.

How to be Curious Instead of Contrarian About COVID-19: Eight Data Science Lessons From ‘Coronavirus Perspective.’

Consistently, the only predictor of positive behavior change (e.g., social distancing, improved hand hygiene) was fear of COVID-19, with no effect of politically-relevant variables.

This Pandemic Is Not Your Vacation.

Bootleggers and Baptists.

The hole in the middle: 16 TV shows whose lead characters are their least interesting.

Teachers Urge Government To Reopen Schools Before Students Learn To Think For Themselves.

U.S. manufacturers see biggest plunge in new orders and employment in 11 years, ISM finds.

Foretaste of the Lockdown-Driven Collapse in the Services & Retail Sectors: Holy Moly, What a Catastrophic Mess.

Pompeii Mania in the Era of Romanticism. Nothing appealed more perfectly to the Romantic sensibility than the mix of horror and awe evoked by a volcano erupting.

The wild, enduring genius of Adrienne Shelly.

How Do You Moderate COVID-19 Misinformation When It’s Coming From Official Sources?

April 1, 2020

Coronavirus Is A Defining Test And American Government Is Failing It. It’s not just Trump. Our politics are unfit for this calamity.

Why Do Matter Particles Come in Threes? Because they aren’t doing social distancing properly.

Von Neumann universal constructor.

There was always a way to pay for the programs we need.

COVID-19 and its environmental conditions.

Reality Has Endorsed Bernie Sanders.

The Climate Crisis Will Be Just as Shockingly Abrupt.

Sophisticatedly engineered ‘watercourts’ stored live fish, fueling Florida’s Calusa kingdom.

Overconfidence is a pernicious bias, even in experts.

Creatures in This Underwater Forest Could Save Your Life One Day.

Restrictions Are Slowing Coronavirus Infections, New Data Suggest.

1986 Black Sea incident.

One of the (many) questions that causes economists to pull their hair out takes the general form: “How can you economists even possibly try to weigh economic costs against the value of a life saved?” Even worse, the question is often delivered in a triumphalist tone of a deeper moral truth being unveiled.

In the new world of on-demand everything, you’re either pampered, isolated royalty — or you’re a 21st century servant.

Taxpayers Paid Millions to Design a Low-Cost Ventilator for a Pandemic. Instead, the Company Is Selling Versions of It Overseas.

The Pandemic Is Disrupting Years of Field Science.

The cruise ship industry may not survive the coronavirus, but we’re all on the Diamond Princess now.

March 31, 2020

Sexually Antagonistic Selection on Genetic Variation is Rare in Humans.

Turning Back the Clock on Aging Cells.

The untold origin story of the N95 mask. The most important design object of our time was more than a century in the making.

No, the coronavirus wasn’t made in a lab, a genetic analysis shows.

America’s underpaid, oft-forgotten EMTs are bearing the brunt of the pandemic. Sadly, front-line EMS teams are used to being forgotten by our broken for-profit healthcare system. Medicare For All now.

Court: Violating a site’s terms of service isn’t criminal hacking.

Macy’s is furloughing a majority of its 125,000 employees.

2019 Saw Over 60 Gigawatts of Wind Power Installed.

The Social-Distancing Culture War Has Begun. Across the country, social distancing is morphing from a public-health to political act. The consequences could be disastrous. Anyone not social distancing should be tased.

March 30, 2020

Coal mines emit more methane than oil-and-gas sector, study finds.

The internet should be a public utility.

Perhaps it’s the poisonous influence of identity politics, but it seems like most educated people don’t understand that contagious diseases are contagious — meaning, they can be transmitted from the source country to some other country through any number of intermediate countries.

The northern-hemisphere winter of 2019-20 was the warmest ever on land.

California once had mobile hospitals and a ventilator stockpile. But it dismantled them.

Guidance against wearing masks for the coronavirus is wrong – you should cover your face.

The Analogy Between Covid-19 and Climate Change Is Eerily Precise.

Debt and Power: An Interview With Michael Hudson.

Our Health-Care System Is Killing People. This is literally what it’s designed to do. Hello, fuck every single moron who does not support Medicare For All. This is what happens.

The robots are ready as the COVID-19 recession spreads.

New York, New York.

How to talk to the coronavirus deniers in your life. No talk. Only punch.

My Family Owns a Grocery Store. The Supply Chain Is a Real Problem.

US awol from world stage as China tries on global leadership for size.

Liebig’s law writ large.

Notes: The Industrial and Neoliberal Origins of COVID-19 (aka SARS 2.0).

The latest sign the economic downturn is intensifying: White-collar workers are being laid off now.

‘White-Collar Quarantine’ Over Virus Spotlights Class Divide.

What does a gender-neutral city look like?

March 29, 2020

Actually, the Spartans Weren’t All That Great.

Covid-19 is nature’s wake-up call to complacent civilisation.

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