Epicene Cyborg

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March 18, 2019

Flawed analysis, failed oversight: How Boeing, FAA certified the suspect 737 MAX flight control system.

The number of companies involved in drug development today is lower than at any time since 1914.

The Real Reason Middle America Should Be Angry. Like many “flyover” cities, St. Louis’s decline is not mainly a story of deindustrialization, but of decisions in Washington that opened the door to predatory monopoly.

The Disturbing Truth About How Airplanes Are Maintained Today. In the last decade, most of the big U.S. airlines have shifted major maintenance work to places like El Salvador, Mexico, and China, where few mechanics are F.A.A. certified and inspections have no teeth.

The European Union is a liberal empire, and it is about to fall.

Despite criticism of social media for spreading the initial video that the New Zealand terrorist live-streamed, the reality is that authorities and social media worked hard to stop the shooter and also to contain the spread of links to the video. In fact, they may have gone too far in attempting to scrub the Internet of the perpetrator’s presence, making it more difficult to understand how he was radicalized.

Why we should be honest about failure.

Making money with licenses.

March 17, 2019

Exploring the behavior of a gas as it transitions between quantum and classical states.

The Profound Emptiness of Beto O’Rourke.

How Parents Are Robbing Their Children of Adulthood. Today’s ‘snowplow parents’ keep their children’s futures obstacle-free — even when it means crossing ethical and legal boundaries.

Letterlocking: the long-lost art of using paper-folding to foil snoops.

Ablative Humanity.

How white supremacists fixate on an all-white Europe that never existed.

Can we handle the truth?

The Decivilization of Venezuela.

As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling.

March 16, 2019

The Amazon Drama.

Silicon Valley’s Fingerprints Are All Over the College Bribery Scandal.

News Organization Like Reuters Supporting The EU Copyright Directive Is A Shameful Support For Censorship.

Major Ice Ages May Be Caused By Tectonic Collisions.

The human cost of insulin in America.This is the list of what Laura Marston has sacrificed to keep herself alive: Her car, her furniture, her apartment, her retirement fund, her dog.

Why Climate Change Pundits Aren’t Convincing Anyone.

Industries turn to Bracewell lobbyists to scuttle product safety rules.

The admissions scandal highlights the “Big Lie” about college: It has nothing to do with education and everything to do with status.

March 15, 2019

To know ourselves, we must first know the Neanderthals.

Meet India’s starry dwarf frog, lone member of newly discovered ancient lineage.

The web we broke.

Capitalist Freedom Is a Farce.

Exercise reduces the startle reflex during periods of unpredictable threat.

Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology teamed up with colleagues from the U.S. and Switzerland and returned the state of a quantum computer a fraction of a second into the past.

How a bad business decision may have made the 737 Max vulnerable to crashes.

Google as a search engine is becoming useless.

One company bought all the retail outlets for glasses, used that to force sales of all the eyewear companies and jacked up prices by as much as 1000%. Economy based on scams and “experts.” Great.

Pests and the plant defenses against them drive diversity in tropical rainforests.

We Can Thank Agriculture and Soft Food for the ‘F’ Word, Claims Provocative New Study. I find this fairly likely. Morphology shapes phonology.

Residents born in state.

Ketamine works great for depression and other conditions, and costs $10/dose; the new FDA-approved “ketamine” performs badly in trials and costs a fortune.

March 14, 2019

Cancer Patients Are Getting Robotic Surgery. There’s No Evidence It’s Better. High-tech surgical robots aren’t an improvement over traditional operations, the F.D.A. warns. For some patients, the robots may be worse. But see, they can charge you 10x as much. That’s “better” in their eyes.

Abolish the Billionaire Class.

Gentrification Is a Feature, Not a Bug, of Capitalist Urban Planning.

The Politics of The Green New Deal: Part 1.

How the Rich Really Play, “Who Wants To Be An Ivy Leaguer?”

Destruction from sea level rise in California could exceed worst wildfires and earthquakes, new research shows.

Colbert Smears Tulsi Gabbard To Her Face While Telling Zero Jokes. Establishment patsy, like anyone else who makes it onto TV.

Pressure Cooker: the morality of home cooking.

Give me back my monolith.

Facebook’s Data Deals Are Under Criminal Investigation.

With days to go until the #CopyrightDirective vote, #Article13’s father admits it requires filters and says he’s OK with killing Youtube. Most media companies would be fine with rolling back to 1990.

Rewarding Neglect and Punishing Investment in Struggling Neighborhood.

March 13, 2019

Research carried out in partnership between the nonprofit Hives for Humanity and the University of British Columbia showed that honey collected from urban beehives can accurately measure how polluted a city is.

Vaccines Against Measles And Other Diseases Confer Added Protections.

You can simultaneously think markets are a useful civic tool and recognize obvious, egregious failures. Alas, most people can’t actually hold two ideas that conflict in some way in their head at once.

Modern Monetary Theory: Democrats Should Try New Economic Ideas. QE did not work out fine: massive asset inflation, bubble.

Your Environment Is Cleaner. Your Immune System Has Never Been So Unprepared.

This story of how rich people schemed and broke the law to get kids into college is a perfect capsule of America now.

On Surveillance in the Workplace.

Graying Out. It looks like the future of the internet and web is to get worse and worse, forever (fuck smartphones).

America’s Defining Divide Isn’t Left vs. Right. It’s Old vs. Young. When most of the Boomers die, things might improve. But it’ll probably be too late due to climate change.

The World Wide Web at 30: We got the free and open internet we deserve. And now we’re going to have to rebuild it from the ground up.

The Software That Shapes Workers’ Lives.

All College Admissions Are a Pay-to-Play Scandal. Exactly. The meritocracy is a complete lie. All rigged from end to end. Why should I trust experts again? Why should anyone?

March 12, 2019

Dream of desegregation is dying, and white parents are enabling it.

Ignore All Arguments About What Is “Politically Feasible.”

As if being picked on wasn’t bad enough, victims of workplace mistreatment may also be seen as bullies themselves, even if they’ve never engaged in such behavior.

Results showed that both girls and boys engage in gender-enforcing behavior. Further, findings suggest that aggression and biased gender-related beliefs are associated with gender-enforcing behavior.

The phenomenon of moral contagion has a number of important implications for understanding morality and politics in the digital age.

Selfish genetic elements amplify inflammation and age-related diseases.

Microsoft’s new Skype for Web client: An early taste of the browser monoculture. Back to IE6 days we go.

For all the many controversies around Facebook’s mishandling of personal data, Google actually knows way more about most of us.

Googling Strangers: One Professor’s Lesson On Privacy In Public Spaces.

Tim Berners-Lee: ‘Stop web’s downward plunge to dysfunctional future’.

Engineering for the Long Haul, the NASA Way.

March 11, 2019

People in open-concept homes are realizing the walls were there for a reason.

Octopus And Squid Evolution Is Officially Weirder Than We Could Have Ever Imagined.

Amid the opioid crisis, a different drug comes roaring back. Deaths caused by meth use have risen 18-fold this decade.

Winograd Schema Challenge.

The dirty error-prone algebra is better done by computers. Learning math that makes you stupider (from an absolute and opportunity cost perspective) is utterly pointless.

St. Augustine, Florida, circa 1894.

China orders its airlines to suspend use of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft.

March 10, 2019

Galaxy Simulations Offer a New Solution to the Fermi Paradox.

These Professors Make More Than a Thousand Bucks an Hour Peddling Mega-Mergers. The economists are leveraging their academic prestige with secret reports justifying corporate concentration. Their predictions are often wrong and consumers pay the price.

Accidental Empires.

Why Do We Have To Suffer.

If We’re Going to Break Up Big Tech, We Shouldn’t Forget Big Telecom.

A Crisis of Identification.

Women Do Ask for More Money at Work. They Just Don’t Get It.

Measles Is a Quintessential Political Issue of Our Time.

Seat Choice in a Crowded Café: Effects of Eye Contact, Distance, and Anchoring.

March 9, 2019

Reality Bites: ‘Captain Marvel’ and the Lie of the ’90s. Now that is how you do a fucking review.

Formafantasma’s Ore Streams is an indictment of consumer design.

The Astonishing Increase In The Price Of Textbooks Since 2004, Visualized.

Size matters: Studies find that operating and embodied energy increases with building height. High density may be a good thing in cities, but tall buildings are not. Tall buildings are also just ridiculously, absurdly expensive, and anti-human.

Pew: One in Four American Adults Did Not Read a Book in the Past Year.

Dianne Feinstein’s dust-up with activists over the Green New Deal revealed that progressives are unwilling to tolerate a political system that they feel threatens planetary survival.

We Can Do Better Than Capitalism.

The Sharing Economy Was Always a Scam. ‘Sharing’ was supposed to save us. Instead, it became a Trojan horse for a precarious economic future.

No One Can Explain The Dominance Of Cavalry.

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