Epicene Cyborg

Jacques Ellul, technology doomsdayer before his time.

How a Discriminatory Algorithm Wrongly Accused Thousands of Families of Fraud. Dutch tax authorities used algorithms to automate an austere and punitive war on low-level fraud—the results were catastrophic.

Food Prices Are Soaring Faster Than Inflation and Incomes. As the Covid-19 pandemic wreaks havoc on economic growth, concerns about hunger and malnutrition are rising around the world.

The US Will Have Enough COVID-19 Vaccines For All Adults By May, Biden Says. That’s two months earlier than his administration previously predicted.

More than a Year Later, Americans Have No Idea Where $9 Trillion of Fed Money Went.

Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution.

Boston Camera. No hand-holding that puppy.

All By Myself. Solitude was treated with suspicion in the Middle Ages. For most people it has only been a possibility in recent times.

Cryptic terrestrial fungus-like fossils of the early Ediacaran Period.

Microdosing study shows placebo effect of taking psychedelics. UK research into LSD consumption reveals expectation of improved wellbeing drives transformation.

Trump’s Strategy for Returning to Power Is Already Clear. And the Dems are laying out the fucking red carpet for this to happen.

The Mars Helicopter is Online and Getting Ready to Fly.

Section 230 faces countless reform efforts. But a look back reminds us that categorical content bans often come at the expense of marginalized groups.

Democrat Reassures Friend This One Of The Good Syrian Airstrikes.

Joe Biden says his hands are tied on a $15 minimum wage. That’s not true. It’s true because he tied his hands himself.

Pure nonsense: Debunking the latest attack on renewable energy.

Noise, interests & democracy.

Why wouldn’t someone want a COVID-19 vaccine? Because they are complete fucking dipshits?

Progressives warn “Dems will lose in 2022” if $15 wage dies in Senate. Yes they will. Or lose even worse than they’re already gonna.

Covid Hospital Admissions Drop 72%, Led by Oldest U.S. Patients. The power of vaccination.

Government seeks to retain lockdown limits on protests. UK, but will happen here too.

Stop Killing Sex Workers in Futuristic SciFi.

How patent laws are hindering the fight against COVID-19.

We’ll never reach herd immunity if we don’t vaccinate more non-White people.

In 1977, Five Were Killed In Helicopter Accident Atop Midtown’s Pan Am Building.

Covid and friendships: the health cost of a year without socialising. Close friendships are vital for our health and longevity. What impact will this year of too many Zooms and not enough hugs have on us all, asks the world-renowned psychologist Robin Dunbar.

No, a $15 minimum wage won’t cost 1.4 million jobs. A much-cited Congressional Budget Office estimate doesn’t reflect the best economic evidence.

The Private Equity Party Might Be Ending. It’s About Time. A recent legal decision may force Wall Street to think twice before saddling struggling companies with debts they can’t handle.

Why Microsoft Word must Die. The problem with successful monopolies is they are hard to see once they win.

Graveyards Are Surprising Hotspots for Biodiversity.

Why Republicans are still holding onto the big lie.

What Was Rush Limbaugh So Afraid Of?

The COVID Zoom Boom Is Reshaping Sign Language.

Even by Pentagon terms, this was a dud: The disastrous saga of the F-35.

Vela incident.

Humans Are Animals. Let’s Get Over It.

In Defense of Dumb TVs.

It’s getting more expensive to be poor. Over the past two years, prices have risen more quickly for many of the things that low-income households spend a lot of their money on, such as rent and utilities.

Possible irreversible changes to sub-systems prior to reaching climate change tipping points.

Light unbound: Data limits could vanish with new optical antennas.

The Willful Misunderstanding of Kink.

Animal source foods in ethical, sustainable & healthy diets: The animal/plant divide in the post-truth era.

The Linguistics of Cottagecore.

Australia is the Covid lucky country. But we risk becoming cruel.

The Secret Life of a Coronavirus.

An increase of 10 dB reduces productivity by approximately 5%.

Assuming Thune was about 16 or 17 when started earning $6/hour, that would be equivalent to about $25/hour in today’s dollars

Where Have All the Houses Gone? The inventory of homes for sale is startlingly low. The pandemic is part of the reason, but it’s not the whole story.

Hunting for a Giant Black Hole, Astronomers Found a Nest of Darkness. Should not have the telescope pointed at my head.

Judge in Google Case Disturbed That Even ‘Incognito’ Users Are Tracked. What kind of doofus thought they were not?

Just Don’t Expect “Pent-up Demand” from Consumers. Here’s Why.

Big Tech Is Boring. Why nobody has any new ideas anymore.

Decades-Long Quest Reveals Details of the Proton’s Inner Antimatter.

A Response to Julia Galef and Herbert Simon on Travel. Julia Galef and Herbert Simon seem to be quant-y dipshits.

We’re Just Rediscovering a 19th-Century Pandemic Strategy. The first way to fight a new virus would once have been opening the windows.

The Strength That Rush Limbaugh Projected Was So Flimsy. I had never been able to put my finger on what I felt for Rush until I tuned into his show one day in the early 2000s. Then I realized it was pity. Same. Whiny man-baby afraid of everything.

What Is Salesforce Really Selling? Behind the flashy events and quasi-spiritual jargon is a software service that wants to swallow the whole business world.

The Betrayal At The Heart of Sanders, AOC and Corbyn’s Refusal To Use Power.

Republicans introduce a torrent of new laws to restrict voting. The real voter fraud.

Degrowth: solving the impasse by magical thinking.

Why Black and Hispanic Small-Business Owners Have Been So Badly Hit in the Pandemic Recession.

Sure, Laugh Away. But Every Big Vehicle Should Look Like This New USPS Truck.

Stop Stressing Post-Vax Risk of Spreading Coronavirus. Why give people another reason to avoid vaccination?

Road-trippers 3x more likely to buy an EV than homebodies, survey says.

Covid-19 Is ‘Probably Going to End My Career.’ Being a nurse was already hard. But in the pandemic, it’s become almost impossible.

Online job posting analysis shows the extent of the pandemic’s damage, especially to women and youth.

Facebook Announces Plan To Break Up U.S. Government Before It Becomes Too Powerful.

Improving natural ventilation in hospital waiting and consulting rooms to reduce nosocomial tuberculosis transmission risk in a low resource setting.

Covid-19 Isn’t the Only Thing Shortening American Lives. New estimates of life expectancy expose worrisome health trends in the U.S.

Garden-variety germs may explode in COVID’s wake, study suggests. I agree with this.

Future Vaccines Depend on Test Subjects in Short Supply: Monkeys.

Running Government ‘Like A Business’ Kills People.

Online Furniture, Grocery, Clothing Sales Explode as Brick & Mortar Melts Down.

Turing tarpit.

California can enforce net neutrality law, judge rules in loss for ISPs.

Contact-tracing apps help reduce COVID infections, data suggest.

Why is the EU running into so many difficulties with its Covid vaccine campaign?

The Anthropocene and the geo-political imagination: Re-writing Earth as political space.

We’re Absolutely Surrounded by Double Stars, New 3D Map Suggests.

Mothers All Over Are Losing It.

Inside the Zero Covid campaign. The urge to eliminate the virus is understandable — but at what cost? Never, ever, ever gonna happen.

Even a Conservative Analysis Shows the $15 Minimum Wage Does More Good Than Harm.

The distribution of plasmid fitness effects explains plasmid persistence in bacterial communities.

Plane engine that caught fire on United Airlines flight over Denver has troubled history.

Did Trump think his mob had taken Mike Pence hostage? I was wondering about that too. Probably so?

The Unpaid Labor That Drives Tech Forward.

Vaccine scepticism is as old as vaccines themselves. Here’s how to tackle it.

Why Does the Pandemic Seem to Be Hitting Some Countries Harder Than Others? While the virus has ravaged rich nations, reported death rates in poorer ones remain relatively low. What probing this epidemiological mystery can tell us about global health.

The McMansion Hell Yearbook: 1978.

The pandemic made the world realise the importance of human contact. Well, some. The rest seem content to screech about Gramma and hide under the bed.

The Jobs the Pandemic May Devastate. An updated forecast by the Bureau of Labor Statistics has alarming news for people with a high school diploma or less.

Buyer beware: Massive experiment shows why ticket sellers hit you with last-second fees. Larger reason: because there is no regulation of this terrible industry.

The Milky Way may be swarming with planets with oceans and continents like here on Earth.

People with extremist views less able to do complex mental tasks, research suggests.

Mars Perseverance Raw Images.

Coronavirus Scotland: Vaccination linked to ‘substantial reduction’ in hospital admissions.

Extinction: Freshwater fish in ‘catastrophic’ decline.

Student Loan Debt Statistics In 2021: A Record $1.7 Trillion.

What it’s like to die from Covid-19. “I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy”: Doctors describe what their sickest coronavirus patients endure. Anti-maskers et al. should be prosecuted for negligent homicide.

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