Debt Is a Powder Keg and Rising Interest Rates Are Matches. Different this time is not.
September 22, 2018
Apple Will Judge Call, Email Activity To Assign Users a ‘Trust Score.’ Fuck Apple. Fuck Google. Fuck them all.
September 21, 2018
Why The Couch Often Kills Your Gym Routine: Humans Simply ‘Hardwired’ For Laziness, Study Finds. It took becoming a paratrooper to overcome my innate laziness. Do not recommend.
Conspiracy Theories: Evolved Functions and Psychological Mechanisms. I am not sure I buy this, but it is interesting.
Termites Are Actually Shrunken Cockroaches. Wood you believe it?
The problem with essays like this one, and with so much other social commentary these days, is that it posits social behavior as endlessly mutable and thus perfectable. More is hardwired than nearly anyone wants to admit OR is only alterable with near-total cultural, social, and environmental change (that is, not likely).
The Racism v. Economics Debate Again. Political scientist Tom Ferguson is well along on a granular analysis of voters who flipped from Obama in 2012 to Trump. The data overwhelmingly show it was economic issues that led to the change. Shocking no one except those who don’t care one whit about truth (centrists).
It’s easy to ridicule the Chinese but how many people right over here can’t wait until everybody is assigned a scorecard with a list of transgressions against speech codes and “murderous thoughts”? She’s absolutely right. That will be de facto here, if not de jure, soon enough.
September 20, 2018
Why We Should Lower the Voting Age in America. And lower the age to be president to 30, and bar anyone older than 65.
You’ll miss Trump one day. His successor (even if not his immediate successor) will be worse. Bet on it.
September 19, 2018
September 18, 2018
The ‘Me Too’ Movement Hits McDonald’s. I am pleasantly surprised that the movement is helping more than already-rich white women. Did not expect this.
The Rise and Demise of RSS. Most of the best of the web is dead and dying. Corporate facsimiles remain, useful only to simpletons, beneficial to no one.
The Office That Became a Circus of Barking Dogs. “Bring your pet to work” might seem like a great company perk. But it can tear workplaces apart. Bring your dog to work, see me eating it for lunch later.
IBM Is Being Sued for Age Discrimination After Firing Thousands. IBM, HP and others have been doing this for years.
It’s been an especially bad summer for mosquitoes. These fish can help. Mosquitofish are awesome.
September 17, 2018
Until we realise the need for a new economic model, we risk another financial crash. It’s not a risk; it’s a certainty.
New global study reveals the ‘staggering’ loss of forests caused by industrial agriculture. If the earth had 500 million people, we’d not face this, and could use very little farmland as we could avoid using sub-optimal land altogether.
Our inner narrator gives us continuity and a sense of self. Essentially what Westworld argued.
Trump protects al Qaeda in Syria. The Resistance applauds. The “Resistance.” This so-called resistance is a fiction, so fictional they don’t even know they are fake.
BBC short story prize selects all-female shortlist for fifth time. Judged blind. Not surprised; pretty high-quality studies show women are significantly better than men at writing on average, so I’d expect to see them dominate about 90% of such things in a fair world.
The Marathon World Record Shattered by Eliud Kipchoge. Modern marathon runners basically run at a dead sprint for 26 miles straight.
September 16, 2018
Bigger Phones, Bigger Watches, Forever and Ever. It won’t be too long before the only phone you can get is the size of fucking briefcase.
In killing Inbox, Google takes another swipe at its most passionate users. It fits a pattern that tells us that Google sees everyone as having equal value, which just isn’t true. Mozilla has a history of doing this, and see how well it’s worked out of them.
September 15, 2018
September 14, 2018
Slaves to speech suppression are masters of nothing. This is a little too extreme for me, but I do agree that language bans/alterations like this are mostly wasted effort and wheel-spinning.
Apple Is Deleting Bought Films From iTunes Accounts – And Don’t Expect A Refund. Piracy is the only answer.
Why Real-World Problems Go Unresolved and What We Can Do about It: Inferences from a Limited-Resource Model of Successful Intelligence. I often call intelligence our “hoodwinking engine” because I believe it mostly evolved to deceive other humans.
So Contact is one of my favorite sci-fi movies, and part of why is about how “real” it feels. It’s far less fantastic-feeling than most sci-fi. Part of that is the contemporary setting, sure, but the visual direction plays a big part of it. Editors are the most underappreciated worker(s) on any film.
September 13, 2018
Pharma chief defends 400% drug price rise as a ‘moral requirement.’ It’s also my moral requirement to guillotine the fuck out of people like this.
Bring back the headphone jack: Why USB-C audio still doesn’t work. Modern computing is replacing tried and true working items with garbage that doesn’t function and never will and if you complain you get told that you just “hate change.” No, motherfucker, I hate broken everything.
Full-fat dairy foods linked to lower disease and death rate. One of the main reasons people distrust science in general is nutritional science has been full of absolute bullshit for 50+ years.