January 31, 2017

The Ridicule for Chuck Schumer’s Tears Over Trump’s Muslim Ban Speaks to Moral Decay.



Is liberalism to blame?



“Science curious” more likely to explore data contradicting their world view.



We need to work less to live better.



How to Deal with Donald Trump and Bullies.



Who Cares If the Dow Jones Hit 20,000?



Children get more satisfaction from relationships with their pets than with siblings.



What kind of nation won’t fund a Post Office?



Very Serious People. This is spot on, all of it.



We can claim he’s insane, claim he’s unhinged, claim he’s feckless, but President Trump’s first week in office has been masterful. The only people looking more foolish than Trump is the Democrats, and that is hard to pull off.



January 30, 2017

“Natural selection has been hugely concerned with minimizing the thermodynamic cost of computation. It will do all it can to reduce the total amount of computation a cell must perform.”



What Would a Labor-Centered Economy Look Like?



Stanford historian uncovers a grim correlation between violence and inequality over the millennia.



Compromise doesn’t work with our political opponents. When will we learn?



British Companies Are Using a Tracking Device That Monitors Their Workers’ Voices, Steps and Stress Levels.



Anthropologists Uncover Art by (Really) Old Masters—38,000 Year-Old Engravings.



Resilient cooperators stabilize long-run cooperation in the finitely repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma.



Hotel ransomed by hackers as guests locked in rooms.



FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot To Just Sit Back And Enjoy Collapse Of United States.



Benoit Hamon is known as the Bernie Sanders of France — and he just won the Socialist Party primary for president.



The eclipse of the West.



Here are some gifts President Obama left to Donald Trump.



This most obvious “quid pro quo” corruption, according to Teachout, is almost beside the point when you look at a political system that is flooded with influence-buying.



Politics isn’t like a debate team — winning the debate isn’t the end of the equation.



Why We Hear Voices in Random Noise.



January 29, 2017

Not Thinking About Race: Accidentally Illustrating Evil with Skin Color.



Donald Trump’s “Walking Dead” politics: A hellscape of walls, guns, violence and dangerous outsiders.



Why actors speak in soft, whispery growls on TV and in movies.



After studying protests over the last two decades, I have to deliver some bad news: In the digital age, the size of a protest is no longer a reliable indicator of a movement’s strength.



Planet Earth makes its own water from scratch deep in the mantle. Maybe.



Double Standards:  Where Were the Liberal Protestors During Obama’s Wars? During Obama’s anything?



It’s Austerity, Not Globalization, That Pulls European Workers to the Right.



Rapid trait evolution crucial to species growth, study finds.



Instead Of Trump’s Wall, Let’s Build A Border Of Solar Panels.



Uncommon Silence: Paintings by Stephanie Buer.



How NATO is becoming a threat to Europe.



Wide, Branching Channels.



It is true that individual white workers can be horribly racist and misogynist. But it is also true that the worship of “diversity” often serves as a cover for gross hypocrisy and ruthless class rule.



“Reform” Isn’t the Answer for Everything.



A Four Planet System in Orbit, Directly Imaged and Remarkable.



How Camus and Sartre split up over the question of how to be free.



Why Has The Electoral College-Popular Vote Gap Grown?



The huge disparities in US life expectancy in five charts.



Federal Reserve Bankers Mocked Unemployed Americans Behind Closed Doors.



January 28, 2017

The rich experience a lower inflation rate.



Libor scandal: the bankers who fixed the world’s most important number. In a just world, any bank who had any part of this would’ve been dissolved.



Trump Has Not Yet Lied About What Matters Most.



Fear it is.



One More Time With Feeling: ‘Anonymized’ User Data Not Really Anonymous.



First FDA Approval For Clinical Cloud-Based Deep Learning In Healthcare.



For This Metal, Electricity Flows, But Not the Heat.



Why Do Pro-Life Activists Seem Only to Care About Unborn Lives?



January 27, 2017

Senate Democrats are acting like a bunch of spineless jellyfish. This lead could be from any time in the past 30 years.



Why the ‘Fuck You, Pay Me’ Ethos Is More Important Than Ever in the Trump Era.



Anxiety and surveillance: pillars of the new economy.



Why I’m not a cyclist.



Lies, Caffeinated Lies, and Operating Systems.



How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains.



Sent Home for Not Wearing Heels, She Ignited a British Rebellion.



Days of Rage.



How to Block Ads that Windows 10 Pushes on You.



The collapse of the flawed Trans-Pacific Partnership was inevitable. The trade pact typified the elitist thinking that put business first at the expense of ordinary people, and was a crude cover for the US China containment policy.



January 26, 2017

The notion of a subsistence economy conceals within it the implicit assumption that if primitive societies do not produce a surplus, this is because they are incapable of doing so, entirely absorbed as they are in producing the minimum necessary for survival.



New Spacesuit Unveiled for Starliner Astronauts.



Alternative Facts and Media Control: Bush and Obama laid the groundwork for Trump’s White House.



The death of facts has been greatly exaggerated. Don’t completely agree, but panicking == no more thinking. Too much panicking going on now, and too little thought.



Who Didn’t Go to the Women’s March Matters More Than Who Did.



The Case Against Unity. The Democratic Party hasn’t earned the right to silence its critics.



Stop boring on about babies – the gender pay gap isn’t about “choice.”



Let’s try to understand our own contradictions (what P. J. O’Rourke gets but Michael Lind doesn’t).



That shows how fully we’ve fallen for the anthropocentric lie that only humans have minds and real emotions. The lie is the high-water mark of scientific fundamentalism.



Deep learning algorithm does as well as dermatologists in identifying skin cancer. If you think automation isn’t going to affect white collar professions, you are wrong.



January 25, 2017

Why an Alzheimer’s Risk Gene Still Exists.



VPN jail.



Researchers generate an organism that can replicate artificial base pairs indefinitely.



Google AMP is Not a Good Thing.



Nicotine Normalizes Brain Activity Deficits That Are Key to Schizophrenia.



Membership in socialist groups is surging in ways that it hasn’t in decades.



Is atomic theory the most important idea in human history?



Kim Keever.



Just say no to performative activism.



College and the American Dream (3 charts).



That the left is against Trump and that the intelligence community is against Trump should not mean, to anyone with sense, that the CIA, NSA or any other alphabet soup agency is good, or noble or our friend.



Trump.



Trump To Cut Health Care For Millions Of Poor And Disabled People With Medicaid Block Grant. Now the real evil begins.



Lessons From Putin’s Russia for Living in Trump’s America. Note that Trump is a consequence of pre-existing trends caused by neolibs like Bush and Obama, not a trendsetter himself.



In embracing a norm that sucker-punching Nazis is acceptable, remember that you live in a nation of imbeciles that loves calling people Nazis.



All the Laws and Executive Orders Trump Has Signed So Far.



January 24, 2017

Toyota’s Gill Pratt on Self-Driving Cars and the Reality of Full Autonomy. Note that even without full Level 5 autonomy, millions of truck drivers (and related) still lose their jobs.



The real long-term threat to American jobs is tech, not trade deals. 100% correct, though much of the rest of the piece is wrong; even most otherwise-delusional economists admit US lost ~2 million jobs to China after MFN status.



Ancient cultures used food to domesticate wild animals.



Why Clinton’s Slogans Failed (Hard): A Persuasion Analysis.



The technology is not the problem. The problem is a political system that doesn’t ensure the benefits accrue to everyone.



Tiny Pollinators Need Wildlife Corridors Too.



Solar power cost down 25% in five months – “There’s no reason why the cost of solar will ever increase again.”



Struggling Media Company Almost Desperate Enough To Hire Someone Qualified For Job.



What’s incredibly expensive is not having basic income, and what really motivates people to work is, on one hand, not taking money away from them for working, and on the other hand, not actually about money at all.



Cervical cancer just got much deadlier—because scientists fixed a math error.



Lik the bred.



January 23, 2017

The internet does to the world what radio did to the world.