February 20, 2017

What do we really gain if we win the right not to check our work-related email only to squander it on clicking, half-mesmerised, that “update” button on Facebook or Twitter?



Neoliberalism: the deep story that lies beneath Donald Trump’s triumph.



The Mark Zuckerberg Manifesto: Great for Facebook, Bad for Journalism. Deeper issue to be examined is private profit on the backs of what should be a public good: the internet, info tech in general.



The Great Moon Hoax (1835).



February 19, 2017

4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump. 4chan unlike this article claims not really a right-wing site: more anarcho-libertarian and something completely new. That said, great article.



Liberals: Stop Trying to Own Conservatives By Their Own Logic…They Do Not Care.



Trump Hates the Press? Take a Number. Trump nothing new under the sun. Problem is 26-year-old journalists who have never picked up a history book.



The long rise in profits is mostly just the flip side of falling interest rates.



Life forms that could be 50,000 years old found in caves in Mexico.



The Congo River’s rapids are so intense that fish species diverge in close proximity.



Pharma industry shuns Trump push for radical shift at FDA.



Some thoughts on the cost problem.



There is no reason to believe that Baby Boomer retirement is even a sliver of the cause as to why the Great “Recession” has proved to be a permanent (so far) break in trend.



Why Do Americans Refrigerate Their Eggs? Because we have the coolest chickens.



The Democrats’ central weakness comes from being a party of business but having to pretend otherwise.



February 18, 2017

Andrew Sullivan extols a pre-Trump past that bears little resemblance to the grotesque reality of American society.



Magnetized Planters Allow Your Garden to Levitate in the Air.



Mexico City, Parched and Sinking, Faces a Water Crisis.



Game On. East vs. West, again.



Migration to America took long enough for evolution to happen on the way.



Self-Described Liberals And Democrats Had Lots of Gay Friends.



US Household Debt Rose To $12.6 Trillion In 2016: Biggest Jump In A Decade. Note this is the one that matters: household debt, not national debt.



Saturn V fuel consumption expressed in elephants.



Dole Food Had Too Many Shares.



The Company You Work For Is Not Your Friend.



February 17, 2017

Internalizing objectification: Objectified individuals see themselves as less warm, competent, moral, and human.



Rates of female sexual violence and aggression.



What Mirrors Tell Us About Animal Minds.



Countries bombed by the USA since the end of the end of WWII. Woo! Look at all that freedom raining down.



The Democrats’ Immigration Problem.



Poorer and less-educated older Americans are more like to suffer from chronic pain than those with greater wealth and more education, but the disparity between the two groups is much greater than previously thought.



A large research synthesis, published in one of the world’s most influential scientific journals, has detected a decline in the amount of dissolved oxygen in oceans around the world — a long-predicted result of climate change that could have severe consequences for marine organisms if it continues.



Why More Democrats Are Now Embracing Conspiracy Theories.



How America Lost Faith in Expertise. Problem with expertise is how very, very often it is used to make deleterious, stupid decisions more confidently. “Trust us, we’re the experts:” Iraq, health care, crash of 2008, NAFTA, Brexit, college, etc.



After Earth’s Worst Mass Extinction, Life Rebounded Rapidly, Fossils Suggest.



The Deep State vs. Trump. Most people are utterly clueless as to what’s really going on now.



Historians can often detect social trends much earlier and better than more empirically-minded economists, among whom only a tiny minority sensed the forthcoming dangers. Most accurate sentence I’ve read so far this year.



Even Karl Marx underestimated the economic anxiety of workers.



February 16, 2017

New Office Sensors Know When You Leave Your Desk. Hiding devices in lights and ID badges, your boss can legally track you everywhere but the bathroom.



Apple Will Fight ‘Right to Repair’ Legislation.



Nickel-and-dime socialism.



The Deep State Politically Assassinated Michael Flynn.



Leading candidate for Trump’s science advisor calls climate change a cult.



Four measures of wage growth: prospects for further meaningful wage growth are dimming.



There’s more slack in the labor market than thought.



These tiny beetles have evolved to ride ants like horses.



Patients treated by foreign-educated doctors less likely to die, study finds.



Womanhood Redefined. Much wrong with this piece, but also much right. Worth thinking about.



February 15, 2017

Cellphone Spy Tools Have Flooded Local Police Departments.



We may live in a post-truth era, but nature does not.



The “magic number” of people needed to create a viable population for multi-generational space travel has been calculated by researchers. It is about the size of a small village – 160.



Very precisely cut steel.



The Political Assassination of Michael Flynn.



Animal crackers.



The more minutiae we measure, the less respect we have for taste or experience.



Private pharma is a stupid way to invent and produce drugs anyway. They spend more on advertising than on research, they sponge off publicly-funded research, and they have vast incentives towards palliatives because a pill a day for life is far more profitable than a cure.



When the USSR discovered anti-gravity, and other architectural fantasies.



Wizard-hat amoeba gets named after Gandalf.



Most new, high-priced cancer drugs don’t even extend life for 10 weeks.



February 14, 2017

Revenge of the Lunch Lady.



Fifth-grade Catholic youth team forfeits season rather than kick girls off.



‘The Great Shame of Our Profession.’ How the humanities survive on exploitation.



Powerful People Trick You Into Hating Protesters. Propaganda works.



Eroding exceptionalism: Internet firms’ legal immunity is under threat. If it kills Facebook, I am for it. (Said only somewhat tongue-in-cheek.)



Wich is the correct interpretation of the great modern weakening?



The Rise of the Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine.



H-1B reduced computer programmer employment by up to 11%, study finds.



There is a popular notion that men and women are very different in their cognitive abilities. The evidence for this may be weaker than you expect.



Who are you calling Malthusian?



February 13, 2017

Obama Leaves Post-It On Counter With Quick Note Explaining How To Use Extralegal Surveillance Apparatus.



Bumblebees Are Dying Out Because They’re Too Fat to Mate. The American future?



Hillbillies and Cultural Capital.



Forget Autonomous Cars—Autonomous Ships Are Almost Here.



Husbands Are Deadlier Than Terrorists.



How to Close a Gender Gap: Let Employees Control Their Schedules. Makes employees more productive, but reduces exec power, so will not be widely adopted.



A Secret of Many Urban 20-Somethings: Their Parents Help With the Rent.



In 2014, 25 percent of college-educated workers were overqualified for their jobs.



Illegal numbers. Back in the early 2000s, I got banned from a dozen+ forums b/c my signature had an illegal prime in it (DeCSS). Regrets: none.



Capitalism in a Bottle.



Fuck this White Dude Game Theory.



Hear the First Jazz Record, Which Launched the Jazz Age: “Livery Stable Blues” (1917).



Obesity is responsible for over 100,000 deaths per year in the US. By comparison, anorexia is responsible for an estimated 145 deaths per year in the US.



Your Pain Is Not Real: How Doctors Discriminate Against Women.



Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.



The polls failed and the nation needs to know why. The pollsters and pundits have not given a satisfactory answer.



Doctors and Probability.



Well-run libraries.



February 12, 2017

White peo­ple make our lives even more dif­fi­cult when they claim to speak in our name.



Skipping Primes: On Watching ‘Hidden Figures.’



The Magical Thinking of the US Liberal Establishment.



Debate Me.



Liberal Fan Fiction.



The 84 Lumber Ad: An Exercise In Propaganda And Media Literacy.



Holy Warriors Against the Welfare State.



The Cult of Work.



Trump is not a sudden departure from the otherwise healthy development of US political and social life. On the contrary, he is the outcome of the long decay of American capitalism and the rise to the pinnacle of economic and political power of a corporate and financial aristocracy.



Income share for the bottom 50% of Americans is ‘collapsing.’



What is the NRx (Neoreaction) Movement?



Google AI invents its own cryptographic algorithm; no one knows how it works.



February 11, 2017

Is Twitter a dystopian technology?