» 2017 » April Epicene Cyborg

It is naive to expect that the redistribution of wealth from you and me to the very rich will be stopped on the initiative of the very rich, whether they are called Trump or Obama.

Obama had a chance to really fight climate change. He blew it. And rein in bankers. And help homeowners. And fight oligarchy, oligopoly and oligopsony. And….

Before alarm clocks, Brits paid people to wake them up by tapping on their window.

The Rich Pay Fewer Taxes Than the Poor, and Get More Services.

Perspectives on transportation history.

Study confirms some men use anti-gay and sexist jokes to shore up their masculinity. Why are men so weak?

Albania is the Future of Europe.

Information technologies don’t just modify how we act in the world; they also profoundly affect how we understand the world, how we relate to it, how we see ourselves, how we interact with each other, and how our hopes for a better future are shaped.

An industry that never stops lauding itself for its creativity and innovation has built its own success mythology by endlessly repackaging the same banal functions that have existed for about as long as the Web. Yep. Most “new, innovative” tech I used on BBSes in 1986.

What Is Digital Humanism?

Even in the most progressive environments, men will treat women like dirt. It’s shameful, and it’s true.

Bankers, who are the primary resource allocators in our society (it is not even close, they create the vast majority of all money, not governments) made such bad decisions, on aggregate, that they lost all their money. In truth, bankers lost so much money 2007-2010 that the losses wiped out all profits from all banks ever on the entire planet for the entire history of banks. In three years.

The Case for Making Artificial Intelligence Conscious.

Will the high-tech cities of the future be utterly lonely?

Flexible working is making us work longer.

The issue is the hundreds of thousands of (generally mediocre at best) retail jobs eliminated or soon to disappear. Retail jobs, remember, are the subpar replacement jobs that hoovered up people whose manufacturing jobs disappeared.

Cassini’s Daring Mission Finale Between the Rings and Saturn.

If you can’t beat laser cat, you probably deserve to die.

Memory scrutinized through electric brain stimulation: A review of 80 Years of Experiential Phenomena.

130,000-year-old mastodon remains could rewrite story of how humans first came to the Americas. If true, this is a mammoth discovery.

Air Force launches test missile off Central California coast.

We’re Living in the Era of the Hypocritical ‘Feminist’ Boss.

Extreme Arctic Melt Is Raising Sea Level Rise Threat; New Estimate Nearly Twice IPCC’s

To believe that change is driven by technology, when technology is driven by humans, renders force and power invisible.

Big content cheers as Congress votes on changes to US Copyright Office.

America is Regressing into a Developing Nation for Most People.

The Licensing Effect Revisited: How Virtuous Behavior Heightens the Pleasure Derived from Subsequent Hedonic Consumption.

Mora.

Ella Fitzgerald: syllabic choice in scat singing and her timbral syllabic development between 1944 and 1947.

The national media really does work in a bubble, something that wasn’t true as recently as 2008. And the bubble is growing more extreme.

The bottom line is that Obama made sure the bailouts for Wall Street continued, and he is being rewarded for it.

African Americans don’t sleep as well as whites, an inequality stretching back to slavery.

Being “pro-science” has become a bizarre cultural phenomenon in which liberals (and other members of the cultural elite) engage in public displays of self-reckoned intelligence as a kind of performance art. This is “my” side and I prefer them to the alternative so it’s hard for me to read this…but, yes.

Middle Class Contracted in U.S. Over 2 Decades, Study Finds.

What happens when an African American woman decides to solo-hike the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine during a summer of bitter political upheaval.

Lazy fit animals: How some beasts get the gain without the pain.

The Myth of Choice When It Comes to Female Beauty.

The shape of income in America.

‘Peak globalization’ and the future of democracy.

Acorn Woodpecker: The Fascinating Life of the Master Hoarder.

A White Battle in the Black Sea.

For the Love of God, Stop Putting Two Spaces After a Period.

Perception: Our useful inability to see reality.

Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting biodegradable solution to plastic pollution. That caterpillar’s got a brand new bag.

To keep EpiPen sales up, Mylan threatened states, sued making bogus claims.

There is a very narrow range of “acceptable” opinions anymore, which is why so many things are increasingly falling under the “Alt” label. This is a very fine piece.

Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies. Best guess is growth would roughly double if we did serious monopoly busting.

Disability is everywhere.

A lot of people have trouble wrapping their heads around the idea that the basic “Econ 101” model – the undifferentiated, single-market supply-and-demand model – doesn’t work for labor markets. Yes. This is another mental glitch trap.

The Weirdness of Juggling Many Different Roles at Work.

Why “Nothing Matters”: Central Banks Have Bought A Record $1 Trillion In Assets In 2017.

A Quarter of Millennials Who Live at Home Don’t Work — or Study. Note that a quarter have a disability.

Our Climate Future Is Actually Our Climate Present.

Socially conscious criticism doesn’t take artistic expression too seriously; it doesn’t take art seriously enough.

Against Worldbuilding.

Men Recommend David Foster Wallace to Me.

Hypozeuxis.

Black Swans, Lame Ducks, and the mystery of IPE’s missing macroeconomy.

Sometimes, Mental-Illness Destigmatization Can Backfire. People with severe mental-health problems really are suffering, and it doesn’t make sense to scrub the language we use to pretend they aren’t.

The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber — It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant.’

Stop Guessing Languages Based on IP Address.

John Deere just told the copyright office that only corporations can own property, humans can only license it.

In trend pieces, the word Millennial has become shorthand for “a college-educated young person living in a city.” But this usage elides some critical details, for example that most people born between the early 1980s and late 1990s (a) didn’t graduate from college, (b) aren’t living in a city, and (c) generally hate being called “Millennials.”

How Online Shopping Makes Suckers of Us All.

Instead of allowing a small group of highly skilled workers in to fill positions where no Americans are available, H-1B has become a treadmill for replacing US workers, as well as facilitating the outsourcing of hundreds of thousands of jobs abroad.

Cloning voices: Imitating people’s speech patterns precisely could bring trouble.

“only made $6/hr.”

The high, high price of affordable housing.

For First Time Since 1800s, Britain Goes a Day Without Burning Coal for Electricity.

You are here, Earth from Saturn.

Most Australian Wine Exports Ship in Giant Plastic Bladders.

“Familiarity breeds contempt” is one of the gloomiest of proverbs. It is also, the evidence indicates, one of the truest. Is the denial of human nature also part of human nature?

Google is a monopoly — and it’s crushing the internet.

The fastest-growing occupation in the United States — by a long shot, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — might surprise you: wind turbine technician.

A study published this week by the Royal Society found that if you’re an “average-looking” or ugly man, being witty, entertaining and imaginative will increase your overall attractiveness. But for women having an interesting personality will do little to improve your dating prospects.

The Loch Ness Monster of Mollusks.

What happens when a whole society wastes time and money on college.

USAFacts.

Apple Forces Recyclers to Shred All iPhones and MacBooks.

Obesity is a concern for bone health with aging.

A Millennial Feminist Explains the New Feminism to a Boomer Feminist Philosopher. Bordo is the Tucker Carlson of the pseudo-left.

Male contraceptive blocked by drug companies who make billions from the female pill.

The Earth just reached a CO2 level not seen in 3 million years. Woo, we’re going for the record!

Stunning series of paintings depicts birds, trees and the sea as its heroes.

Anyway so we all know the mindset you adopt in the military because of the danger, so to realise that an identical sense of humor has been adopted by normal people should probably tell you something very important about the amount of stress modern young folks experience in daily life.

In Chile’s desert, it looks like someone intentionally swept gypsum crystals into 15-foot-high piles. Scientists say whirlwinds they call gravel devils are responsible.

What It Would Really Take To Sink A Modern Aircraft Carrier.

“Every one of those regulations was written in someone’s blood.” I favor a campaign to change the term from “regulations” to “protections,” which is what they are.

How can we execute people if 1 in 25 on death row are innocent?

Go East, Young American. So instead of fixing our own country, we’re advocating yet more rootlessness and destruction of community?

If you live inland, don’t think sea level rise won’t affect you. You think house prices are bad now….

The Nightmare Scenario for Florida’s Coastal Homeowners.

America Commits Acts of Terrorism—Why Is That So Hard to Understand?

Archives