» 2017 » June Epicene Cyborg

So if mankind is now 300,000 years old, what beliefs about the present should we revise? That nearly-undetectable neurostructural evolution is probably more important than we thought.

How to Build an Impossible Polyhedron.

Millions of Young People Shut Out of the Housing Market.

Whether it takes the form of insular campus activism, reactionary internet sermonizing, or impotent calls for general action, what passes for “the left” today is both parochial and completely disconnected from power. To put it bluntly, we have lost; we are decimated and we are feeble.

Any working woman could have told James Comey what would happen when he spurned President Trump.

Hey Intercept, Something is Very Wrong with Reality Winner and the NSA Leak. Agreed. This is an op, not a leak. Also, why use that photo?

GREs don’t predict grad school success. What does? Ticket-punching things like high GPA, high GRE, don’t mean nothing, but they don’t equate to the things we need.

The New Paranoia. Democrats have always prided themselves on being a voice of political sanity. So why has Trump’s election turned the left into a breeding ground for conspiracy theories?

Battery-pack costs are down to less than $230 per kilowatt-hour in 2016, compared with almost $1,000 per kilowatt-hour in 2010.

Renewable Energy Push Is Strongest in the Reddest States.

Jumping Spiders Can See the Moon.

Whole-Hearted Fangirling.

Many terrorists’ first victims are their wives – but we’re not allowed to talk about that.

Earliest fossil evidence of Homo sapiens found in Morocco, rewriting the story of our species. Remember that “Homo sapiens” is an arbitrary division, and that evolution is not so neat.

Welcome to the software interview.

The strange Cook pine trees that always lean towards the equator.

Explaining and Undoing the Male Gaze in Cinema.

Farewell Walt Mossberg, the scourge of Silicon Valley.

A Minor Detail.

A Terrorist Attack Is Not Like a Car Accident.

Slow Crash.

The Biggest Threat to Freedom of Speech On the Internet.

How air conditioning changed the world.

Boffins find evidence of strange uranium-producing bacteria lurking underground.

Caroline Gavazzi’s images of tropical flowers in glasshouses look like impressionist oil paintings.

The big media lie about single-payer health care. The propaganda and glib Kevin Drum BS has been really flying around about this.

A Health Care Bargain. Don’t believe the critics: a new report shows California’s single-payer plan is eminently affordable.

The guilt of hating gun violence, but loving its movies.

Recycling Reconsidered.

Hyper-local air pollution maps reveal how emissions can vary from street to street.

In this new form of automation, robots aren’t replacing people at all, because people frankly couldn’t do the job.

Obama was conservative. Trump is radical.

Astronomers Find Planet Hotter Than Most Stars.

Drug Deaths in America Are Rising Faster Than Ever. Much easier, cleaner, and more politically acceptable than actual death camps.

Even Elizabeth Warren Gets Harassed by Debt Collectors — And It’s About to Get Worse for Everyone.

The largest non-nuclear explosion in U.S. history destroyed most of a Texas town, killing hundreds.

For luxury brands, selling clothes is basically a marketing expense.

Desired for their labor, rejected as neighbors. Farmworkers in California face hostile communities.

The Gender Balance of The New York Times Best Seller List.

This new putative ruling class, notes author Michael Lind, sees its rise, and the decline of the rest, not as a reflection of social inequity, but rather their meritocratic virtue. Only racism, homophobia or misogyny — in other words, the sins of the “deplorables” — matter.

Drug Company Chairman to America: Go Fuck Yourself.

Harvard is perhaps best known for producing some of the most heinous war criminals and terrorists of the second half of the 20th century, from Henry Kissinger to the Unabomber. But there is one thing that Harvard won’t stand for, and that’s offensive memes.

Illustrated Glossary Of Typographic Terms.

Permanent On-The-Spot Job Creation—The Missing Keynes Plan for Full Employment and Economic Transformation.

Hillary Clinton’s big problem wasn’t bad data — it was bad politics.

The Doctor Is In. Co-Pay? $40,000.

It’s possible that the tally sicks, whether single or split, were the earliest permanent records of economic transactions that we know of.

Standing up for cinema.

The Cause of the Opiate Epidemic.

Leningrad, USSR (St Petersburg, Russia) | Fashion 60s-70s.

California’s Surprisingly Cheap Single Payer Plan.

Say Hi to the Beavers of the Tundra.

The difficulty of philosophy doesn’t stem from its peculiar subject matter or the inadequacy of its methods, but simply from the fact that it takes on the hard questions.

US contiguous counties where at least 50% of the population aged 25 and over have a college degree.

Class Struggle Still Gets the Goods.

Sexism in ratings of intelligence across the life cycle.

A Golden Age for Dystopian Fiction. What to make of our new literature of radical pessimism.

Curiosity rover finds its crater was habitable for 700 million years.

By transitioning to solar photovoltaics (PV) in the US, up to 51,999 American lives would be saved at $1.1 million invested per life.

Even Hillary Clinton’s supporters are telling her to “move on.” After Hillary Clinton speaks up, Democrats everywhere are telling her to shut up. World has had enough of the Clintons, of any gender or age or generation.

The Shouting Class.

Telling the time at night.

For all of the talk about automation, outsourcing, and the gig economy transforming the labor market, there is a lot of public service work that takes a human touch that the market is not seeing to, including elder care, childcare, deferred maintenance, establishing a green energy infrastructure, setting down cable for rural broadband, etc.

Blue Cross Cracks Down on ER Visits, Angers Doctors.

Hillary had been running for president for almost a decade and still didn’t really have a rationale. Obama was no better. But at least he won.

The U.S. can’t quit the Paris climate agreement, because it never actually joined. All the liberal wailing and gnashing of teeth now, despite Obama’s inaction and “joining” only when it’d do no political damage to him.

Manchester attack: It is pious and inaccurate to say Salman Abedi’s actions had ‘nothing to do with Islam.’ Yep. Just as it’s inaccurate to say that Right Wing terrorism in the US has “nothing to do with Christianity.”

What No One Ever Tells You About Tiny Homes. I don’t need a 5,000sf house, but I certainly don’t want a 500sf one.

Why Some Scenes In Your Favorite Action Movies Look Jerky.

The median home size decreased slightly in 2016, but it’s still historically high at a time when smaller houses are in demand. Where I live, avg home is a 4+ bedroom monstrosity when average family size is 2.5 people.

She has placed the blame on misogyny, voter suppression, Russian agents, the Democratic National Committee, Facebook’s fake news problem, the media’s coverage of her email scandal (which she inexplicably compared to Pearl Harbor), and Wikileaks.

Retail carnage continues as sector’s job growth falls for fourth straight month.

Orientalism and non-translation.

Fuck Facebook.

The cold facts about the Paris Agreement, global warming, & the Constitution. Both signing on to and exiting the Paris agreement are symbolic, mostly meaningless, and exiting beneficial if the US ever elects someone like Sanders.

How Markets Work.

Walmart is asking employees to deliver packages on their way home from work.

Hawaii and the Ghost of Climate-Change Future.

A New Report Finds No Evidence That People Will Work Less Under a Universal Basic Income. Of course not, unless it were very high. What it will do is stop people from taking horrible jobs for low pay, which is why industry opposes it.

Hundreds of Walmart Employees Say They’ve Been Punished for Taking Sick Days.

Google could face a $9bn EU fine for rigging search results in its favour.

Data mining astronomical records fails to falsify Einstein. Twenty years of orbiting around a black hole ends up in perfect agreement with relativity.

The Obamas’ $8.1 million real estate purchase is a lesson for us all. Yes, but the lesson is: no one should be that rich, especially no one powerful.

What’s Warming the World?

Universal Scalability Law.

Comparing An iPhone 7 Camera To A $100,000 Hollywood-Grade Camera. Phone cams have improved, but they remain just worlds away from a decent still or video rig. Just because you can’t get better pictures with a $$$ camera doesn’t mean I can’t. (I do.)

The First Cookbook.

What would California’s proposed single-payer healthcare system work? It would benefit millions, and make Kevin Drum angry. Win-win.

Want to reduce income inequality in the US? Dismantle its onerous system of copyrights and patents.

Around the world, environmental laws are under attack in all sorts of ways.

Poll: Americans Think Their Health Care Will Get Worse. They are not wrong.

Women seem to be leaving the workforce for some of the same reasons men are: Middle-class jobs are in short supply and working at the bottom pays less than it used to.

Enough with the dead butterflies!

Markets Don’t Trust Banks, and They’re Right.

Hunting Down the Lost Apples of the Pacific Northwest.

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