» 2018 » March Epicene Cyborg

Newly Sequenced Cockroach Genome Explains Why They Are So Goddamn Hard to Kill.

US electricity use drops, renewables push fossil fuels out of the mix. About 20 years ago, I was told that it was impossible that the economy could grow with decreasing electricity use. Another thing all those people were wrong about.

California Housing Problems Are Spilling Across Its Borders. Housing is far too expensive everywhere; California is just the tip of that spear.

In 2016, the United States spent nearly twice as much as 10 high-income countries on medical care and performed less well on many population health outcomes.

Stories about President Trump’s move on tariffs have focussed on the Midwest, but much of American steel is now made in smaller mills in the South.

The biggest solar parks in the world are now being built in India.

No one can pretend Facebook is just harmless fun any more.

The hunt for Toys R Us’ missing millions: Investigators probe a £580m loan moved to a tax haven just months before the store went bust.

How Did Our Default Ringtones Become So Grating?

Bills cracking down on sex work won’t help trafficking victims, but more housing will.

The formula widely agreed upon by conservation scientists is to keep half the land and half the sea of the planet as wild and protected from human intervention or activity as possible.

The Bleak View Of The World’s Problems (Or: They’re all going to have to die.)

The Devens Literacy Test.

‘Testilying’ — a Stubborn Police Problem.

Hyper-efficient gas engines, next-gen wind turbines, and more early-stage wonders.

The reality of living with a disability.

Booting the Multia.

One side effect of being young, female and sick: People won’t believe you.

The Weird World Inside a Pitcher Plant.

These Crickets Can’t Sing Anymore—But They’re Still Trying.

Double Movement.

Blockchain might just be the most over-hyped technology of all time.

The Rise and Fall of the American SRO.

Some of this hash plowed into Spirit Lake, a secluded mountain getaway that once hosted scout camps, summer cottages, and small resorts. The force of the cascading debris created a tsunami that sent water coursing some 850 feet up and over the surrounding slopes.

Toys ‘R’ Us Case Is Test of Private Equity in Age of Amazon. This piece is very generous with the aims of private equity. Generous as in “not even close.”

Federal court tosses out Obama-era rule requiring financial advisers to act in customers’ best interests.

Someone said on the thread yesterday that cities are the future. Well, duh. But cities can’t be everybody’s future; too much density isn’t good for anyone, and I for one don’t want to live in some slightly cleaner and less polluted version of Mexico City, or even Los Angeles. Hear, hear. If the future is everyone crammed into some Hong Kong-style highrise, I’d honestly rather be dead.

Numerals.

New research suggests a pretty straightforward way to bust gender stereotypes: Get men and women to work closely alongside each other. Offices are becoming more segregated from what I can tell.

When Truth and Reason Are No Longer Enough.

Complex Human Cultures Are Older Than Scientists Thought.

The crisis in modern masculinity.

To find suspects, police quietly turn to Google.

Time After Capitalism.

Pfizer CEO gets 61% pay raise—to $27.9 million—as drug prices continue to climb.

How do we define affordable housing?

The Intellectual We Deserve.

Why Gun Culture Is So Strong in Rural America.

Yale Study: Sad, Lonely Introverts Are Natural Born Social Psychologists. Introverts prone to melancholy are exceptionally good at accurately assessing truths about human social behavior, without formal training or tools.

A list of all the places that the sea already came for.

Scott Kelly’s medical monitoring has spawned some horrific press coverage.

EU wants to require platforms to filter uploaded content (including code). Really surprised this hasn’t happened everywhere already.

Study: Mapping Apps May Make Traffic Worse.

Anti-Union Media Conglomerate Experimenting With What Happens When You Keep Laying Off Workers.

Generational Disaster: Debt-Laden Millennials Set Back By $140,000 Vs Their Parents.

How Public Schools Became a Battleground in the Trump Era.

The heart of the Deep Space Network started beating on Christmas Eve 1963, when JPL confirmed their long-term intentions of sending missions into deep space.

Research hints at tipping point in the Atlantic’s currents.

Trump Was Right to Block Merger.

Many Drugs and Many Doctors Lead to Many Mistakes.

Jordan Peterson: Useful Idiot.

The Worsening Cosmic Ray Situation.

Physically Fit Women Were Almost 90% Less Likely to Get Dementia in 44-Year-Study.

#MeToo, Said the Shulamite.

We’re getting the relationship between video games and people all wrong.

Stephen Hawking’s final words to the internet: robots aren’t the problem, capitalism is.

This is not a time to calm down. Kids are fucking dead. Their friends are rightfully, and loudly, pissed about it.

2 “good guys with guns” accidentally fired them in schools on Tuesday.

How Amazon Became Corporate America’s Nightmare.

The Market Can’t Solve a Massacre. Our political rhetoric, like our moral imagination, uses the vocabulary and logic of the market, of assets and investments, of incentives and innovation. This is an excellent piece.

Autonomous Vehicles Require Socio-Political Acceptance—An Empirical and Philosophical Perspective on the Problem of Moral Decision Making.

Gina Haspel, Trump’s Pick for CIA Director, Ran a Black Site for Torture.

Don’t Mind Me, Just Charging.

Ideological Apparatus. Social movements seem doomed to reproduce the dominant societal ethos, even if nominally directly opposed to it. That so many do it so thoughtlessly is what bothers me.

A way that men abuse their power that especially white men in tech can identify with: when senior management expresses their opinion on implementation details. Yep. “Advice” always terrible, 10 years out of date, and extremely harmful to the entire project. Good analogy.

Taleb: “Best Thing For Society Is Bankruptcy Of Goldman Sachs.”

Why the Tiny Weight of Empty Space Is Such a Huge Mystery.

Reality Winner: The Cost of Mounting a Defense Arguing the Government Overclassifies.

The Insane Things We Do to Avoid Ambulance Bills Shows Just How Fucked Up Our Health-Care System Is.

On the so-called “beauty premium.” The beauty premium is also partly subverted by the fact that women in hiring positions tend not to want to hire attractive or very attractive women, causing a sort of beauty dispremium.

The Dark Warning of an Early Spring.

Why Film Critics Were Blind to The Big Lebowski’s Brilliance. They’re biased toward naturalism in movies, rather than bizarro versions of the real world. I don’t even care for the film that much, but still accurate.

Spencerian script.

Clothes are what most visibly set humans apart from all other species.

The voices of ancient women.

Why Japan youth gangs don’t use guns.

Regulate Weapons Like We Do in the Military, Says an Army Officer.

A Tale of Two Moralities, Part One: Regional Inequality and Moral Polarization.

AI Has a Hallucination Problem That’s Proving Tough to Fix.

Stochastic resonance.

You Can Have Emotions You Don’t Feel. Yep. My most common experience.

What would happen if you dived into Jupiter?

To Test Einstein’s Equations, Poke a Black Hole.

Right-to-Work Laws Have Devastated Unions — and Democrats.

Almost entirely absent from the 576 pages of Enlightenment Now are the social movements that for centuries fought for equal rights, an end to slavery, improved working conditions, a minimum wage, the right to organize, basic social protections, a cleaner environment, and a host of other progressive causes. The arc bending toward justice is no mystery: It bends because people force it to bend.

This is the story of how Honda engineers screwed up a big expensive project with a simple arithmetic mistake, tried to fudge their result with sound editing software, and congratulated themselves for being totally awesome.

Elizabeth Catte: Appalachia Isn’t Trump Country. Gonna read her book, yes I am.

Tech companies aren’t half the story.

Inside the Ecology of the Vacant Lot.

For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here’s What I Learned.

Society of Guilt.

Why You Can’t Remember Being a Kid.

Gigantic Study of Fake News Online Finds the Enemy Is Humanity.

No gun sells quicker than the weapon used in the most recent mass shooting.

World War II’s Best Codebreaker Was a Woman.

Things Aren’t What They Used To Be. Watching liberals embrace unrestrained free trade because Trump is against it for the moment is very weird and disappointing.

What Airbnb Did to New York City’s Housing Market. Airbnb is pretty evil, as companies go.

Most Millennials Have $0 for Retirement and We’re All Fucked.

Why We Should Genetically ‘Disenhance’ Animals Used in Factory Farms.

Bill Gates: It is a ‘certainty’ we will have another financial crisis. Yep. Absolutely inevitable.

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