» 2018 » October Epicene Cyborg

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October 13, 2018

The Political Economy of the Working Class.

Amid Market Rout, Decade of “Financial Repression” Ends, Capital Preservation Suddenly is a Thing. Cap pres was a thing with me already.

Rising Health Care Costs Means a Job Doesn’t Equal Security.

Why Are Trump Supporters Offering People ‘Free Helicopter Rides’ Online?

Donald Trump, Brett Kavanaugh, and the Rule of Pampered Princelings.

Women don’t act as one. The question is why so many people are still surprised that they don’t, even after the election of 2016. The Left is all about prizing the individuality of women…until they treat them like robots that most vote exactly the way they’ve been “programmed.”

Development and Security.

Psychological Origins of the Industrial Revolution.

Adam Smith’s two economies.

With Market Hot, Landlords Slam the Door on Section 8 Tenants.

The land price argument and why it fails.

In a corporatist system, wherein there is no clear line between corporate power and government power, corporate censorship is government censorship. I know this censorship spree would hit the left harder, but of course they would not believe that until it occurred. Look who’s getting de-platformed now?

Geometric pies.

Exposure to opposing views on social media can increase political polarization.

The only individual action that matters is voting for people who care about climate change.

Ethnography is the opposite of the political echo chamber. It’s the antidote to that queasy feeling I get after 10 minutes on Twitter.

‘We Need Answers’: Florida Residents Increasingly Desperate for Food and Shelter.

October 12, 2018

How An Amateur Rap Crew Stole Surveillance Tech That Tracks Almost Every American. If someone wrote this as fiction, they’d be laughed out of the editor’s or producer’s office.

Medicaid Expansion and the Opioid Epidemic. New evidence that expansion reduces overdose mortality and increases treatment access.

Visualize the Entire Global Economy in One Chart.

This is 18 Around the World — Through Girls’ Eyes.

Rising test scores . . . reported as stagnant test scores.

The Later Wittgenstein.

How Will 6% Mortgage Rates Deal with Housing Bubble 2?

The economic and the political crises we are witnessing are not really crises. Meaning that they are not events of limited duration that you can expect to be over.

Percentage of young U.S. children who don’t receive any vaccines has quadrupled since 2001.

Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women. GIGO. True for “AI” as for anything else.

October 11, 2018

Sloppy science bears substantial blame for Americans’ bad eating habits.

Wide Streets as a Tool of Oppression.

Plants Can’t Talk. But Some Fruits Say ‘Eat Me’ to Animals.

Anti-Wind Farm Activism Is Sweeping Europe—and the U.S. Could Be Next. Could the human race in general be any stupider?

Graduate Student Solves Quantum Verification Problem. Urmila Mahadev spent eight years in graduate school solving one of the most basic questions in quantum computation: How do you know whether a quantum computer has done anything quantum at all? I had no idea this problem had been solved. Cool.

Twin studies indicate that between 30% and 60% of the phenotypic variance in personality, as assessed by a variety of instruments, is genetic in origin.

The All-Women Team of Scientists That Trekked to the Heart of Kilauea Volcano’s Eruption.

Are millennials really to blame for the decline in the liberal arts? Increasing college tuition means adults have more power over their children for longer. I wonder if this isn’t also responsible for the modern liberal belief that a woman has no agency of any kind before she’s ~35, that she’s essentially a child? (Also, why does this not apply to men?)

October 10, 2018

Why Some Amazon Workers Are Fuming About Their Raise.

Generative adversarial network.

How Do You Find an Alien Ocean? Margaret Kivelson Figured It Out. For forty years, the physicist at U.C.L.A. has been uncovering the outer solar system’s secrets. Few scientists know more about the mysteries of Jupiter and its icy moons.

Climate change denial should be a crime. Bold. I like it. I like it a lot.

This sketch of the ways that bacteria appear in popular culture is also a sketch of ourselves. What our research demonstrates is that bacteria are a kind of vehicle for fears of what we might be, and of aspects of ourselves and our society that we find it difficult to confront directly.

The Death of the IPO. The number of IPOs is declining, and that could mean that small investors are getting shut out of the most lucrative deals.

Geoengineering Is Inevitable. Agreed. It’s terrible and inevitable.

Myth Busting Banksy. What a huge scam.

October 9, 2018

Is our future Star Trek or the dystopian Jupiter Ascending?

The Rise of Authoritarian Capitalism. Authoritarianism is not just restricted to capitalism, but has ramified across the entire cultural space of our civilization.

One of the most important ethical practices is to know where your red lines are. What won’t you do? What won’t you accept or let go?

Men like to believe theyd be great in apocalypse scenarios but they dont even know how to sew.

I watched a rape. For five decades, I did nothing. Even in the face of great evil witnessed in person, most people do nothing. I try not to be one of those people.

The transformation in human consciousness is the plan of action. Not as crazy as it seems. Has happened several times in human history. Examples: Controlling fire. Making Art. Agriculture. Writing. Those were revolutions of thoughts, not action.

Some Thoughts On Climate Change.

October 8, 2018

Major Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk of Crisis as Early as 2040s. In many places, the crisis is already here.

The melodious call of many birds comes from a mysterious organ buried deep within their chests: a one-of-a-kind voice box called a syrinx. Now, scientists have concluded that this voice box evolved only once, and that it represents a rare example of a true evolutionary novelty.

Age of fracture and after.

A Common Bacterium Has Been Discovered Thriving in a Place Where It Shouldn’t Exist.

5G Got me Fired.

On the 16th, I was asked to speak at a gun control rally by a woman on the school board. For what seemed like the first time, adults were treating me and my peers as though they cared about what we had to say.

The Causes of Traffic and Congestion.

Vacuum decay: the ultimate catastrophe. My partner once made our vacuum decay by setting it on fire accidentally.

Some people really do deeply hate women.

October 7, 2018

Forest study in China finds mix of trees can absorb twice as much carbon as areas with one species.

Decades before Amazon dominated the city, Seattle was the fiery site of labor unrest, radical action — and the US’s only true general strike.

Kavanaugh’s Confirmation Will Kill Disabled Sex Workers Like Me.

The fault tolerance of natural language suggests….

Women aren’t a monolith – and the white women supporting Kavanaugh prove it.

In 2018, culture is being evaluated for its moral correctness more than for its quality.

The First Rule of Microsoft Excel—Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It. Hell yes to this. Say, “Excel? What’s that? Is that some kind of energy drink?”

Do you really want to impeach Trump?

Waiting for Iceland’s Brave Stance Against Neoliberalism, 10 Years Later.

Forgiveness Is Overrated.

Being frugal is for the rich.

In a rarity, Los Angeles strips building from rent control, leaving tenants facing big increases.

College Sports.

Welfare was meant to help the poor, not subsidise exploitative employers.

We’re animals. We think we do things for reasons we understand, but we’re 99% instinct-driven.

The Dutch Reach: A No-Tech Way to Save Bicyclists’ Lives.

Taming the Groundcherry: With Crispr, a Fussy Fruit Inches Toward the Supermarket.

October 6, 2018

Bacteria Floating 30,000 Feet Overhead Could Be Influencing the Weather. Bacteria, what are you doing up there? Get down from there.

From Harvey Weinstein to Brett Kavanaugh in One Exhausting Year. Women bared their souls. Yet somehow men are casting themselves as victims.

Theory transmission didn’t even result in much learning! Indeed, in some respects theories actually reduced learning because people who inherited a theory tended to believe it to the exclusion of other theories and, as a result, they reduced their exploration of the design space.

“High End” Apartment Construction Totally Dominates, Creates Mismatch of Supply & Demand.

Fresh and Wilting Glass Flowers by Lilla Tabasso Explore the Nature of Ephemerality.

40% of all multinational profits and 50% of US ones are in tax havens. US companies report more profits in Ireland than China, Japan, Germany, France and Mexico combined. 10% of global GDP is being held inside tax havens. ~50% Russia’s wealth has been hidden abroad.

There is a lot of talk about educating society about science. Perhaps what is more needed is educating scientists about society.

How Democratic Party idiocy may cost them the Senate. “Idiocy” is pretty much the Democrat brand.

Berkeley’s Jumping Robot is Back.

The Organic Chemistry Behind “The Pill.”

‘This will negatively impact home values’—California parents oppose plan to build affordable housing for teachers.

Now that China won’t take plastic waste, what’s the U.S. doing?

Neon uterus with boxing glove ovaries by artist Zoe Buckman.

October 5, 2018

The Binary Bias: A Systematic Distortion in the Integration of Information. I spend half my thinking time attempting to avoid doing this.

If men had to get IUDs, they’d get epidurals and a hospital stay.

Cushy office perks are a trap.

Lord, give me the confidence of a straight white male Ivy Leaguer writing about the true aesthetics of the common man from his journalism job with good benefits.

People will say – you need to embrace the change. No. You do not. You need to embrace good change and resist change that is done for the sake of it, or one which harms your productivity. Preach it.

New autonomous farm wants to produce food without human workers.

The average OpSec bro has less practical training than a teenage girl.

Blogging vs. Twitter. Blogging makes you smarter and Twitter makes you stupider. I see, then, why Twitter won.

Do we have evidence for an exomoon? Ask again in a year.

A nonprofit battles the ‘magnetic media crisis’ by digitizing aging movies before they vanish.

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