» 2019 » January Epicene Cyborg

hits counter

January 31, 2019

The Most Splendid Housing Bubbles in America Shrink.

We Need a Scorched-Earth Campaign Against Health Care Insurers. Weird to agree with Kevin Drum, but yes.

Gone in a Generation. Across America, climate change is already disrupting lives.

The Shutdown Showed How Precarious Americans’ Finances Really Are. What began as an impasse over the border wall became a warning sign of creeping instability.

A free book of science fiction from around the world about climate change, introduced by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Wealth redistribution, not tax cuts, key to economic growth.

Where does today’s anti-trade sentiment come from? A new study finds that people are particularly sensitive to job losses and outsourcing due to international trade. Protectionist sentiments, the authors find, can be magnified given the right narrative frames. Funny, when people’s jobs get shipped thousands of miles away, they aren’t such big fans of “free” trade.

New paper in AER demonstrating empirically what many suspected for a long time: globalization has led to reduced tax burden on the top 1% while increasing it on the median.

Yale psychologists find that adults take girls’ pain less seriously.

Longevity defined as top 10% survivors and beyond is transmitted as a quantitative genetic trait.

As Midwest Freezes and Australia Burns, Welcome to the Age of Weather Extremes. Numbing cold hit parts of the United States as wildfires raged in Australia’s record-breaking heat. Here’s the climate change connection.

Now, Refrigerators Are Watching Us Too: “Smart” Coolers Are Coming To A Store Near You.

Neanderthals and Denisovans Shared a Siberian Cave for Thousands of Years, New Research Suggests. Timeshares didn’t begin with 80s Yuppies after all!

January 30, 2019

The Illegal CIA Operation That Brought Us 9/11.

Wall Street Executives Fear Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, Want ‘Centrist’ Like Howard Schultz. Howard Schultz runs, Trump probably wins.

Should Cognitive Differences Research Be Forbidden? I have come around to the view that some knowledge perhaps is too dangerous to even research. I don’t like this view, but I begrudgingly agree.

Who’s correct about human nature, the left or the right?

Major New Study Finds Lowering Blood Pressure Can Prevent Cognitive Decline, but Questions Remain.

A liberal elite still luring us towards the abyss.

How digital media killed itself.

The Green New Deal: How We Will Pay For It Isn’t ‘A Thing’ – And Inflation Isn’t Either.

An Evolutionary Perspective on Why Food Overconsumption Impairs Cognition.

Facebook pays teens to install VPN that spies on them. Even more than FB already spies, and that’s a lot. Is there a single reason Mark Zuckerberg is outside a jail cell?

January 29, 2019

Ghostly galaxies hint at dark matter breakthrough.

Twitter Might Punish Users Who Tweet ‘Learn To Code’ At Laid-Off Journalists.

The Generation of the ‘Layoff Fund.’ What are millennials saving for? Mainly getting fired.

Into the dark. The inside story of an improbable team of divers, a near-impossible plan and the rescue of 12 boys from a Thai cave.

Association between intake of non-sugar sweeteners and health outcomes: systematic review and meta-analyses of randomised and non-randomised controlled trials and observational studies. NSS do not seem to be harmful in any notable way.

Overall, the evidence suggests that while young men have dramatically increased the amount of time they spend gaming over the past decade and a half, their decreasing levels of employment and labor force participation are more likely to result from changes in labor demand.

The Fleecing of Millennials. Their incomes are flat. Their wealth is down. And Washington is aggravating future threats. Precarity is really what matters.

Lifting Weights Just Once a Week Can Cut Your Heart Disease Risk in Half.

The Next Financial Crisis Could Be Caused by Climate Change.

How can you prepare for the future of work? The answer is not “learn to code.”

January 28, 2019

Perception Of Rapists As Successful People Decreases Likelihood Of Crime Being Labeled As Rape, Study Finds.

Facebook: The Normalization Of What Should Never Have Been Accepted As Normal.

We need to rethink everything we know about global warming. New calculations show scientists have grossly underestimated the effects of air pollution.

From the Northern to the Southern Cross.

The next generation of computerized voices has to be human enough to connect with but not so human that we feel we’re being lied to. That’s no small feat.

From this point of view, not only does one never stop hustling — one never exits a kind of work rapture, in which the chief purpose of exercising or attending a concert is to get inspiration that leads back to the desk. Evil.

Labor Market Is Doing Fine With Higher Minimum Wages. Predictions of job losses and slower economic growth haven’t panned out.

Democratic attacks on AOC expose the party’s fear of taking on moneyed interests.

The rent is too damned high because money-laundering oligarchs bought all the real-estate to clean their oil money. Not just oil money, but also Chinese money being exfiltrated, etc.

The Hidden Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite.

January 27, 2019

In WSJ Op-Ed, Mark Zuckerberg Speaks Down to Users and Misses the Point.

The World’s Writing Systems.

Muscle memory discovery ends ‘use it or lose it’ dogma. New research shows that extra nuclei gained during exercise persist even after a muscle shrinks from disuse, disease or aging — and can be mobilized rapidly to facilitate bigger gains on retraining.

There’s No Medical Reason to Get Your Period While on the Pill.

Pity the poor billionaire, for today he feels a new and unsettling emotion: fear.

The government shutdown is going to do major damage to the GOP.

The Crisis Facing American Journalism Did Not Start With the Internet. For decades, newspaper conglomerates lapped up profits and failed to adapt. Our communities are worse off for their folly.

Ancient Plants Reveal Arctic Summers Haven’t Been This Hot in 115,000 Years.

Google Displays Fake Phone Numbers For Some Local Businesses In Toronto So They Can Record Calls.

The earliest when.

January 26, 2019

Your TV Is Now a Computer, but Not in a Good Way. You don’t really own it, and it breaks in unpredictable ways. My TV is just a monitor because I’m not into surveillance and such.

Android Q will allow your evil carrier to lock down your phone in new and exciting ways.

Why Intervention in Venezuela Must Be Rejected.

We shouldn’t blame Silicon Valley for technology’s problems—we should blame capitalism.

Nothing is more arbitrary and changeable over time, or regarded as more self-evident and absolute in their moment, than social mores.

Virtually all of the founding inventions that underlie the current “knowledge” economy were either made by government researchers or by researchers in a government regulated monopoly (aka. Bell Labs.).

You can have a free press or you can have Facebook. But you can’t have both.

Mr. Jobs probably got it right the first time: Many of us would be better off returning to his original minimalist vision for our phones.

AOC Thinks Concentrated Wealth Is Incompatible With Democracy. So Did Our Founders.

The Messy Truth About Infiltrating Computer Supply Chains.

Jag Diary 9: Google Mapocalypse.

Dynamism has declined across Western economies. Fewer new firms are being started and America’s opening to the world has stalled.

Max Planck’s scheinproblems.

Without Workers, We Wouldn’t Have Democracy.

Trump’s shutdown is over for now. But the obliviousness of the plutocrats who run America won’t be forgotten.

Obesity in infertile women increases the costs of fertility treatments, reduces their effectiveness and increases significantly the risks of many complications of pregnancy and for the newborn. Studies suggest that even a modest loss of 5–10 % of body weight can restore ovulation.

The whole ecosystem of artificial intelligence is optimized for a lack of accountability.

January 25, 2019

Physical activity protects against depression.

As usual, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is right: There should be no billionaires.

A Common Gum Infection Bacteria May Also be Causing Alzheimer’s.

More Americans than ever are worried about climate change, but they’re not willing to pay much to stop it.

The U.S. Needs a Federal Wealth Tax.

Climate change tipping point could be coming sooner than we think. Vegetation may not be able to continue abating effects of emissions from human activities.

To Fight Fatty Liver, Avoid Sugary Foods and Drinks. Children with fatty liver disease sharply reduced the amount of fat and inflammation in their livers by cutting soft drinks, fruit juices and foods with added sugars. Fat Acceptance wankers just need to shut up forever.

Together, our findings suggest that partisans of both sides of the political spectrum engage with the ‘fake news’ label (and perceive media story legitimacy) in a way that is consistent with a motivated reasoning approach, though these motivations appear to differ between-groups.

Governments of limited vice.

Start-Ups Try to Turn Satellite Surveillance Into Big Business.

Yes, “algorithms” can be biased. Here’s why.

January 24, 2019

Queueing theory: The science of waiting in line.

The Rationalization of the Attention Market.

America has never worried about financing its priorities.

Researchers get gene drive to push mice beyond Mendel.

Public transportation is 10 times safer, analysis shows.

Millions of bank loan and mortgage documents have leaked online. The database included highly sensitive financial data on customers who have taken out loans with U.S. banks.

Recent studies show that brief periods of rest after learning facilitate consolidation of new memories. This effect is associated with memory-related brain activity during quiet rest and suggests that in our daily lives, moments of unoccupied rest may serve an essential cognitive function.

A subsequent steep increase in cumulative culture, roughly 75 ka, may reflect the rise of active novelty seeking (curiosity), which led to a dramatic range expansion and steep increase in the diversity and complexity of material culture.

Sorry, Ajit: Comcast lowered cable investment despite net neutrality repeal. Shocking absolutely no one.

Climate change, social collapse, and deep adaptation.

Sharpest Color CRT Display is Monochrome Plus a Trick.

Your Expensive Smart Appliance May Not Last A Decade. Which is part of the point.

Birth of massive black holes in the early universe revealed.

Love in the Age of Data. I do think it’ll become increasingly unacceptable to meet anyone outside of algorithm. Will be seen as harassment of a sort.

January 23, 2019

Ancient Climate Change Triggered Warming That Lasted Thousands of Years.

Rather than simply using narrative-disrupting tools wherever they come from to fight the establishment narrative control machine, I’m encouraged to isolate myself to the extremely narrow spectrum of voices which agree with my exact worldview perfectly. This kind of paranoid, self-cannibalizing mentality is rife throughout most anti-establishment circles.

There are a variety of weight loss interventions that can work quite well.

tumblr hit tracking tool