» 2019 » June Epicene Cyborg

The era of national self-determination has turned out to be an era of international lawlessness, which has crippled the legitimacy of the nation state system. Just excellent article; a real systems thinker. Very rare.

For the origins of the selfie, look to the dandy.

Higher protein intake is associated with a lower likelihood of frailty among older women.

How Have Rents Changed Since 1960?

Suburban homeowners are the single biggest recipient of housing subsidies.

The Forever War Is So Normalized That Opposing It Is “Isolationism”.

Mold In Space. If I know anything from watching The Expanse, it’s that space goo is bad.

Joe Biden represents a failed white liberalism.

5 lessons from cities trying to fix traffic.

The Fragile Nature of the Social Mind.

How to speak Silicon Valley: 53 essential tech-bro terms explained.

Assortative mating and the evolution of desirability covariation.

Health Inequality Is Getting Worse in the US.

As of Friday afternoon local time, the small town of Gallargues-le-Montueux, located in southern France, cracked 45.9 degrees Celsius (114.6 degrees Fahrenheit). That marks an all-time French record.

New Property of Light Discovered.

Okay, here’s my promised post on the Transformer architecture.

This neural net would like to deliver these petitions.

A new federal study has found that an oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico that began 14 years ago has been releasing as much as 4,500 gallons a day, not three or four gallons a day as the rig owner has claimed.

The “backfire effect” is mostly a myth, a broad look at the research suggests.

Fake news ‘vaccine’ works: ‘pre-bunk’ game reduces susceptibility to disinformation.

The truth behind America’s most famous gay-hate murder.

The Problem With Public Expertise.

When Pepsi Had a Navy.

The genetics of obesity is about the environment.

Americans Have Spent Enough Money On A Broken Plane To Buy Every Homeless Person A Mansion. The cost of the Iraq + Afghanistan wars could’ve moved the US completely to renewables.

Privacy, democracy, and equality can be experienced as abstract ideas only by those who have the luxury of taking them for granted.

Some extinct crocs were vegetarians.

How Memphis’s Methodist University Hospital, a “nonprofit,” sued the shit out of its Black, poor patients while raking in millions and paying execs more than a million each. Usual criminal enterprise stuff.

The Pentagon Has a Laser That Can Identify People From a Distance By Their Heartbeat. They have an app for that.

What’s Wrong With Modern Buildings? Everything, Starting With How They’re Made.

How to Fight 8chan Medievalism—and Why We Must.

History Will Not Be Kind to Jony Ive. Ive, Apple’s Chief Design Officer, is leaving the company. He leaves a legacy that made its products hard to repair and impossible to upgrade.

Walmart’s Monopolization of Local Grocery Markets.

Deer Antlers Are a ‘Controlled’ Form of Bone Cancer.

Man Ruthlessly Scolds Other Man Online For Having Opinion He Held Less Than 2 Years Ago.

There Are Really Two Distinct White Working Classes. One is solidly Republican and will stay that way; the other leans Democratic. And then there are the in-betweeners. According to standard liberals/Dems, they are all deplorable and we should forget about them.

It turns out that Trump’s story of US manufacturing decline was much closer to being right than the story of technological progress being spun in Washington, New York, and Cambridge.

How Should We Treat Rational, Sentient Robots? Definitely not like Ava was treated in Ex Machina, though we probably will anyway.

The Road Not Taken. The shuttering of the GM works in Lordstown will also bury a lost chapter in the fight for workers’ control.

it would not be a problem for youtube to be politically neutral if they were politically neutral, but they aren’t. they can say that as much as they want but they have code that boosts some videos over others. if they delete that, they can be neutral.

Women’s greater support for censorship of “hate speech” is largely due to their greater susceptibility to sexual disgust.

New Flaw Discovered On Boeing 737 Max. The whole plane.

Edmunds examines costly side effect of safety tech: repairs.

‘Sand mafias’ threaten Morocco’s coastline.

There is a lot of resistance to free higher education in any of the forms that left-leaning candidates have proposed it, most of which fall into the predictable “Yeah well who’s gonna PAY for it huh?” trough that American political discourse uses whenever something that doesn’t directly and obviously benefit the wealthy is proposed. Lack of money and resources isn’t the problem, idiot centrists.

The Wave of Terror in American Commerce.

NY Times admits it sends stories to US government for approval before publication.

When NPR Is More Dangerous Than Fox News. When you tune in to “mainstream” media, you may think you’re getting an objective account when in fact you’re getting an account that’s biased in favor of war—just biased in subtler, harder-to-detect ways than the accounts on Fox News. Smarter propaganda for smarter people.

New England Is Losing Its Native Plants.

As the first of 12 presidential debates blows in at mid-week like an evil patch of bad summer weather, twenty candidates vie for the position of Ole Massa on the Democratic Party plantation, and the air is gravid with bad vibes.

High school students who take music courses score significantly better on math, science and English exams than their non-musical peers, according to a new study published in the Journal of Educational Psychology.

U.S. Tech Companies Sidestep a Trump Ban, to Keep Selling to Huawei.

Planning For A Global Green New Deal.

How Americans became workaholics. It is a relatively recent development. Hmm, what could’ve caused this? Starts with “neo” and ends with “liberalism.”

Lex specialis.

New Hampshire installs first historical marker to honor computer programming.

Yentl Syndrome: A Deadly Data Bias Against Women.

A Robot Has Been Stuck on Mars for Months. NASA will conduct a delicate rescue mission to free a probe trapped just inches below the Red Planet’s surface.

SESTA wiped out entire areas of the web in less than a year because internet corporations, the same ones signed up to Libra, decided that sex workers & queer people weren’t worth defending their free speech ideals for. You really think they will treat transactions any different?

Rainbow Blanket Octopus.

Hey, remember that “holy shit” explosion footage that went viral from a few days ago? Here’s the terrifying write-up of how close we came to that murdering most of Philadelphia.

The Ableist, Racist, Classist Underpinnings Of ‘Laziness’.

We know a lot less than we think about the world – which explains the allure of “simplism.” From how a zip works to Brexit, we often pretend we understand complex problems. But simplism has become a doctrine – and it is ruining our politics. Centrists, though, use the opposite to their political advantage. For them, everything is too hard and complex to attempt.

Capuchin monkeys have a 3,000-year archaeological record. 3,000 years discarded stone hammers reveal changes in capuchin diet and culture.

Facebook’s Libra Must Be Stopped. True, and also true if the string “‘s Libra” is removed from headline.

When you’re lying awake at night wondering whether you’ve done enough today, when you’re walking home from work and you wonder if you should buy groceries this week or pay rent on time, that word is capitalism.

Welcome to the Dollhouse. Great essay that completely subverts this era’s dubious certitudes.

What Does Oligarchy Mean? That We’re Screwed. The typical American has no influence at all.

Americans’ plastic recycling is dumped in landfills, investigation shows.

Boeing sued by more than 400 pilots in class action over 737 MAX’s ‘unprecedented cover-up’.

A lost century in economics: Three theories of banking and the conclusive evidence.

Inclusive fitness is an indispensable approximation for understanding organismal design.

The Cinematic Life of Trees.

America’s Finest Economists Have Been Needlessly Undermining Growth, Study Confirms.

The Land Where the Internet Ends. To find real solitude, you have to go out of range. But every year that’s harder to do, as America’s off-the-grid places disappear.

Giant Squid, Phantom of the Deep, Reappears on Video.

GeoWorks: The Other Windows. I used this back then. It was pretty good.

Ghost networks of psychiatrists make money for insurance companies but hinder patients’ access to care. More of the scam economy.

Corn `Train Wreck’ Worse Than Forecast, U.S. Farmers Warn.

Google Chrome has become surveillance software. It’s time to switch.

Making a house an investment is social poison.

Viewed very broadly, the construction industry functions like a massive, decentralized, and human-powered 3D printer controlled by AutoCAD.

It takes real skill to continue to be published from a place of such undisguised unoriginality, and for that if nothing else, Sunstein deserves our admiration.

One of the great challenges of city governance these days is that NIMBYs quite sincerely believe they are not NIMBYs.

Who Gets to Own the West? A new group of billionaires is shaking up the landscape. “Stealing” would be more accurate here.

In a Colony of 40,000, Just Two Penguin Chicks Survived This Year. The planet is sounding all sorts of alarms—including with the mass death of birds.

Open borders and a massive flow of low-skill immigrants create social and political stresses, but economists tell us they boost the economy. That ignores their costs.

Generations of lawyers and judges educated at law schools in the United States have been taught to ignore this essential role of law in creating and sustaining economic power.

What is the best way of wrecking a city? Pour cars into it.

Yes, there is such a thing as a vampire finch. Yes, it is what it sounds like.

Boeing Wins.

When Joe Biden Collaborated With Segregationists. Could this dumbass be any worse?

Alexa, how many dogs come to work at Amazon Seattle? 7,000. Fuck me. I could never work there (not that I’d want to).

How to Become a Federal Criminal.

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