» 2024 » January Epicene Cyborg

The next time you’re interviewing for a job, there are five words your interviewer might say that should send you running in the opposite direction: “We’re like a family here.”

Japan government accepts it’s no longer the ’90s, stops requiring floppy disks.

The ‘Take Our Border Back’ Convoy Is Already a Complete Mess. Instead of immigrants, the group of extremists mostly battled each other, paranoia, and their GPS systems.Preview of Civil War II.

New Wolf in the pack: Astronomers discover an ultra-short-period super-Earth.

New GitHub Copilot Research Finds ‘Downward Pressure on Code Quality.’

What Happened to My Search Engine? Or why tech upgrades are now mostly downgrades.

How Much of the World Is It Possible to Model? Mathematical models power our civilization—but they have limits.

I worked nights, weekends, and holidays after being put on a performance improvement plan. I saved my job, but it wasn’t worth it. If you ever get put on a PIP, just find another job then quit.

Confirmation of ancient lake on Mars offers hope that Perseverance rover’s soil and rock samples hold traces of life.

Beware of scammers sending live couriers to liquidate victims’ life savings. The scams sound easy to detect, but they steal billions of dollars, often from the elderly.

Alzheimer’s can pass between humans in rare medical accidents, suggests study.

Survey: Surprising number of managers want sick employees to come to work. Fucking idiots.

Tiny Fossils Reveal Dinosaurs’ Lost Worlds.

Trump is a loser. Here’s why it matters.

Is America like the Soviet Union in 1990? It sometimes feels that way. America’s symptoms of decline are everywhere — and history tells us what happens if we don’t change course.

Inside the Crime Rings Trafficking Sand.

The Rise of the American Oligarchy.

Tech Layoffs Not Tied to Economic Struggles, but AI Investments.

Bankruptcies Surge Among Gen X and Millennials.

How Boeing’s troubles are upsetting the balance of power in aviation.

We keep making the same mistakes with spreadsheets, despite bad consequences.

Gen Z might be the MAGA movement’s undoing.

What would the late heavy bombardment have done to the Earth’s surface? Early in Earth’s history, bombardment by enormous asteroids was common.

Windows 11 Design Mistakes.

The Best Neighborhoods for Starting a Life in the Galaxy.

Record number of Americans are homeless amid nationwide surge in rent, report finds.

Gen Z are over having their work ethic questioned: ‘Most boomers don’t know what it’s like to work 40+ hours a week and still not be able to afford a house.’ But Kevin Drum and Noah Smith say all is well….

A 27-year-old Berkeley city council member wanted to build more affordable housing. Relentless harassment from ‘left NIMBYs’ pushed him to resign.

Google Update Reveals AI Will Start Reading All Your Private Messages.

The ultramodern architecture bubble has burst.

Prices of New Houses Drop to 2-Year Low.

Beware of fake IronWolf drives on Amazon.

Travel bans proposed in Tennessee & Oklahoma. States would send aunts & grandmas to prison as “traffickers” for helping teens.

If you want to understand modern politics, you have to understand modern fandom.

‘Laying claim to nature’s work’: plant patents sow fear among small growers.

The Norman Conquest brought French kings, language and culture across the Channel. What did that mean for medieval England?

The Great Freight-Train Heists of the 21st Century.

Which Shows Got Their Finale Right, and Which Didn’t? A Statistical Analysis.

A vote for Trump is a vote for chaos. Let’s leave the 2010s in the past where they belong.

Six Reasons Drug Prices Are So High in the U.S. Research shows prices in the United States are nearly double those in other well-off countries.

A Second Trump Term Will Bring an End to the American Century. This was in the cards anyway, Trump or no Trump.

Most People Who Stop Taking Wegovy/Ozempic Keep the Weight Off, Study Finds.

iPhone Apps Secretly Harvest Data When They Send You Notifications, Researchers Find.

Housing is now unaffordable for a record half of all U.S. renters, study finds.

Why Bosses Should Tell Employees to Slow Down More Often.

Rising nationalism in the nineteenth century threatened multi-ethnic states with “right-sizing” through secessionism and irredentism. States therefore frequently turned to brutal “right-peopling”, in particular where cross-border minorities and those with a history of political independence increased the risk of territorial losses.

The effect of wearing college apparel on Black men’s perceived criminality and perceived risk of being racially profiled by police.

Cheap but lethally accurate: how drones froze Ukraine’s frontlines.

The iPhone’s Walls Are Coming Down, but Not in the US.

Streaming music is a steaming turd.

Turkish parliament approves Sweden’s NATO membership bid.

Higher vehicle hoods significantly increase pedestrian deaths, study finds.

A newly identified ‘Hell chicken’ species suggests dinosaurs weren’t sliding toward extinction before the fateful asteroid hit.

They Abducted a River in California. And Nobody Stopped Them.

Of greed, technolibertarianism and geek omnipotence. From 2000, still true and relevant.

Ring Will Stop Giving Cops a Free Pass on Warrantless Video Requests.

Google Drops Thousands Of Search Quality Raters In Latests Cuts (Cancels Appen Contract). Their search quality is below the floorboards so why even bother to rate it?

The strange reasons medieval people slept in cupboards.

US Movie Ticket Sales -46% in 2023 from 21 Years Ago: AMC and the Movie Theater Meltdown.

Insect populations flourish in the restored habitats of solar energy facilities.

For example, on NCIS Los Angeles Kensi often describes Deeks as a pervert for looking at or chasing women. Now the #meTOO movement is further broadening the definition of harassment, narrowing the range of acceptable approaches by men to women (sometimes requiring telepathy, since men must know in advance how women will respond). Has only gotten worse.

Chronic inflammation may be a “disease of affluence.”

France fines Amazon €32M for watching staff so much they’d have to ‘justify each break.’

The US needs 22m acres for the solar energy transition – here’s what that looks like.

Online travel agent allows customers to filter out Boeing 737 Max planes.

Alaska Airlines CEO: We found ‘many’ loose bolts on our Max 9 planes following near-disaster. Time to bolt out of any Boeing plane.

Palm Springs capped Airbnb rentals. Now some home prices are in free-fall.

Helium is an essential material for research and medical equipment, but it’s nonrenewable and difficult to recycle.

The ‘nothing-happened’ Y2K bug – how the IT industry worked overtime to save world’s computers. Yep. Nothing happened because WE FUCKING FIXED IT.

Cancer vaccine with minimal side effects nearing Phase 3 clinical trials.

How America accidentally made a free-money machine for banks.

More Workers Want to Change Jobs, but the Market Is Getting Tougher. Job dissatisfaction is colliding with shrinking opportunities for white-collar professionals.

HP CEO evokes James Bond-style hack via ink cartridges. “Our long-term objective is to make printing a subscription.” Fuck no.

Road rage is on the rise. You’re not imagining things. Data and experts confirm that drivers have become more aggressive, even violent.

The Woman Who Spent Five Hundred Days in a Cave.

NASA finally figures out how to open a $1-billion canister. Got some insulin in there?

The Printer Isn’t Working!!

How the internet is erasing the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre.

The Trick to a Great Marriage: Vacation Without Your Partner. At least sometimes.

It’s not that I think the companies are the problem, it’s the machineries and imperatives of Late Capitalism, which for a while we foolishly thought Internet companies could route around.

What the Housing Shortage Is Doing to American Environmentalism. Alas, most environmentalists are complete clowns.

On the dimensionality of spacetime.

The scam economy runs on this kind of indirection, where scammees are turned into scammers. Economy is now scams all the way down.

Why the World Is Betting Against American Democracy.

Scientists Film Plant ‘Talking’ to Its Neighbor, And The Footage Is Incredible.

How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus.

It’s Time to Nationalize and Then Break Up Boeing.

Actually, Way More Than Water Can Keep You Hydrated. I never drink plain water because I hate it.

European manufacturers and retailers face ‘chaotic’ period after Red Sea attacks.

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