Society

In this bonus episode, Rohan Grey speaks with Philip Diehl about #MintTheCoin in the wake of this season’s debt limit showdown. Director of the United States Mint under President Bill Clinton from 1994 to 2000, Diehl is best known today as the person most responsible for 31 U.S. Code 5112(k).

Whodunit and what to do about it

Good afternoon from summertime Washington, where I am writing this dispatch along the Anacostia River. Alex Howard here, with another civic text. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed and amplified this series so far, particularly the folks who have signed up for a paid membership. This newsletter will need to

In a column four years ago, I recounted the experience of a friend in academia with the godawful “learning management software” which her institution required for designing exams. She complained  that she was trying to create a midterm exam and “blackboard is complete fucking garbage. No intuitive way to break up questions into sections, can’t...

AI critics are right about the industry’s challenges — but they risk missing the larger story

The Convivial Society: Vol. 5, No. 10

AI cameras can use this one weird trick to sidestep privacy restrictions to follow people around

Last week, in the midst of the slow, painful collapse of the generative AI hype cycle, something incredible happened. On Monday, a Federal Judge delivered a crushing ruling in the multi-year-long antitrust case filed against Google by the Department of Justice. In 300-pages of dense legal text, Judge Amit Mehta

The FRED Blog has discussed how the increased popularity of video streaming over the internet gradually decreased employment in video tape and disc rental establishments. Today we explore a related topic: how consuming news over the internet has reduced employment in the print media industry.

Americans certainly remember Sputnik. At a time when the world was larger and scarier, the Soviets had a metal basketball flying over the United States and the rest of the world. It made people ner…

“Five thousand quatloos that the newcomers will have to be destroyed.” Quatloos. Credits. Euros. Dollars. Dogecoin. Wait, Dogecoin? At some point in your life, you’ve probably asked yourself, “What…

In April of this year, I published a fairly long piece in The New York Times, arguing that Democrats should be thinking hard about how to roll out President Biden’s multi-trillion dollar Build Back Better agenda without exacerbating inflationary pressures.

Aaron Huey’s effort to photograph poverty in America led him to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, where the struggle of the native Lakota people — appalling, and largely ignored — compelled him to…

Aaron Huey’s effort to photograph poverty in America led him to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, where the struggle of the native Lakota people — appalling, and largely ignored &#8212…

The Wikipedia {{primary sources}} cleanup template, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Template_index/Cleanup#Verifiability_and_sources Cleanup templates are for articles which should be improved. A good feature of Wikipedia is that...

Know Your Military - Here's my final thought on the non-issue of Walz' and Vance's service records. Most of the U.S. citizenry knows next to nothing about their military. I was enlisted for 14 years and left service 7 years ago and my family still doesn't quite understand what I did. My wife thought everyone was just assigned jobs, that there was no choice for me. But aside from anecdotes, lets look at some numbers: 1/9

There's a dangerous game of verbal gymnastics being played out in the public sphere, and it's high time we called it what it is: a steaming pile of i...

I am sincerely shocked they didn't pick the shitty technocrat lawyer and IDF volunteer with a bunch of scandals under his belt and instead went with the likable normal guy who seems to take pride in helping people. What is going on? Either way it's another L for the Beltway

I’m still digging through some of the pieces I posted at the now defunct NewCo Shift, and found this piece, adapted from a talk I gave at the Thrival Humans X Tech conference in Pittsburgh ba…

The governor of Minnesota had a career in the National Guard and as a high school teacher before he got into politics in the early 2000s.

There are more than 100 response teams nationwide, but experts say more research on their impact is needed.

Five years ago I was posting a lot to a publication called NewCo Shift, which is now offline. I got ahold of the archives, and found this review, which hasn’t lost any of its relevance &#8211…