Society

Western societies stand on the brink of a great reversion towards a demographically and economically stagnant society reminiscent of the Dark Ages.

Too many workplaces still encourage a culture of ‘stress-bragging’ and pretending to be busy instead of actually getting stuff done.

Under the slogan ‘Think of the children’, the European Commission tried to introduce total surveillance of all EU citizens. When the scandal was revealed, it turned out that American tech companies and security services had been involved in the bill, generally known as ‘Chat Control’ – and that the whole thing had been directed by completely different interests. Now comes the next attempt. New battering rams have been brought out with the ‘Going Dark’ initiative. But the ambition is the same: to install state spyware on every European cell phone and computer.

Cliometrica - This article presents a database with the probably most up-to-date and reliable consumer price indices for a large sample of European countries since 1870. The database is a...

Lund University. Jonas Ljungberg needed access to different European countries' consumer price indices (CPIs) for the last 150 years to calculate real exchange rates for a research project. But when he looked at the CPIs listed in popular databases, he found that several of the figures were not reliable. This discovery led Jonas Ljungberg to launch a new research project in which he went back to the sources and compiled the most credible consumer price indices from 24 European countries between 1870 and 2022.

Even casual fans are lured by a high-quality product that doesn’t exist on streaming platforms.

What if the internet were public interest technology? Is that too wildly speculative? I think not. I am not talking about a utopian project here — a public interest internet would be a glorious imperfect mess and it would be far from problem-free. But while there is a lot of solid thinking about various digital issues or pieces of internet infrastructure (much of which I rely upon here), I have yet to read to an answer to this question: What global digital architecture should we assemble if we take seriously the idea that the internet should be public interest technology?

Since the rise of the internet, software developers have commanded big salaries and valuable perks. But something has shifted since the pandemic.

Josh Elchert held an Employee Appreciation Day at his business so that he could honor the hard work of his employees

Those who insist that we all as a society pay the cost of a serious problem they are creating, just so that they can imagine themselves to be the solution. Things we could never afford and should stop paying for.

No.315 — Binding the Moon & Exadelic ⊗ Reimagining migration and mobility ⊗ AI systems are learning to lie and deceive

The leaf blower is one of the most hated objects in the modern world. They’re loud, they pollute, and… how important is a leafless lawn anyway? In a lot of towns and cities, the gas-powered leaf blower has been banned. In others, there are strict guidelines on where and when they can be used. But

In my short video this morning, I argue that any politician who says there is no magic money tree is not telling the truth. There is. It’s called the Bank of England, and they can tap it for cash whenever they want - so long as they keep inflation in mind. The...

In 1952, an experimental nuclear reactor in Chalk River, Ont., about 180 kilometres northwest of Ottawa, partially melted down, becoming the world's first nuclear reactor incident. Disaster was averted, in part, with help from future U.S. president Jimmy Carter.

The Pentagon admits to running the propaganda operation, which sowed distrust in Chinese vaccines.

In an age when AI regurgitates the blather of meaningless content, seeking its audience in the attention marketplace, it's a small wonder that it is hard to tell what is really real anymore.

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Building a tech industry that's better for its workers and customers through co-operation, democracy and worker ownership.

SAN MATEO, CA—After spending the past three decades of his life being totally unable and unwilling to engage in any meaningful way with the world around him, James Parker, a local guy who sucks at being a person, told reporters Thursday that he saw huge potential in AI. “While it’s still in its early phase, artificial…

Like this newsletter? Subscribe to my podcast Better Offline - this week we've got a two parter digging into Sam Altman, with a deeper dive featuring Tom Dotan of the Wall Street Journal (Part 1) and Ellen Huet (Part 2, airing Friday.) I think you'll love the back-catalog too! The

A chat with friends recently reminded me about pangrams, and what a cute little language curiosity they are. I also remembered that i never got a self-enumerating pangram generator to work. I should give that another try! I thought it would be fun play with ChatGPT and see if it could generate some good ones, expecting it to do quite well on this task. After all, LLMs should be excellent wordcels, right? That is, is there’s one thing they should be very good at, that is verbal intelligence. Yeah, i know this meme of “shape rotators vs. wordcels” can be a bit cringy, but i honestly find these terms ironically endearing. Well, it doesn’t seem so.

Last week, cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier published an interesting blog post in which he (together with co-author Barath Raghavan) argues that online privacy is continuing to decline for the same reason overfishing occurred in the last century – due to the “Shifting Baseline Syndrome.” The presented analogy is a very powerful one, but we still feel that it falls flat in some regards, and in reality, online privacy might even be worse off than suggested.

Plastic has become embedded in everyday life. That’s because for the last 70 years, the plastics industry convinced consumers to embrace the material for its low cost and disposability.