After four years, as she prepares to hand off to her successor, our workplace advice columnist reflects on the rewards and the frustrations of office life.
Two days after his company's downfall, Austen Allred wrote:
I wish people could see how ugly it is to be envious, and how obvious it is to those around you when that's what's happening.
There's not much uglier than trying to tear someone down because they achieved what you wish
We asked a group of writers to consider the forces that have shaped our lives in 2017. Here, science fiction writer Ted Chiang looks at capitalism, Silicon Valley, and its fear of superintelligent AI.
What everyone gets wrong about the 2015 Ashley Madison scandal
Nine years after hackers targeted Ashley Madison, the dating site for wannabe adulterers, many people still don't grasp what was truly chilling about the scandal, says Annalee Newitz
On the campus of Florida International University, in Miami, there’s a place ominously named “The Extreme Events Institute.” They map the risk of storm surge for the whole Caribbean, and study how the public perceives the threats from natural disasters. They’re also home to the International Hurricane Research Center. Their hangar houses a dozen giant
Going Dark: The war on encryption is on the rise. Through a shady collaboration between the US and the EU.
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...
Errors detected in several historical consumer price indices
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.
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?
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.
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...