Pluralistic: How lock-in hurts design (24 Jan 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Society
The Etsy Sellers Getting Sued for Using a Smiley Face
Violence Is Our Way: The Great Delusion of Civilization
Beneath the pretense of benevolence lurks savage conquest.
Domestic Textile Industry Crashing Because of Trade Loophole
The ‘de minimis’ exemption allows Chinese e-commerce companies Shein and Temu to deliver hundreds of millions of packages of cheap clothing without tariffs or inspections.
The path to socially responsible AI - Stack Overflow
And the Oscar nomination doesn’t go to … 20 great performances snubbed by the Academy
Ahead of the release of year’s nominations later today, here are the best acting turns not even shortlisted for an Academy Award this century
Thinking Big - Futility Closet
Called on to give an after-dinner talk at a 1961 meeting, Los Alamos physicist Darol Froman proposed a new project “without much attention to some of the practical aspects”: What if we turned Earth into a giant spaceship and drove it around? If we built a fusion rocket and fed it the moon and some damp sand, it could (in principle) carry us out of orbit. Our atmosphere would protect us from interstellar radiation, and we’d be free of the worry of our sun’s impending death. It might take 100 million years to make our way out of the solar...
Dopamine, Smartphones & You: A battle for your time - Science in the News
by Trevor Haynes figures by Rebecca Clements “I feel tremendous guilt,” admitted Chamath Palihapitiya, former Vice President of User Growth at Facebook, to an audience of Stanford students. He was responding to a question about his involvement in exploiting consumer behavior. “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works,” he explained. In Palihapitiya’s talk, he highlighted something most of …
I Study Economic Crime and Hang Out With Mexican Cartels
Pluralistic: Boeing, Spirit and Jetblue, a monopoly horror-story (21 Jan 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Idolatry of Innovators Can Lead You to Foolish Places
Here’s an insane thing I read on social media today: Post by @inspiringselfcompassion View on Threads The fellow who blocked the account above, Michael Darius, includes Apple pioneer, skeuomo…
Levels of Wealth
I occasionally get to hang around people with real wealth, and those on their way to real wealth. I’ve notice there is a rising scale of how wealth is experienced. As your income gains more zeros, you ascend through this … Continue reading →
The public cloud has failed to crack telecom
Despite all the cheerleading and hype, telcos remain fiercely resistant to putting their mission-critical workloads in the public cloud.
Why is Global Fertility Crashing?
A story a bit deeper than millennials and avocado toast
Incentives Are Not Enough
Imagine a billionaire kidnapped a random person and said: Here is a camera, banana, bicycle, sundress, and porcupine; you have one day to make a funny video using them all. I’ll upload it to YouTube, and if it gets “enough” views in the first day, I’ll give you $10B. If not, I’ll kill you and your closest twenty relatives. No, I’m not going to tell you my “enough” threshold. Go.
To Fix the Climate We Need to Rewire the Economy, Our Democracy, and Our Brains
Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, righ…
Pluralistic: Brinklump Linkdump (20 Jan 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
The Last Word On Nothing | The internet and the overmind
The Airbus Advantage
Today on TAP: Why Europe’s mixed economy produces safer planes than America’s financialized capitalism
AI Is The Great Equalizer. Don’t Miss Out.
Image generated with DALLE3
Pluralistic: 2600’s amazing Hackers on Planet Earth con may go down to enshittification (19 Jan 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Companies Make it Too Easy for Thieves to Impersonate Police and Steal Our Data
For years, people have been impersonating police online in order to get companies to hand over incredibly sensitive personal information. Reporting by 404 Media recently revealed that Verizon handed over the address and phone logs of an individual to a stalker pretending to be a police officer who...
Email Unsubscribe Services Don’t Really Work. Follow This (Free) Advice Instead.
Email unsubscribe tools promise to eliminate unwanted emails, but our testing showed they rarely deliver. You’re better off making inbox rules yourself.
#E42 In The Face Of AI, Humanity Must Prove Its Value, With Steve Fuller
Listen to this episode from Hyperscale by Briar Prestidge on Spotify. “Humans have to raise their game. They have to be valued for something else, for something more, because we have now made machines that basically can replace us. And I think that is the bottom line question when it comes to humanity's relationship to AI: what is the value added of being human?” On this episode of HYPERSCALE, I am joined by Steve Fuller, a social philosopher and an instructor at the University of Warwick. Steve is an advocate for social epistemology and academic freedom, and supports the concepts of intelligent design and transhumanism. This mix of diverse expertise made for a truly intriguing conversation. Join us as we explore a society where augmented transhumans are the standard, how public healthcare would have to adapt in such a world, an early example of cyborg legislation, and more. FOLLOW ► Instagram: https://bit.ly/briarig LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/linkedin TikTok: https://bit.ly/briartiktok Website: https://briarprestidgeofficial.com
State Department develops framework to combat foreign disinformation - UPI.com
The U.S. State Department on Thursday announced a new framework to counter foreign disinformation.
Five new maps proposed for Central Washington redistricting
A group of advocates sued the state for dividing Latino voters between Pasco and Yakima. Now the court will draw a line before the fall elections.
Pluralistic: Demon-haunted computers are back, baby (17 Jan 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
The 1944 CIA guide to sabotaging meetings — Authentic Comms Strategic Consultancy
A handbook aiming to cause disruption from within during World War II has resurfaced after becoming declassified by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). How to sabotage and disturb meetings specifically resonated as relevant now as it was c.80 years ago.
A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change | Holovaty.com
On the Origins of Social Movements
On the Origins of Social Movements by Jo Freeman