Society

The word Waltersobchakeit looks and sounds German, but it's entirely made up. Read more here about where it came from, and why it sounds so German!

Hastily doodled artwork by me

CopyCop churned out 19,000 deceptive posts in a month

I posted this video on YouTube this morning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yMMTDYFlLc In case the video is not embedded properly (and that happens sometimes) it is available here. The transcript is as follows: The way that banks create money is so hideously simple that everyone needs to understand it. People presume that somehow or other, creating money is...

It's easy to get caught up in the short-term game. Quarterly earnings, annual bonuses, and the relentless pressure to show progress can lead even the most visionary companies astray. Welcome to the Human Tenure Trap. Here's how it works: When managers join a company, they're often thinking about

Automated Gender Recognition (AGR), sometimes referred to as ‘gender detection software’, takes a bio-essentialist construction of gender and codifies it.

A paradigm shift for our economy begins when we name and see the anti-democratic bias that lies at the heart of our capital-centric system.

Key quotes from Caplan’s Build Baby Build: Why is US housing to expensive? “Two words: government regulation … Housing prices stay high in desirable areas because most governments strictly regulate new construction. … ‘Take it from Paul Krugman, the most eminent progressive economist alive. “High housing prices in slow-growing states also owe a lot to policies that sharply limit construction. Limits on building heights in the cities, zoning that blocks denser development in the suburbs, and other policies constrict housing on both coasts.” …

Russian online interference is increasingly targeting smaller languages, including Finnish, to drive wedges into society.

Opinion | It is widely assumed that Russia possesses unparalleled powers of manipulation, and that its ubiquitous propaganda is wreaking havoc on public opinion around the world.  In reality, however, Russian propaganda is far from the sophisticated machine it is made out to be.

Covid vaccines, chemtrails, the Great Reset … Why do people invent false conspiracies when there are so many real ones to worry about? There’s only one way to find out: ask a believer

It wasn’t really Jews or Palestinians. It was the U.S. Congress, which closed American borders 100 years ago this month.

The Department of Labor’s new overtime regulation is restoring and extending this promise for millions more lower-paid salaried workers in the U.S.

If billionaires actually cared about saving the planet, they’d pool their vast wealth and buy everyone a heat pump. But it’s not funding, or the technology itself, that’s preventing a full heat pump takeover.

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is the intro: Out of curiosity, I recently cracked open The American Economy in Transition, published in 1980, edited by Martin Feldstein and including contributions from… Nobel-winning economists [Samuelson, Friedman, Kuznets], successful business leaders and notable public servants. Though most of the essays get it wrong, […]

Whistle-blowers say that a group called the Banditos functions as a shadow government within local law enforcement. The sheriff says there is no such gang in his department.

Sam Altman, CEO of firm that developed app, says ethics do matter, but they need to be rethought (and AI isn’t going away).

The air war over Ukraine has become a cat-and-mouse game where drones must constantly evolve to survive.

“Yahoo Boy” cybercriminals are openly running dozens of scams across Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, TikTok, YouTube, and more. And they’re not afraid to show it off online.

Governance by AI is coming. The Coming Cyberocracy explores the failure of world leaders at a time when technology will soon rival human…

Ordoliberalism is the German variant of economic liberalism that emphasizes the need for government to ensure that the free market produces results close to its theoretical potential but does not advocate for a welfare state (and did not advocate against one either).[1]

Overshoot is the reason civilization is going to collapse. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and resource depletion are merely symptoms.

Today on TAP: Lessons from the Tory wipeout in local U.K. elections

We read an interesting paper today (ht Sachin Benny with an assist from ChatGPT) in the Yak Collective weekly governance study group (Fridays at 9 AM Pacific). Sons of the Soil, Migrants, and Civil…

Athletes are being caught in scandals, yes, but the bigger scandal is that the ease and prevalence of betting is driving a huge rise in addiction—and neither the leagues nor our politicians care.

Otaku is a Japanese word that describes people with consuming interests, particularly in anime, manga, video games, or computers. Its contemporary use originated with a 1983 essay by Akio Nakamori in Manga Burikko.

Happy Friday! What's good? I'll have a longer essay on Monday about my half marathon – about the race and the (mostly) technology-free training block. But I did want to make one related observation: Sunday's race had over 8200 finishers, up from 5900 the year before. That's huge! And that's amazing!