This leads us to a scenario that leaves little room for resistance, because opting out, even collectively with a group of friends or a small organization, seems pointless. You are missing the network effects and you are losing traction. Every act of resistance seems to be too small because of the sheer scales of these firms. What do we do?
It’s incredibly difficult, and a lot of the resistance options are heavily individualized. We can personally lock down our social media profiles, we can turn toward privacy-saving alternatives, we can deploy algorithms that fool other algorithms, we can fool facial-recognition surveillance with specialized makeup and outfit, and so on. But these all tend to rely on individuals making a choice, rather than any approach to trying to systematically undermine the big platforms. It is incredibly difficult to think about what can be done, in part because the size and scale of these companies is very difficult to challenge from the ground up. There are some attempts though — for example, the platform cooperative idea of “we’ll produce an alternative, and we’ll get users to migrate to a nice, humane version of Uber,” for instance…
Guianan cock-of-the-rock – Wikipedia
Rodents ‘see’ infrared after eyeballs injected with nanoparticles • The Register
It looks like their “infrared sight” is good enough to make out various shapes, too. In a third experiment, the researchers put them into a Y-shaped maze. The mice were trained to find a hidden platform that was associated with one or two specific patterns. The same patterns were projected onto one end of the maze using infrared light, and the bionic mice were able to find the hidden platform whereas the normal, plain mice could not.
What’s more interesting is that their super infrared vision lasted up to ten weeks with few harmful effects. “Endowing mammals with [near-infrared] vision capacity could also pave the way for critical civilian and military applications,” the researchers wrote in the paper.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/01/danger_mouse_infrared/
Drawbridges up – Globalisation and politics (2016)
From Warsaw to Washington, the political divide that matters is less and less between left and right, and more and more between open and closed. Debates between tax-cutting conservatives and free-spending social democrats have not gone away. But issues that cross traditional party lines have grown more potent. Welcome immigrants or keep them out? Open up to foreign trade or protect domestic industries? Embrace cultural change, or resist it?
In 2005 Stephan Shakespeare, the British head of YouGov, a pollster, observed:
We are either “drawbridge up” or “drawbridge down”. Are you someone who feels your life is being encroached upon by criminals, gypsies, spongers, asylum-seekers, Brussels bureaucrats? Do you think the bad things will all go away if we lock the doors? Or do you think it’s a big beautiful world out there, full of good people, if only we could all open our arms and embrace each other?
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2016/07/30/drawbridges-up
The Discount Cable and Charger Brands You Can Trust
Useful info.
For the most part, cables only really have one job: transfer information or power from one place to another. There are few things an expensive cable does better than a cheaper one. However, there are still a few distinguishing features to watch for when you’re cable shopping, depending on your needs. Here are a few tips:
What Is The Great Attractor? – Universe Today
While the Norma Cluster is massive, and local galaxies are moving toward it, it doesn’t explain the full motion of local galaxies. The mass of the Great Attractor isn’t large enough to account for the pull. When we look at an even larger region of galaxies, we find that the local galaxies and the Great Attractor are moving toward something even larger. It’s known as the Shapley Supercluster. It contains more than 8000 galaxies and has a mass of more than ten million billion Suns. The Shapley Supercluster is, in fact, the most massive galaxy cluster within a billion light years, and we and every galaxy in our corner of the Universe are moving toward it.
https://www.universetoday.com/113150/what-is-the-great-attractor/
List of common misconceptions – Wikipedia
Wow, I definitely held some of these misconceptions. A few examples:
- While the beta carotene in carrots can help improve night vision in those suffering from a deficiency of vitamin A, it does not enhance it beyond normal levels in those receiving an adequate amount.[365] The belief that it does originated from World War II British disinformation meant to explain the Royal Air Force‘s improved success in night battles, which was actually due to radar and the use of red lights on instrument panels.[366]
- Eating less than an hour before swimming does not increase the risk of experiencing muscle cramps or drowning. One study shows a correlation between alcohol consumption and drowning, but there is no evidence cited regarding stomach cramps or the consumption of food.[316]
- Poinsettias are not highly toxic to humans or cats. While it is true that they are mildly irritating to the skin or stomach,[277] and may sometimes cause diarrhea and vomiting if eaten,[278] an American Journal of Emergency Medicine study of 22,793 cases reported to the American Association of Poison Control Centers showed no fatalities and few cases requiring medical treatment.[279] According to the ASPCA, poinsettias may cause light to mid-range gastrointestinal discomfort in felines, with diarrhea and vomiting as the most severe consequences of ingestion.[280]
- European honey bees are often described as essential to human food production, leading to claims that without their pollination, humanity would starve or die out.[271][272] The quote “If bees disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live” has been misattributed to Albert Einstein.[273][274] In fact, many important crops need no insect pollination at all. The ten most important crops,[275] comprising 60% of all human food energy,[276] all fall into this category.
- Earthworms do not become two worms when cut in half. Only a limited number of earthworm species[256] are capable of anterior regeneration. When such earthworms are bisected, only the front half of the worm (where the mouth is located) can feed and survive, while the other half dies.[257] Some species of planarian flatworms, however, actually do become two new planarians when bisected or split down the middle.[258]
Bill Gates tweeted out a chart and sparked a debate on global poverty – Vox
The percentage of humans living in extreme poverty has diminished greatly since 1820. That’s an important and marvelous fact. But there’s also nuance around how to interpret that, and what narrative it might serve. There was recently a debate between researchers on the subject, and Vox does a good job of summarizing it. Recommended reading.
…over the course of the debate, the two sides’ positions appeared, at least to me, to converge substantially. Everyone agrees that since 1981, the incomes of the world’s poorest people have gone up — even Hickel has disavowed his Guardian headline, saying it was forced upon him by editors. Everyone agrees incomes for the poor haven’t gone up enough, and that $1.90 per day is hardly enough for a human being to live a decent life.
The big differences, then, are how to slice and interpret these facts, and which political interests and narratives they serve. Hickel argues that focusing on data showing declines in global poverty does political work on behalf of global capitalism, defending an inherently unjust global system that has failed residents of rich and poor nations alike. Pinker agrees that the data supports the idea that capitalism is working for the world’s poorest, and says that’s a decisive rebuttal of Hickel’s narrative of enduring persecution.
Bill Gates tweeted out a chart and sparked a debate on global poverty – Vox
Zucktown, USA | Julianne Tveten
Like George Pullman and Milton Hershey, the tech industry’s elites take all prisoners in their respective campaigns to expand, absorb, and dominate. The tech company town, that most contemporary of neofeudalist wangles, is the next step in West Coast corporate behemoths’ quest to lure employees into a twenty-four-hour working existence—the totalizing successor to bottomless Indian food spreads, on-site bike-repair shops, and Frank Gehrized habitats. Its premise deviates not at all from that of its antecedents: a genial, painstakingly aestheticized service to workers, where beneficent corporate hands take the reins of the public good for the well-being of the community. This time around, though, that community will be bridled with union–busting and data-harvesting apparatuses sure to make even the most paranoid techno-tyrant salivate.
Certainly, the megalomaniacs who aim to populate municipal fixtures with registered-trademark logos will expect cities to genuflect at every turn. Bezos has exemplified this in Seattle, whose recent measure to “tax the rich” drove him to seek another location in which to build Amazon’s second headquarters. While residents of its hometown grapple with a commandeering leech that “suck[s] up our resources and refus[es] to participate in daily upkeep,” Amazon will soon attempt to prime another city to be sapped. Meanwhile, the smooth-faced metallic vampires of California have just begun to cosplay as frontiersmen, raring to follow Bezos’s lead. Drunk on glib TED Talk propagandizing, and accustomed to dismissing the civic inconveniences of corporate regulations and poor neighborhoods, our technosettlers feel little need to heed the lessons of the past when their chief interest is to monopolize the future. Taxing the techie billionaires is a start, but only when cities refuse to be their hosts will they cease to be their parasites.
Here’s Why So Many Americans Feel Cheated By Their Student Loans
This article does a good job showing just how crippling student debt has become. And it brings home what an utter failure of moral governance it is that the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program has denied over 98% of the people who have put in ten years of public service and requested the loan forgiveness they were promised.
There’s a reason our current debt situation has been dubbed a “student loan crisis”: It foreshadows radical shifts in the way millions of Americans, most of them still in early adulthood, will be able to participate in the economy, in society, in the workplace. For many of us, student debt means delaying — if not entirely forgoing — homeownership, marriage, and parenthood. This new form of social stratification — between those who have student debt, and those who do not — will have ramifications for generations to come.
I think of a 28-year-old, now in her first year in the PSLF program, with $110,000 in graduate school debt. Her health insurance with a public service employer doesn’t cover specialist visits to the doctor — so she goes without, because she uses her extra income toward covering her student loans. “I basically can’t have children until I’m at least 38, and who knows if my eggs will be dead by then,” she told me. “I have pretty abysmal views that I’ll save much money at all in the next ten, twenty, THIRTY years.”
And if hundreds of thousands of people aren’t even saving for themselves, we’re certainly not saving for our kids’ college tuition, effectively ensuring their future monumental student debt. It’s a slow-motion emergency, but because it is built on two cherished components of the contemporary American dream — the necessity of both debt and education — almost no one has heeded the calls for help.
You might not have student loans. You might not be in a student loan forgiveness program — and, as such, might think that the problems plaguing the thousands who are struggling with their debt have nothing to do with you. You’re wrong. The experience of student debt is isolating, lonely, and often dismissed as the result of individual choices — but its ramifications span generations and demographics. To actually address those ramifications, however, means looking to the larger, societal issues underpinning student loans in general: how we, as a country, came to frame college and “credentialing” as essential and how we shifted from one paradigm of funding college to another. Because the only way to actually fix a problem of this magnitude is to really, clearly, see it: what created it, what continues to fuel it, and who profits from it.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/student-debt-college-public-service-loan-forgiveness