Category: Worth Your Time

1. Read: NYC’s yellow cabs are getting hit by the 1-2 whammy of competition and a post-COVID loss of customers. Medallions are selling for <10% of their prior high prices.
2. Read: Less shopping is good for sustainability… and workers
3. Read: This author wants a “more equal” form of capitalism but fails to notice how much better capitalism is compared to feudalism, communism, and the rest. D’oh!
4. Read: Why we eat bad food (hint: industrial agriculture)
5. Read: Beware of Wish-Cycling: “Sometimes it’s just better to trash something. Recycling—either at home, at the dump, or a second-hand store—is only beneficial if it can actually be turned into something new or reused”
6. Read: An Indian family that home schooled its kids “on the road” and Americans who “rage quit” for home schooling. (The common theme here are schools that can’t teach very well.)
7. Read: How to hide your personal data from the internet
8. Read: The sperm count “crisis” may not really be a crisis?
9. Read: Civilization will not end if “we” (rich people) buy 25% less stuff
10. Read: “The one Covid-19 intervention that definitely worked was mask mandates“

1. Who killed the recumbent bicycle?
2. American cities are starting to remove highways to heal neighbourhoods (often home to minorities) torn apart by policies in the 1950s
3. Will bitcoin’s energy consumption (and decentralised blockchain) “unleash” renewables? Related: Bitcoin goes mainstream, so what will happen with its cyberpunk culture?
4. Watch: “Sponsored content” on “news” shows is legit disturbing
5. Watch: A drum and bass DJ raves thru London on a bike
6. Read: The curious structure of Master Classes (e.g., learning to write from Malcolm Gladwell)
7. Watch: This is COVID+Satan+metal ridiculous 🙂
8. Read: Swimming in the wild will change you
9. Watch: I always knew that “raw water” was a bit of a hippie scam, but this video’s ridicule hits a new level
10. Watch: Expensive wine is for suckers

1. Read: A look into the work of a Mississippi River pilot
2. Read: COVID and digital nomads
3. Read: Surprise (not!) — lots of fraud in the PPP bailouts for small businesses
4. Listen: All drugs should be legalized
5. Read: What if Remote Work Didn’t Mean Working from Home?
6. Read: The Economics of Dining as a Couple
7. Listen: Pipe Dreams: The Urgent Global Quest to Transform the Toilet
8. Listen: “…the challenges facing Black America go beyond racial discrimination and the threat of police violence…“
9. Read: Can plastic be “infinitely” recycled?
10. Listen: Finally, a central banker (and economist) who makes a lot of sense

1. Listen: Daniel Kahneman on Why Our Judgment is Flawed — and What to Do About It
2. Watch: “Chinatown” architecture in the West is not authentic. Instead, it’s aimed at avoiding discrimination.
3. Read: What is the Dutch obsession with pavement cafes all about?
4. Listen: If you treat discussions and debates like a soldier (“defend the position!”) rather than a scout (“what’s interesting over here?”), then you are likely to feel right but be wrong over the long term.
5. Read: Monopoly was invented to demonstrate the evils of capitalism
6. Read: Reusable plastic shopping bags are actually making the problem worse
7. Read: The bad science behind “wash hands and keep distance but ignore masks”
8. Read: Internet 1.0 was freedom and exploration. Internet 2.0 was exploitation via algorithms. Internet 3.0 will put everything behind paywalls.
9. Listen: The weird origins of Daylight “Savings” Time and other time trivia
10. Read: How the Personal Computer Broke the Human Body: “What Zuboff observed was that as intellectual engagement with the work went down, the necessity of concentration and attention went up. What the computer did was make the work so routine, so boring, so mindless, clerical workers had to physically exert themselves to be able to focus on what they were even doing. This transition, from work being about the application of knowledge to work being about the application of attention, turned out to have profound physical and psychological impact on the clerical workers themselves.”

H/T to PB

1. Read: Predictable shenanigans with carbon offsets in California: “Mark Trexler, a former offsets developer who worked in earlier U.S. and European carbon markets, said the board should have anticipated the perverse incentives created by its program. “When people write offset rules, they always ignore the fact that there are 1,000 smart people next door that will try to game them,” he said. Since the board set up a system that “incentivizes people to find the areas that are high-density, or high-carbon, that’s what they’re going to do.””
2. Listen: The birth of techno in Berlin
3. Watch: In this 1983 video, Grandmaster flash explains how to mix records. History!
4. Read: It’s not a ‘labor shortage.’ It’s a massive reassessment of work in America
5. Listen: (Negative) carbon credits are getting more attention, but can they work?
6. Watch: Tracking down the other 99% of plastics that are NOT floating in the middle of the ocean
7. Read: Finally! “Indigenous leaders launch $2.1 billion class-action lawsuits against Canada over lack of drinking water“
8. Read: Are dentists making money on unnecessary procedures? Sadly, yes.
9. Read: Louisiana’s refineries, chemical plants and other polluting locations are typically located in areas where freed slaves lived — areas that are still predominately Black. Coincidence? No, systemic racism.
10. Read: Social Justice Groupthink: Liberalism and science, Pluckrose and Lindsay remind us, are “systems—not just neat little theories—because they are self-skeptical rather than self-certain . . . They are self-correcting.” Enlightenment empiricism encourages us to critique our own beliefs and modify them, however reluctantly we may do so. “People in liberal systems are free to believe anything they wish, and they’re free to argue for anything they want, but to claim that such beliefs are knowledge and demand they be respected as such is another matter.” Social Justice dogma, which demands uncritical adherence, is the opposite of liberal, although the political right has muddied the waters for years by grouping us all into a collective rubric of “liberal,” “the left” or “radical.”

H/T to BZ

1. Read: The businesses that make money by helping ruin your reputation on the internet and the (same) businesses that will take your money to save it.
2. Read: Can’t buy cannabis? Pay a psychic to find what you “lost” 😉
3. Read: Yahoo has destroyed more internet content than any other company (so, yeah, the internet DOES forget some things…)
4. Play: How does a cat-shaped iceberg float? What about a California-shaped one?
5. Read: Female soldiers are getting more responsibility, and they may be better at soldering than men!
6. Read: Web 2.0 was about user-created content that corporations monetised (think Facebook or YouTube ads). Web 3.0 will allow everyone to charge for everything.
7. Listen: A podcast on the impact of social media on society and what to do about corporations (e.g., Facebook) that can destroy countries (e.g., civil war in Myanmar or the US…)
8. Read: Testing wastewater to improve public health (and detect COVID)
9. Watch: Why Jakarta is sinking (Answer: unfunded drinking water infrastructure)
10. Read: In 1953, Hillary and Norgay reached the summit of Everest, but they were not wearing Rolex. Rolex has spent decades implying they did. Liars.
11. Read: Why do beavers build dams?

H/T to DG

1. Listen: More women needed in science!
2. Read: Bad policy encourages stupid behavior (NY Times): “The sense that money and technology can overcome nature has emboldened Americans. Where money and technology fail, though, it inevitably falls to government policies — and government subsidies — to pick up the slack. Thanks to federally subsidized canals, for example, water in part of the Desert Southwest costs less than it does in Philadelphia. The federal National Flood Insurance Program has paid to rebuild houses that have flooded six times over in the same spot. And federal agriculture aid withholds subsidies from farmers who switch to drought-resistant crops, while paying growers to replant the same ones that failed. Farmers, seed manufacturers, real estate developers and a few homeowners benefit, at least momentarily, but the gap between what the climate can destroy and what money can replace is growing.”
3. Watch: Mr Money Moustache’s 15-year old brings some seriously valid criticism to the cheap (and not very efficient) educational system. Watch the video to be VERY impressed by a teenager “firing on all cylinders”
4. Read: Steve Keen thoroughly criticises the shitty economics that William Nordhaus uses to under-estimate the (civilization-threatening) damages of climate chaos. His biased, hackneyed work has slowed or prevented  us from engaging in the catastrophe now unfolding. (I’ve criticised Nordhaus before; this article makes me think he should be tried for crimes against humanity.)
5. Read: The US labor market is running into trouble as workers turn down jobs that pay less than unemployment benefits. (Maybe there’s some need to raise wages, and thus prices, to sustainable levels?)
6. Watch: American cities are developing via a car-centric Ponzi scheme
7. Listen: The West must engage confront China
8. Read: “How Russia wins the climate crisis“
9. Listen: Sometimes waiting (“masterly inactivity”) is better than micro-management?
10. Watch (amazed): The crane that installs massive wind turbines
11. Read: Rising food prices hit the poor the hardest:

H/T to PB

1. Read: The hidden toll of remote work
2. Watch: The [US] national debt, republican hypocrisy, MMT and your kids
3. Read (and weep): French vineyards are losing their grape wine crops (and maybe their vines) due to record frost. Worse news: ALL farms are facing crop losses, thereby taking us another step closer to a climate-chaos-driven food crisis.
4. Read: Green spaces in Amsterdam over the centuries
5. Read: The right-wing conspiracy to undermine university professors
6. Read: The US was always a nation of migrants but only “white” (Northern European, but not Italians, Irish or Jews) immigrants — until the 1965 immigration reform allowed non-whites. For my father (British citizen but born in India), this was a barrier to his entering the US in the early 60s.
7. Read: Why are Chinese solar prices so low? One reason is forced labor. A bit of blood splashed on that green?
8. Read: I’m shocked, shocked to read that Facebook (passively) supports fascists
9. Read: Goodbye forests 🙁
10. Read: Looking at the roots of conspiracy theories
11. Listen: Happiness

H/T to PB

1. This article on environmental scientists suffering emotionally as the natural world shrinks under the onslaught of Mankind (and mostly men within our species) rings true with me. It’s so sad to see dying corals, burning forests, etc. 
2. Listen: I teach liberal arts and sciences (LAS). I’m not sure if our students know how lucky they are, but these prisoners earning their LAS degrees sure do.
3. Read: Divorce in an Indian couple is no longer unimaginable
4. Listen: Sal Khan, the founder of Khan academy, on better education
5. Read: Amsterdam tries to rebalance away from mass tourism
6. Read: “Extreme weather is wreaking havoc on olive oil production” — this is the beginning of the end of food security, which will affect people in poorer countries much more than most of us.
7. Read: Tap water in the US is more polluted than it should be (as I said a few years ago when Flint was in the news).
8. Read: ADHD in women manifests via self-doubt and confusion
9. Read: American drivers — unlike those in other countries — are killing more pedestrians and bikers despite driving less. Why? US road rules are designed for speed not safety. Watch this for a humorous (but exacerbating) explanation.
10. Read: Dutch recycling: ‘we don’t know what is going on’

1. Read: Stronger storms and waves have doubled the number of shipping containers “lost” at sea from cargo vessels. Another cut into our quality of life.
2. Read: Inside Israel’s lucrative (and occasionally evil) cyber security industry
3. Read: A look at the business model of influencers
4. Read: Some German festival organisers (think Burning Man) have decided to take (health) matters into their own hands, in defense of culture. Bravo.
5. Listen: Archaeology from space
6. Try? “We build desirable, open source, privacy-enabled smartphone operating systems” — basically “de-googled” android systems
7. Listen: Climate change is entering business models and (very interesting!) negative real interest rates are raising the cost of inaction. 
8. Watch: The best NFT description I’ve seen (via SNL 😉
9. Watch: How to (properly) compare COVID vaccines
10. Read: Don’t say media has no impact. “Birth of a Nation” (1915), formerly called “The Klansmen” spurred racist violence: