Interesting stuff

  1. Credit card reward programs are a tax on the poor
  2. The humanities need to go back to basics: an empty room, a group, a conversation): “You simply cannot sustain a serious humanism as an integral part of a digitalized culture
  3. Think: The Netherlands had more sunshine in 2022 than in any year since records began (1965) as well as a shortage of rain. The transformation into California continues!
  4. Read: Another study on masks: Not sure if they work for the population, but pretty sure they work on individuals. Thanks for the confusion.
  5. Read: Why we usually can’t tell when a review is fake
  6. Read: Dating apps helped us meet each other, but “revenge bans” (plus match.com’s monopoly power) can isolate you from that scene.
  7. Read: San Francisco is thinking of reparations to Blacks for discrimination (not slavery). Although justice is certainly worthwhile, I think that efforts based on race (a concept lacking objective definition) are inferior compared to those aimed at poverty. I worry that SF’S politicians are pursuing an “eracist” policy of signaling virtue as a means of closing the topic (using citizen’s money) and walking away, guilt free.

H/T to CD

Interesting stuff

  1. Watch one of Trevor Noah’s best analyses: Trump the African president
  2. Listen to The Capitalisn’t Of Consulting: McKinsey And Beyond
  3. Read about new (effective) weight loss drugs. I can haz cheezburger? Related: Eye-care cream is expensive due to marketing, not quality.
  4. Sorry racists skin-tone fetishists: Early Dutch were dark-skinned and blue-eyed
  5. Read: The vertical farming bubble is popping
  6. Q: Is South Africa as dangerous as the media makes it out to be? A: Worse.
  7. Read a long, interesting article on the downfall (and transformation?) of the humanities: “One literature professor and critic at Harvard—not old or white or male—noticed that it had become more publicly rewarding for students to critique something as “problematic” than to grapple with what the problems might be; they seemed to have found that merely naming concerns had more value, in today’s cultural marketplace, than curiosity about what underlay them. This clay-pigeon approach to inquiry struck her as a devaluation of all that criticism—and art—can do.”
  8. Watch how oil and gas companies set up astro-turfing operations to create a false sense of voter opposition to green policies.
  9. Read how citizen assemblies can fail — and work
  10. Read: AIs are now capable of “passing” the Turing test [meant to separate humans from computers], so now humans are being forced to show THEY are not computers.

Interesting stuff

  1. Video: The redesign of Pakistan’s rivers created the world’s largest irrigation district — and many problems.
  2. Read: Which matters most: Many bikes or good infrastructure?
  3. Listen: Should academics forsake peer review for public discussions?
  4. Read: Disney is harvesting data from you and your kids.
  5. Read: How counterfeit fabric slips into a complex supply chain
  6. Read: Musk’s destruction of Twitter should push legislators to regulate algorithms. My idea? Make any company with x% market share disclose its algorithm (even if it’s in a black box), so that civili society can find its bias.
  7. Read: Heat pumps are amazing. Have you got one? (I’m waiting for a smaller one for my flat.)
  8. Read: You can now pay social media companies for more prominence, account security and more followers. What could possibly go wrong in a  world already known for fakes, lies, and counterfeits?
  9. Read: “I was struck by how many people said that their present age was their favorite one. A reassuring number of respondents didn’t want to trade their hard-­earned wisdom—or humility, or self-­acceptance, whatever they had accrued along the way—for some earlier moment”
  10. Whelp, that’s peak libertarian!

Interesting stuff

  1. A republic requires citizens; entertainment requires only an audience…Americans have struggled to make sense of a pandemic that refuses to conform to a tidy narrative structure—digestible plots, cathartic conclusions.” Americans no longer take the time to think about understanding or fixing the world — sleepwalking into the matrix.
  2. Listen to this surprisingly nuanced discussion of climate change with Bjørn Lomborg and Andrew Revkin
  3. Listen to why Google has a lot to worry about (due to manipulating markets) with respect to the anti-trust suit.
  4. Watch this video about a Russian priest who stood up to Putin’s lays against discussing reality.
  5. Read about why we need more “risky playgrounds” (hear hear!)
  6. Debate: We need more farmer-led (small-scale) irrigation
  7. Read: Internet shopping is now worse than physical shopping
  8. Read: Scientists are “calibrating the thickness” of fat-tailed weather events (disasters), which is useful!
  9. Listen & learn about the problems with academic peer review (just drop it?)
  10. Read: Parents are suing social media companies for harming their kids. Good.

Interesting stuff

  1. Watch a fact-checked (=not unhinged) debate on legalized cannabis.
  2. People who don’t read books often have character issues (to read, duh)
  3. Listen to this good discussion: The End Of China’s Miracle?
  4. Listen to this nice introduction to “ecological economics” from one of its founders. I especially appreciated Daly’s point on limited resources vs unlimited utility.
  5. Read: My printer is extorting me (another chapter in the “x as a service” nightmare)
  6. Listen to Paul Ehrlich on population, sustainability, etc.
  7. Read: The death of live customer support is the agony of customers
  8. Read: People are leaving New York, so why are the rents rising?
  9. Listen to this 2016 debate over Brexit. The Leave side was deluded.
  10. Read how Vancouver has tried to reduce harm from drugs while facing a rising tide of drug problems. This public health disaster needs serious resources (you know, like the kinda $$ we spend on infertility).

Interesting stuff

  1. This article on income and inequality in The Economist is really well written and insightful.
  2. Listen: Human sperm counts are down by 50 percent since 1970, and half the population is “clinically infertile.” The causes — plastic endochrine disruptors — are not going away, with current policies. (Other species are also losing fertility.)
  3. Read: Elephant poaching falls as income rises. (“shoot-to-kill” policies help)
  4. In 1968 and 1970, the American Petroleum Institute commissioned papers that argued fossil fuels would cause climate change. They’ve known for 55 years.
  5. Read: Artificial sweeteners are in many more products than you’d expect, and they are increasing obesity.
  6. Read (and comment): California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA): too little, too late and too slow?
  7. Listen to the scale in which humans have expanded on the subsidy of fossil (=non renewable, from the past) fuels.
  8. Watch: Espresso has less caffeine than instant, which has less than drip
  9. Watch: Trevor Noah’s analysis of what America needs (his last show)
  10. This is the best version I’ve seen of that old H2O joke:

H/T to JH

Interesting stuff

  1. Read: To focus on energy efficiency is to make present ways of life non-negotiable
  2. Read: An Aridzona suburb loses its water supply (yep, saw that coming). Related: Drying reservoirs are reducing hydropower generation
  3. Read: Twas the first iceless Christmas
  4. Read: How ChatGPT Will Destabilize White-Collar Work and how universities are changing to reduce cheating risk
  5. Listen: Being Human in the Age of AI (reminds me of my 2005 paper on how Google [search] will eliminate amateurs — and thus the next leaders)
  6. Watch: Why Amsterdam is [not really] Removing 10,000 Parking Spaces (the ideas in my parking paper make an appearance). Related: this podcast on local zoning
  7. Read: Google maps democratises spatial feedback
  8. Read: Alaska’s Arctic Waterways are toxifying due to CC
  9. Listen: The facts behind eating local
  10. Read: The rise of the scented-candle industrial complex

H/T to ED

Interesting stuff (to read)

  1. Bike helmets are not as safe as protecting bicyclists from cars. Related: Cities are fighting to keep car-free spaces
  2. 3D-printed houses are coming
  3. Bomb Cyclone? Or Just Windy with a Chance of Hyperbole?
  4. A 20-something hustles JP Morgan out of $175 million
  5. How Musk destroyed Twitter
  6. Trying to Live a Day Without Plastic (nope)
  7. The Rise of Mass Social Engineering (Hitler wasn’t first)
  8. The key to human happiness? More face-to-face meetings with friends
  9. Instagram threw $millions into useless video content
  10. Big screen TVs are cheap because they are selling your data. Related: How consumer demand results in cheap, disposable products

Interesting stuff

  1. Read: Americans don’t have a lack of free speech, they have a lack of listening.
  2. Lex Fridman’s podcasts are really long (sometimes 3-4 hours), but these are interesting:
  3. Listen to how police used the blockchain to identify and arrest dozens of men abusing children (and sharing videos of that abuse). A little less of that disgusting evil.
  4. Read: Wanna save the environment? Empower indigenous people to protect (and own) their traditional lands. (I’m seeing examples of why this is necessary in the southern African countries I am visiting, where aggressive locals displaced hunter-gatherers and colonizers destroyed everything to extract resources.
  5. Read: The implications of tech mayhem in 2022.
  6. Low-tech Magazine has a lot of deep, insightful stories:
  7. How novelists are using ChatGPT (AI) to write
  8. Watch: The great places destroyed by suburbia
  9. Listen: Freakonomics rediscovers the “real” Adam Smith

Interesting stuff

  1. A history of that disaster — the residential lawn
  2. The Dutch Prime Minister’s apology for slavery is 150 years late but surprisingly interesting and useful
  3. In 1969, the oil industry commissioned a report on the dangers of green-house-gas emissions. It warned of the dangers we are seeing today. They knew of the dangers, but they did nothing — because profits. #reparations
  4. This article on using fish to clean sewage from the very interesting — and insightful — Low-Tech Magazine is full of amazing examples of how we worked with, rather than against, nature.
  5. How to dress for cold weather (hint: loose layers)
  6. The circular economy is a sham that (accidentally?) supports unsustainable growth and consumption.
  7. Surprise! (Not!) Artificial sweeteners are (probably) worse for you than basic sugar.
  8. If we want a sustainable energy system, then we should focus on matching demand to supply (running machines when energy is available), not the supply to demand (e.g., battery storage)
  9. We stayed next to “Masi,” a township of poor South Africans (mostly “Black” — a loaded term from the Apartheid era) that that has far outgrown its planned population. Right next door? A gated community of rich, mostly White, people who complain about their neighbors encroachment on a wetland.
  10. Related: Watch why South Africa is still so segregated (economic redlining has replaced political redlining). My thought is that SA is at least 30 years — and probably 100 years — behind the US in reducing its problems of opportunity, safety and dignity.