The forces that drove this election’s media failure are likely to get worse “There’s plenty of blame to go around, but the list of actors has to start with Facebook. And for all its wonders — reaching nearly 2 billion people each month, driving more traffic and attention to news than anything else on earth […]
Obama and The Wrong Side of ‘the Right Side of History’ Obama has mentioned “the arc of history” a dozen times since his election. The problem with this kind of thinking is that it imputes an agency to history that doesn’t exist. Worse, it assumes that progress is unidirectional. But history is not a moral […]
Median Voter Last Name “Larkowski is the median last name if you lined up all voters in alphabetical order.”
Crony Beliefs “So if a brain anticipates that it will be rewarded for adopting a particular belief, it’s perfectly happy to do so, and doesn’t much care where the reward comes from — whether it’s pragmatic (better outcomes resulting from better decisions), social (better treatment from one’s peers), or some mix of the two. A […]
TYLER COWEN ON UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME “The revenue required to finance a UBI would likely require shifting away from income taxes toward some sort of national sales tax or value-added tax. (Which is a good idea anyway.) One effect of basing our fiscal system more heavily on consumption taxes is that resident non-citizens, who wouldn’t […]
Westworld’s Trigger Warnings “Their quest for verisimilitude is animated by a dream as old as the story of Pygmalion: to create art that is indistinguishable from life. The myth of Pygmalion, though, feeds off a sentimental hope that when art comes to life, it will love the artist. Perhaps the underlying fantasy is a patriarchal […]
Map: The Most Common Job In Every State Over time from 1978-2014
Self-Driving Trucks Are Going to Hit Us Like a Human-Driven Truck “It should be clear at a glance just how dependent the American economy is on truck drivers. According to the American Trucker Association, there are 3.5 million professional truck drivers in the US, and an additional 5.2 million people employed within the truck-driving industry […]
Explainer, Elucidator, Enchanter: A Gradation of Great Writing from: October 26, 2016 at 01:02AM
The Social Value of Manners “Every day and almost every hour of our lives, those of us who are not hermits or anchorites have an opportunity to practice the minor ethics of good manners, of kindness toward and consideration for others in little things, of petty sacrifices. It is only on great and rare occasions […]
The Weird Economics Of Ikea “…there is a sort of evolutionary dynamic at play in the annual Ikea catalog: survival of the fittest furniture. She noticed that the company tends to discontinue products that remain expensive. “If they can’t figure out how to make them more cheaply, or retool them or slightly redesign them, it […]
Obama’s Secret Weapon In The South: Small, Dead, But Still Kickin’ “It’s an image of North America as it looked during the Cretaceous era, 129 million to 65 million years ago. As you can see, much of the continent was still covered by water. The Deep South had a shoreline that curled through the Carolinas, […]
Putting yourself “10 feet away” from the people in your community from: October 15, 2016 at 10:28AM
Two Pointed Questions Posed as Tweets from: October 15, 2016 at 10:11AM
*American Honey* from: October 15, 2016 at 09:48AM
Second Thoughts on This Year’s Economics Nobel Prize from: October 15, 2016 at 09:44AM
Google Interview University “This is my multi-month study plan for going from web developer (self-taught, no CS degree) to Google software engineer. This long list has been extracted and expanded from Google's coaching notes, so these are the things you need to know. There are extra items I added at the bottom that may come […]
When Debate Is Futile: Bertrand Russell’s Remarkable Response to a Fascist’s Provocation from: October 12, 2016 at 10:35PM
Will the Robots Take Our Jobs? Or Worse? from: October 5, 2016 at 10:04AM
Gaia 3D Starmap 3D map of 2 million stars in our vicinity, written in javascript!