The pharma industry spends $2 on marketing for every $1 it spends on R&D: Shahram Ahari was a rep for Eli Lilly, so he knows how the money was spent:… Read the rest of the article: A former pharma rep explains how the industry pushes doctors to overprescribe
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Cory Doctorow Back in 2016, it looked like the private prison industry would finally die, thanks to an Obama memo directing the DoJ to reduce their use for federal prisoners, but the… Read the rest of the article: After Trump reversed Obama's restrictions on private federal prisons, states started banning them instead
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Cory Doctorow John Barnett had a three-decade career as a Boeing quality manager, but after he was transferred to the Charleston, SC production facility for the Boeing 787 "Dreamliner," he became a… Read the rest of the article: Veteran Boeing manager was transferred to 787 production; based on he saw there, he won't fly in a Dreamliner and begs his family not to
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Cory Doctorow On November 27, just as the courthouses were closing and newsrooms were going to a skeleton crew, the Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina — lately stuffed… Read the rest of the article: As news outlets were shutting down for Thanksgiving, the University of North Carolina quietly gave white nationalists $2.5m to settle a lawsuit that hadn't even been filed
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Cory Doctorow We've been closely following the plan by Google sister company Sidewalk Labs to build a surveilling "smart city" in Toronto; last week, I sat down with the Out of Left… Read the rest of the article: Talking with the Left Field podcast about Sidewalk Labs's plan to build a surveilling "smart city" in Toronto
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Cory Doctorow Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle created The Game of Oligarchy, which "shows that the 'free market' leads inexorably to one person getting all the money and everyone else going broke.… Read the rest of the article: The Oligarch Game: use coin-tosses to demonstrate "winner take all" and its power to warp perceptions
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Cory Doctorow The poster for "The Dark Knight Returns: The Golden Child" features Batman hurling a molotov cocktail in front of the words "The Future is Young," after DC Comics posted it… Read the rest of the article: DC Comics kills Batman image because China insisted it was supporting the Hong Kong protests
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Cory Doctorow Pennsylvania has one-upped Ohio's lethal anti-abortion bill (which requires OB/GYNs to perform a non-existent operation to implant fertilized eggs from ectopic pregnancies in women's uteruses, on penalty of prison time),… Read the rest of the article: Pennsylvania to Ohio: we see your terrible life-threatening anti-abortion bill and raise you with funerals for unimplanted, fertilized eggs
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Cory Doctorow For many years, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was a newspaper columnist for the Telegraph, where he espoused some of the most reactionary, disqualifying garbage ever published by a mainstream… Read the rest of the article: A quick trip through the ghastly, racist, sexist, eugenicist, authoritarian things that Boris Johnson has said in recent years
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Cory Doctorow Artist Coop's revival of the outstanding skulls of the Randotti Corporation (as seen at Disneyland and Walt Disney World!) continues with a line of tights featuring Haunted Skull, Voodoo Skull… Read the rest of the article: Coop's Randotti skulls: now available as tights!
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Cory Doctorow Cards Against Humanity asked Spencer Kelly to teach a computer to write mean, funny joke-cards for a new, AI-based expansion pack to the game; Kelly trained the popular GPT-2 generative… Read the rest of the article: Cards Against Humanity's Thanksgiving livestream pits a machine learning model against human joke writers
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Cory Doctorow Jake Berman writes, "I've drawn a series of maps showing the lost streetcar and subway systems of North America." He's selling them as prints.
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Cory Doctorow An Italian police raid of 19 homes of members of the Italian National Socialist Workers' Party uncovered troves of weapons, Nazi literature, and books about Hitler and Mussolini. "The self-styled… Read the rest of the article: Italian cops raid neo-Nazis, find rifles, swords and Nazi literature
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Cory Doctorow Christine Feehan is the author of several bestselling series, including one simply called "Dark" — in her trademark application with the USPTO, she has applied for the exclusive right to… Read the rest of the article: Writer asks for an exclusive trademark on the use of the word "dark" in "Series of fiction works, namely, novels and books"
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Cory Doctorow Classified Pentagon spending is the fastest-growing part of the US military budget, rising to 11% of the total $716b proposed for 2020; this spending is not subject to oversight and… Read the rest of the article: Defense contractors gleefully report record earnings in divisions that bid on "classified" projects, the fastest-growing part of the Pentagon's budget
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Cory Doctorow South Carolina's system of appointed magistrates allows the state senate to appoint "judges" with no legal training, some of whom cannot pass a basic competency test on the first try,… Read the rest of the article: Meet the Krazy Klown Kavalcade of racists, homophobes, islamophobes and transphobes serving as appointed South Carolina magistrates
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Cory Doctorow Three separate, named women have independently accused Trump's EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland of repeated acts of sexual misconduct while he was in a position of physical, financial and professional power… Read the rest of the article: Three women independently accuse Gordon Sondland of repeated acts of highly similar sexual misconduct
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Cory Doctorow Union organizers don't have arguments with workers, they have "structured organizing conversations" — conversations in which the organizer asks someone to think about what change they want to see, what… Read the rest of the article: This Thanksgiving, don't have a political argument, have a "structured organizing conversation"
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Cory Doctorow Mariana Mazzucato (previously) came to prominence after the publication of her 2013 book The Entrepreneurial State, which described the way that robust state spending on large-scale R&D was critical to… Read the rest of the article: Profile of Mariana Mazzucato, the economist who's swaying both left and right politicians with talk of "the entrepreneurial state"
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Cory Doctorow Modern Monetary Theory (AKA MMT) is the latest incarnation of a long-running current in economic thought, once called Chartalism, which has gained prominence in recent years as an alternative to… Read the rest of the article: A layperson-friendly introduction to MMT, a heterodox school of economics that could finance a Green New Deal