Deutsche Welle's footage of the empty entrance plaza of Shanghai Disneyland as the PA system broadcasts a message that the park is "temporarily closed" for "prevention and control of the… Read the rest of the article: Listen: loudspeakers broadcast corona virus closure messages to the empty streets of Shanghai Disneyland
Last October, two Amazon employees — Maren Costa (UX designer) and Jamie Kowalski (software engineer) spoke on the record to the Washington Post about their employer's complicity in the climate… Read the rest of the article: Amazon threatened to fire two tech workers who spoke about climate and Amazon's business, then 357 more workers joined them
Leading libertarian intellectuals are now disavowing the label (Tyler Cowan says he's now a "State Capacity Libertarian") thanks to the total failure of libertarianism to cope with climate change.
Ten years ago, Apple released the Ipad. I was in a hotel room in Seattle, jetlagged and awake at 4AM while my wife and daughter slept.
More word from the ongoing attempt to bring the people responsible for years of CIA torture to justice: one of the three waterboarding specialists at Guantanamo was called "The Preacher"… Read the rest of the article: One of the CIA's waterboarding torturers called himself "The Preacher" and shouted religious nonsense while performing executions
Home genetics tests purport to tell you what percentage of your ancestry comes from which places, an incoherent, unscientific fraud that perpetuates ridiculous eugenic myths. But that's not all: when… Read the rest of the article: The privacy-invading, junk science "home DNA test" industry is cratering
Last year, the EU adopted the incredibly controversial Copyright Directive (it passed by only five votes, and afterwards 10 MEPs said they'd got confused and pushed the wrong buttons!): now,… Read the rest of the article: Brexit means the UK will shelve the EU Copyright Directive (for now)
In 2010, the UN adopted a rule regarding incarcerated pregnant women: "instruments of restraint shall never be used … during labour, during birth and immediately after birth." In 2018, the… Read the rest of the article: Two years after a federal law banning shackling women during childbirth was passed, prisoners in America are still giving birth in chains
Andy Byford comes from generations of public transportation workers and worked his way from a London Underground platform supervisor to running multiple British rail lines; then went to Australia where… Read the rest of the article: Andrew Cuomo's naked hostility drives out MTA president Andy Byford, the "Train Daddy" who has transformed the world's rail systems
Writing in The Journal of Health Economics, three economists claim (Sci Hub mirror) that "a one standard deviation reduction in daily stock market returns is associated with a 0.6% increase… Read the rest of the article: Fatal car wrecks are correlated with stock-market fluctuations
"Proactive credit line increases" (PCLIs) are when your credit card company increases your credit limit without your asking for it; it was very common prior to the 2008 crisis, but… Read the rest of the article: Banks have returned to the pre-2008 world of automatic credit-limit increases for credit cards used by already indebted people
Companies like Edubirdie offer platforms for academic cheating, connecting freelance essay-writers with desperate students who pay hundreds of dollars to have their academic papers ghostwritten for them. Edubirdie has recruited… Read the rest of the article: Cheating term-paper-for-pay businesses recruited customers through subsidized on-campus parties
Cum-ex (previously) is a technical, boring financial engineering technique that lets fraudsters file multiple tax-refund claims for the same stock transactions (they called it "dividend arbitrage"); from 2006-2011, the EU's… Read the rest of the article: The cum-ex scam stole $60b from European tax authorities: it's monumentally boring, complicated, and very, very important
In 2012, Chicago PD collaborated with the RAND Corporation and the Illinois Institute of Technology to automatically generate "risk scores" for people they arrested, which were supposed to predict the… Read the rest of the article: Chicago PD's predictive policing tool has been shut down after 8 years of catastrophically bad results
Clearview AI (previously) is a grifty facial recognition company that sells untested, secretive tools to police departments, claiming that they can identify people from security camera footage by matching the… Read the rest of the article: The answer to the Clearview AI scandal is better privacy laws, not anti-scraping laws
My latest LA Times review is for William Gibson's new novel Agency, sequel to his outstanding 2014 novel "The Peripheral," which marked his return to explicitly futuristic science fiction after… Read the rest of the article: I reviewed William Gibson's novel "Agency" for today's LA Times
Warner subsidiary Otter Media has a division called Fullscreen ("a social content company for talent and brands") that has been demonetizing Youtubers' videos that use the numbers 36 and 50… Read the rest of the article: Warner claims ownership over the numbers 36 and 50, and demonetizes Youtube videos that incorporate them
Jamie Dimon (previously) is the Jpmorganchase CEO who committed a $13b mortgage fraud and whose company received $25B in TARP bailout money, $500B in low-cost federal loans, and billions more… Read the rest of the article: Jamie Dimon is a (highly selective) socialist
Snickelsox's guide to playing animated armor that is full of bees is full of surprisingly well-thought-through advice for anyone who should be tempted to role-play such a thing, despite their… Read the rest of the article: Howto: roleplay a suit of armor filled with bees
When John Stumpf (previously) was CEO of Wells Fargo, he oversaw a string of scandals including literally millions of acts of bank fraud, and still managed to walk out of… Read the rest of the article: Wells Fargo's ex-CEO will pay $17.5m in fines and never work in banking again (but he is still very, very rich)
