The real estate bubble is in trouble: London's luxury housing market has been in freefall for years, and New York's retail vacancy has been soaring, even as global super-luxe housing… Read the rest of the article: A quarter of NYC's post-2013 luxury condos are unsold
LA's next source of energy: a massive solar panel and lithium battery array in the Mojave, operated by 8minute Solar Energy, and capable of supplying 6-7% of the city's energy… Read the rest of the article: LA is going to get cheap nighttime power from a massive solar and battery array in the Mojave
A Hill-HarrisX survey found that 58% of Americans "support government-funded public college tuition and the cancellation of student debt for the more than 44 million Americans who currently hold it."
Maria Farrell admits that comparing smartphones to abusive men (they try to keep you from friends and family, they make it hard to study or go to work, they constantly… Read the rest of the article: This is your smartphone on feminism
Iowa state court officials contracted with Coalfire to conduct "penetration tests" on its security; as part of those tests, two Coalfire employees broke-and-entered the Adel, Iowa courthouse, and were caught… Read the rest of the article: Penetration testers jailed after they broke into a courthouse to test its physical security
Octavia Butler (previously), the brilliant Afrofuturist, McArthur Genius Grant-winning science fiction writer, died far, far too soon, leaving behind a corpus of incredible, voraciously readable novels, and a community of… Read the rest of the article: The Folio Society is releasing a gorgeous edition of Octavia Butler's "Kindred"
EFF has just posted a job listing for a development director, seeking someone to "take charge of EFF's eleven-person Development Team in their efforts to raise over $13 million each… Read the rest of the article: EFF is hiring a development director!
When social media was young, it was obvious that it had some pathologies — perverse incentives that drove people toward antisocial behaviour. Back in those days, a company named Flickr… Read the rest of the article: Demetrification: improving social media by removing public like/follower/repost counts
AB5 is about to pass the California legislature: it forces companies like Lyft and Uber to comply with the longstanding Dynamex decision and treat their employees as employees.
French economist Thomas Piketty changed the world in 2014 with his magisterial Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a book that reported out an incredibly ambitious project to map out three… Read the rest of the article: Thomas Piketty's new book uses data to trace how inequality changes ideology
This Sunday, the outstanding SF in SF reading series hosts two outstanding authors: Hannu Rajaniemi (Summerland) and Christopher Brown (Rule of Capture). American Bookbinders Museum, 366 Clementina Alley. Doors at… Read the rest of the article: To do in San Francisco this Sunday: SF in SF with Hannu Rajaniemi & Christopher Brown
It has been 0 days since Facebook's last privacy scandal.
Margrethe Vestager (previously) is the EU competition commissioner who handed out a bouquet of multibillion-dollar fines to US-based Big Tech companies; she had resigned herself to being ousted after her… Read the rest of the article: The EU's top trustbuster gets a surprise re-appointment
The Black Blorchestra performs a gorgeous and stirring rendition of "Glory to Hong Kong" for an audience of protesters in HK, all dressed in the uprising's defacto uniform of masks… Read the rest of the article: A symphony orchestra in masks and helmets perform for Hong Kong's protesters
Juul is the cash-flush e-cigarette company whose billions (invested by Marlboro's parent company) have allowed it to create a massive market of addicted children, wiping out decades of progress in… Read the rest of the article: Juul gave marketing presentations to schoolchildren in the guise of "mental health/addiction" seminars
For two decades, the Phoenix police union has had a secret deal with the police department that required that the disciplinary records of cops would be "purged," so that no… Read the rest of the article: Phoenix's police union has a secret deal with the department to purge dirty cops' disciplinary records
Eleanor Saitta's (previously) 2016 essay "Coercion-Resistant Design" (which is new to me) is an excellent introduction to the technical countermeasures that systems designers can employ to defeat non-technical, legal attacks:… Read the rest of the article: Creating a "coercion resistant" communications system
The NCAA is notionally an "amateur" league, but the only thing amateur about it is that the athletes (who risk their health and even their lives) are unpaid, while the… Read the rest of the article: California to force NCAA to pay athletes
The attorneys general from 48 states, DC, and Puerto Rico are collaborating on a joint antitrust investigation of Google's dominance in the ad- and search-markets, but two AGs are sitting… Read the rest of the article: Everyone's investigating Google for antitrust violations…except California and Alabama
For years, researchers have tracked the discrepancy in average life-expectancy predicted by income equality, and, as with the wealth gap itself, this life-expectancy gap just keeps getting wider.
