20211201 The American Prison System’s War on Reading • Protean Magazine you know, cause of that whole, smuggling in books thing that is trivial to work around. oh, and there’s a grip of cash to be made on charging prisoners MSRP for books. 20211203 Could Covid Lead to Progress? - The New York Times i’m hopeful, but probably not. just in case you forgot you were owned....
20211102 ‘Dune’ Has a Desert Problem don’t quite know how i landed on this article. but i found it a fascinating read on the influences and whitewashing of dune over its various incarnations. research!rsc: Lessons from the Debian/OpenSSL Fiasco - great read; passed along to me during a crypto discussion at $DAYJOB. 20211106 Who Controls the Internet? And should they? - Bert Hubert’s writings...
20211001 Opinion | Our constitutional crisis is already here - The Washington Post They put their trust in family, tribe, religion and race. Although zealous in defense of their own rights and freedoms, they are less concerned about the rights and freedoms of those who are not like them. That, too, is not unusual. What is unnatural is to value the rights of others who are unlike you as much as you value your own....
20210902 modern tools (xkcd) this is totally worth it for the alt-text. 20210903 Oh My Fucking God, Get the Fucking Vaccine Already, You Fucking Fucks - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency appropriately captures my feelings on the topic. 20210904 States That Cut Unemployment Benefits Saw Limited Impact on Job Growth - WSJ will the DFL hang this around the necks of the GOP in these states?...
20210801 A Warning Ignored | by Jelani Cobb | The New York Review of Books What the US Could Learn About College Admissions from the USSR | by Anastasia Edel | The New York Review of Books The Color Line | by Annette Gordon-Reed | The New York Review of Books COVID Anti-Vaxxers Aren’t a MAGA Death Cult — It’s Worse Than That | by Tim Wise | Aug, 2021 | Medium...
given the density of the news surrounding the IPCC report and the dire implications of a report that leaves little/nothing to question as to the state of things this nugget from NNT, et al was a wry bit of commentary. We have only one planet. This fact radically constrains the kinds of risks that are appropriate to take at a large scale. Even a risk with a very low probability becomes unacceptable when it affects all of us – there is no reversing mistakes of that magnitude....
some personally interesting elements from this NY review of books essay by jelani cobb. “In 2019 Minneapolis ranked, according to US News & World Report, among the best places in the US to live, but it was also among the cities with the worst socioeconomic disparities between black and white residents, with a $47,000 gap separating the median household income of the two groups—shocking even for the United States. Seventy-six percent of whites in the area owned their homes; only a quarter of blacks did....
impressive study. the top line, even battery powered cars plugged into dirty electrical grids are better than burning gas. Results show that even for cars registered today, battery electric vehicles (BEVs) have by far the lowest life-cycle GHG emissions. As illustrated in the figure below, emissions over the lifetime of average medium-size BEVs registered today are already lower than comparable gasoline cars by 66%–69% in Europe, 60%–68% in the United States, 37%–45% in China, and 19%–34% in India....