I love the thought of a natural, universal bullshit filter in the form of the effort required to broadcast trustworthy signals. Talk is cheap, and I feel like there are some underlying parallels between this concept and the inspiration behind Readup.

It's difficult to communicate in a software product, but the fundamentals are strikingly similar: You shouldn't be able to broadcast your opinion on an article without putting in the effort required to read it and the greater the effort, the louder the signal should be broadcast.

Can't recommend this one enough. Highly informative but also deeply personal. The story of the older elephant couple used as props in a cabaret parking lot after being chained up in the jungle all day was especially powerful:

>> Someone builds a bonfire in the parking lot and a conga line forms, lurching this way and that, skirting the flames, romping past the elephants. The singing and dancing continues late into the night.

Trapped in the eye of this storm, Joumban and Mae Seang press their faces against each other. With her trunk, Mae Seang gently touches Joumban’s mouth, his tusks, his eyes. He responds in kind. They wrap their trunks around each other and rub foreheads. What must they make of all this?

I think this is worth the time to read and that the policy of UBI deserves some consideration. It's an idea that has potential to appeal to people across the political spectrum, as evidenced by diverse array of economists and politicians that have supported variations of it, but I'm not convinced that Yang's version fits that bill.

While I believe that some form of UBI could be an improvement over the status quo, I am very weary of having to raise an additional $800 bn per year in taxes and allowing current welfare recipients the choice of receiving the Freedom Dividend or retaining their current benefits. One of the biggest advantages of UBI would be the elimination of legacy entitlement bureaucracies.

I'm also extremely dubious of all the fear mongering about AI and robots taking our jobs. We've been through similar changes before. Half of all Americans used to work in agriculture compared to the 2% that do today. Also many of the "smartest people in the world" are perpetually missing the mark when it comes to predicting the viability of autonomous vehicles and other trendy technology.

Interesting dive into the relationship between Google and the businesses that depend on its traffic. I would hate to see Google forced to scale back on innovations like the hotel module due to concerns about it being a monopoly. Just recently Google removed the article preview feature for users in France due to new regulations. Anti-trust legislation was designed to protect consumers, not corporations.

This is a fascinating look into what happens when a country collapses and turns into a failed state. The juxtaposition of a corporate compliance review taking place in a war torn country makes it all seem totally unreal.

I loved this! YouTube has such a mind blowing variety of talent and entertainment. I just finished watching a new video that was posted by one of my favorite medical YouTubers after watching another by a guy that does nothing but chemical science experiments. The diversity of content producers and the topics they cover is incredible. I'm also subscribed to chefs, carpenters, machinists, lawyers, mechanics, lock pickers, programmers, surgeons, journalists and on and on from all over the world.

It's awesome watching someone who is passionate about a given topic start off making videos in their free time, grown their audience, increase their production quality and then be able to quit their day job and start making videos full time. All the while providing viewers with incredible educational content for free with ads or a few bucks a month without. I think this article is spot on in its prediction that this will have a huge impact on our culture in the coming years.

An important fact to always keep in mind with all the hype around "big data", artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The author does a great job highlighting the unintended consequences of increased regulation in the tech sector. I think it's really unfortunate that there seems to be a growing, bipartisan consensus that "something must be done" about these perceived monopolies.

If you do a quick search you can find multiple examples of Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg and other tech CEOs calling for additional rules and regulations on the internet and politicians will always jump at the chance to gain more power and influence. The alternative of voting with your own time, attention and money, and encouraging others to follow suit, can make a difference and give rise to new players in the market but it won't happen overnight.

I also appreciated author's proposal of additional, explicit protections for competitors as a less harmful regulatory approach if it is decided that something must indeed be done.

This is such a beautiful description of the nostalgia elicited by late 80's/early 90's television for those of us who grew up during those years. No doubt older and younger generations will be able to relate as well (I'm always shocked by how dated video from the early 00's looks).

I was surprised there was no mention of Vapor Wave, a genre whose sole purpose seems to be to deliberately extract, amplify and hammer on the "punctum" effect of archived broadcasts from that era.

Highly recommend this one! It's crazy to think that our language can impact the way we see the world in such a literal sense.

As a child I remember being fascinated, as I'm sure most kids are at some point, with the question: "How do I know that what I see as blue is what you see as blue?" I always figured any variation between the colors that individuals experienced would be due to random mutations at the ocular cellular level, not what your native language was!

Love watching hype machines break down.

Interesting behind-the-scenes look into the strawberry industry. It's crazy to think that behind every single seemingly mundane product we take for granted there are people who live and breathe and obsess over it day in, day out. I wonder how different our produce selection would be today if the Plant Patent Act had never been passed.

A bit long winded and not particularly rousing, but I definitely agree with Zuckerberg's position on free speech and the empowering nature of the internet. I don't like Facebook but they're only a small part of it so I just don't use it. I wanted to read this before reading all the articles attacking it. The New Yorker one by Masha Gessen left me wondering whether the author had even listened to or read the speech. I feel like too many people in the media industry just love to hate Facebook and will lash out any time Zuckerberg says anything publicly.

Absolutely incredible. I highly recommend checking out this YouTube video about Kipchoge and the marathon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A73HQwEct-o

It's unreal how perfect his form is. Watching the other runners attempt to sprint the same pace he kept up for the entire two hours really drives home what an unbelievable achievement it is.

This is amazing. Who would have thought that a potential treatment for drug-resistant superbugs could be found in the sewage of the hospitals they inhabit? We're lucky the Eastern Europeans kept the research alive all these years.

Nope.

But that’s OK. While reading this I kept thinking of the song “As I Sat Sadly by Her Side” by Nick Cave. It’s the height of hubris to feel compelled to, or believe that you can, make all the concerns in and of the world your own. Nevertheless, the book sounds interesting and the review was a fun read.

And God don't care for your benevolence
Anymore than he cares for the lack of it in others
Nor does he care for you to sit
At windows in judgement of the world He created
While sorrows pile up around you
Ugly, useless and over-inflated

Financial bullshit is an epidemic.

Wild that this was written in 1953 and sad that the understanding of mental illness hasn't progressed further since then.

PS: The formatting on iOS and reader mode in Chrome can make this article difficult to read. Star it for later if you can't read it in your browser, we'll have a fix pushed out soon!

This is an awesome idea and very impressive project but I’ve dealt with enough high pressure debugging scenarios that I’d never actually want to play it!

I need to get to sleep!

Don’t let the atrocious title put you off. This is exciting stuff!

Fascinating look into one man's life and death and what happens afterwards when there is no next of kin. Wish I could give this an 11.

“We believe that any speech that challenges national sovereignty and social stability is not within the scope of freedom of speech.”

Absolutely chilling.

So many conflicting thoughts about this. It seems ridiculously petty and trivial but at the same time hyper disturbing and Orwellian. It's easy to be angry at Apple for acquiescing to such a demand from such a government but would it be preferable for US companies to refuse and be banned, leaving Chinese consumers further isolated from the rest of the world with only domestically produced products from companies under the complete control of the communist government?

Also, how on earth does something like this end up happening? Like practically, who is the despot liaison at Apple that gets these calls and emails? What is their internal decision making process like? The whole thing is so bizarre.

I wonder what the subway system would look like today if the government had just stayed out of the picture and left the private companies to continue to expand and develop on their own. It's hard to imagine a bleaker history than the one we were left with.

I love that becoming a successful YouTuber is what these kids aspire to. Over the past couple years YouTube went for me from being a place that hosted random videos to my primary destination for all video content, surpassing Netflix, HBO, Hulu and all my other subscriptions combined. The democratization of media is awesome.

Semicolons are still a mystery to me. Off to find Watson's Longreads interview.

This actually kind of makes sense!

> Other, less diverse schools in New York, including elite private ones, had taken to dividing their students by race into consciousness-raising “affinity groups.” I knew several mixed-race families that transferred their kids out of one such school because they were put off by the relentless focus on race.

The accounts detailed in this article range from gross negligence to outright child abuse on the part of the New York public school system. The schools chancellor believes that "Worship of the Written Word" is a white supremacist value that needs to be disrupted? I don't know if I could be convinced that Richard Carranza isn't a right-wing troll himself.

I felt incredibly sad reading this. I'm trying to remind myself that children are resilient and their natural rebelliousness provides for a much needed counterbalance to the bullshit that adults inevitably subject them to but that does nothing to excuse the deranged malfeasance being perpetrated here.

Interesting stuff! I suppose the hypothesis would also explain why individuals can find success losing weight with so many different kinds of diets. Whatever their differences, I'm sure most diets don't call for ultraprocessed foods and people who are thinking about what they're eating probably know to stay away from them instinctually.

I've always had a fascination with these obscure corporate behind-the-scenes jobs at huge ubiquitous brands. I was laughing out loud once I got to the part about the social media manager for Moe's Southwest Grill.

This is a super interesting investigative piece that gives a glimpse into China's startup culture through the story of the incredibly fast-paced rise and fall of a bike manufacturing and sharing company. Even when things seemed to be going well I couldn't imagine dealing with the breakneck speed of their design and production. As soon as we were introduced to Chandler Xu I knew his story would be a particularly painful one.

I loved this bit towards the end:

> On Paul Ashbury’s ‘SpeedX Riders’ Facebook group, riders share hacks to remove the integrated electronics, replace the SpeedForce stem, shed battery weight … convert their visionary ‘smart’ bikes back into, simply, bikes.

Fascinating piece on the "diamond invention." Since this article was written back in 1982 I was super curious to see how the trends have progressed since then. Unfortunately it seems that millennials are killing just about every industry except for the one run by a cartel that manipulates people into spending absurd amounts of money on useless rocks.

I love everything about this. Well researched and hilariously written. I need more meme retrospectives in my life. The excerpt of the interview with R.L. Stein was perfect. Reading all those Gersberms titles really brought back some memories.

Highly recommended. Couldn't take my eyes off the screen once I started reading. Truly horrifying stuff. The nightmarish scenes depicted within reminded me of those from The Orphan Master's Son.

While the worst offenders could just leave New Zealand for other jurisdictions with less oversight at least the country's fisheries and maritime ecosystem will be better protected going forward.

It's unfortunate that The Atlantic chose to publish such a terrible article. Don't bother reading unless you're looking for a weakly-written profile of one unfortunate guy in a poor Appalachian town by an uninformed and condescending writer who extrapolates from that story to support his politicized and ill-conceived agenda (and sell his book).

Don't read this if you're scheduled to have surgery any time soon! Hopefully devices and practices have improved since this article was written. Still a good read though. I never considered how difficult it is to thoroughly clean sophisticated surgical equipment. The author paints some horrifying visuals.

Great article! Reading it made me eager to read the books and other articles on Thomas cited throughout.

I remember reading about him breaking his 10 year streak of silence back in 2016 when he asked the US attorney in Voisine v. United States to name any other instance where a misdemeanor violation could result in a permanent suspension of a constitutional right. Must have been quite a shock to be on the receiving end of that questioning.

In looking up that exchange I also just learned that he had a "Yale Sucks" bumper sticker on the mantle in his chambers which is quite understandable after reading this article. The elitism of ivy-league colleges and the concept of "legacy preference" are both reprehensible.