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What is ‘elite overproduction’?
Elite overproduction … describes the condition of a society which is producing too many potential elite-members relative to its ability to absorb them into the power structure.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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The Tail End (2015)
No matter what your age, you may, without realizing it, be enjoying the very last chapter of the relationships that matter most to you. Make it count.
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Facebook’s Widely Viewed Content Report is strange
According to new data, the most popular post on Facebook is a business that sells golfing dates with former Green Bay Packers players. What?!
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Historian suspended by Facebook after sharing document by Goebbels
To: Oversight Board Good day, My name is Igor Petrov, I am an independent historian. The list of my publications, including those for Cambridge University Press, is available at https://independent.academia.edu/IgorPetrov40 On August 6, 2021, whilst conducting archival research and working with…
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The Queen's Duck
Brian Wigginton
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Did America just lose Afghanistan because of WhatsApp?
In the middle of a conflict, good analysis is hard to come by. Because adversaries do not telegraph their plans to one another, plans depend greatly on the fact patterns surrounding their execution…
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Canada's awful new proposals on “harmful” content
Canada's government is poised to pass a "harmful content" regulation. It's a worst-in-class mutation of a dangerous idea that's swept the globe, in which governments demand that hamfisted tech giants remove broad categories of speech – too swiftly for meaningful analysis.
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The uncanny absence of nihilism
Nihilism, like botulism, is not an ideology or conceptual system. It is a stance: an emotionally-charged way of being.
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The case against crisis-mongering
We face problems. As have all societies ever.
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Life Improvements Since the 1990s
A list of unheralded improvements to ordinary quality-of-life since the 1990s going beyond computers.
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California Megafires Are Solvable
The basics on how we got to now, why it matters for all Americans, and how we can fix it together.
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“Raiders of the Lost Ark” Story Conference Transcript (1978)
G We’ll just talk general ideas, what the concept of it was. Then I’ll get down to going specifically through the story. Then we will actually get to where we can start talking down scenes, in the end I want to end up with a list of scenes. And the way I work generally is I figure a code, a general measuring stick…
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End of the line for Uber?
Uber is a bezzle ("the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it"). Every bezzle ends.
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Apple wants to redefine what it means to violate your privacy. We mustn’t let it
Violation of privacy by proxy is still violation of privacy.
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Apps Getting Worse
Too often, a popular consumer app unexpectedly gets worse: Some combination of harder to use, missing features, and slower. At a time in history where software is significantly eating the world, this is nonsensical. It’s also damaging to the lives of the people who depend on these products.
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Big Tech are supposed to be the plumbers, not patricians of internet discourse
When tech companies take it upon themselves to arbitrate what is or isn't misinformation they think they're the patricians of internet discourse. The reality is they're the plumbing. Meanwhile, most of the mainstream media coverage around the pandemic can be classified into five logical fallacies.
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Apple’s New ‘Child Safety’ Initiatives, and the Slippery Slope
The stakes are incredibly high, and Apple knows it. Whatever you think of Apple’s decision to implement these features, they’re not doing so lightly.
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Apple’s new abuse prevention system: an antritust/competition point of view
Apple has announced the new client-side content scanning (based on parameters received from the center) to find child sexual abuse materials to be reported to law enforcers.
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On Apple’s “Expanded Protections for Children” – A Personal Story
These efforts will evolve and expand over time. – Apple on their “Expanded Protections for Children” I am broke “non-liquid” right now. Normally, that sentence doesn&#…
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Apophenia: How the Internet Transforms the Individual into a Conspiracy of One
How the Internet Transforms the Individual into a Conspiracy of One
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This Can’t Go On
The long view of economic history says we're in the midst of a huge, unsustainable acceleration. What happens next?
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Bombs vs. Bugs
I’ll be taking some time in the next months to talk about the newly hostile-by-default nature of technology, and how I deal with it.