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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 4,917 posts.
In fiscal year 2014, the federal government will spend around $3.8 trillion. These trillions of dollars make up a considerable chunk - around 22 percent - of the US. economy, as measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP). That means that federal government spending makes up a sizable share of all money spent in the…
Collected data and analysis from a large survey of machine learning researchers.
In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.
Our impact on climate change is not just about emissions that occur today. How much we emitted in the past also matters.
Energy use is declining in some countries, despite economic growth.
More than three-quarters of global agricultural land is used for livestock, despite meat and dairy making up a much smaller share of the world's protein and calories.
We used data from EIA to get up-to-date average household electricity consumption. We compiled statistics to compare to other countries.
a summary of Steven Gibson events and quotes demonstrating charlatan status
When we think of nuclear safety, two accidents often come to mind: Chernobyl and Fukushima. What was the death toll and impact of these disasters?
The US is so economically exceptional that the poorest 20 percent of Americans are richer than many of the world’s most affluent nations.
WHO is continuously monitoring and responding to this pandemic. This questions and answers page will be updated as more is known about COVID-19, how it spreads and how it is affecting people worldwide. For more information, regularly check the WHO coronavirus pages. https://www.who.int/covid-19
After more than four decades of serving as the nation's economic majority, the U.S. middle class is now matched in size by those in the economic tiers above and below it.
The notion that anyone in America who is willing and able to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” can achieve significant upward mobility is deeply embedded in U.S. society. Conventional wisdom holds that class barriers in the United States are the lowest among the world’s advanced economies. Motivating this…
Report showing the number of people who are locked up in the United States and why
The increasing polarised and politicised views 1 on whether to wear masks in public during the current COVID-19 crisis hides a bitter truth on the state of contemporary research and the value we pose on clinical evidence to guide our decisions.
How is inequality measured, who produces key databases, and what does the data tell us?
Palestinians are systematically subjected to home demolitions and forced evictions, and live in constant fear of losing their homes. For more than 73 years, Israel has been forcibly displacing entire Palestinian communities. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians’ homes have been demolished, causing terrible trauma &…
Ponzi schemes fail because they are built on illusions: there is no there there. So what happens when an entire continent of towns and cities is caught up in a kind of Growth Ponzi Scheme? We are finding out.
Data on the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions
The 51-page report, “Meta’s Broken Promises: Systemic Censorship of Palestine Content on Instagram and Facebook,” documents a pattern of undue removal and suppression of protected speech including peaceful expression in support of Palestine and public debate about Palestinian human rights. Human Rights Watch found…
Explore global data on where our energy comes from, and how this is changing.
Over the past few days, EFF and one of our staff technologists, the talented Micah Lee, have had an illuminating back and forth with Canonical Ltd over the use of the Ubuntu mark. While we don’t believe that Canonical has acted with malice or intent to censor, its silly invocation of trademark law...
Do you have a gun in your home? In general, do you feel that the laws covering the sale of firearms should be made more strict, less strict, or kept as they are now? Do you think there should or should not be a law that would ban the possession of handguns, except by the police and other authorized persons?
The Declaration of Causes made by Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas.
Barely 10 years past the end of the Great Recession in 2009, the U.S. economy is doing well on several fronts. The labor market is on a job-creating streak that…
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
What is a warrant canary? A warrant canary is a colloquial term for a regularly published statement that a service provider has not received legal process that it would be prohibited from saying it had received. Once a service provider does receive legal process, the speech prohibition goes into...
We could reduce the amount of land used for grazing and croplands used to grow animal feed.
This Research Brief presents updated data on crash risk using data on crashes from the US DOT in conjunction with data on driving mileage from the AAA Foundation's American Driving Survey.
Barely 10 years past the end of the Great Recession in 2009, the U.S. economy is doing well on several fronts. The labor market is on a job-creating streak that…
