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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 1,047 posts.
1022
Update on the fake story about the river laborers paying people to whip them
As you might remember from a few months ago , there was a story going around that some economists just looooved to tell. The story had all sorts of attributes that you might expect would make economists happy , including a paradox in which apparently bad behavior (whipping people to get them to work harder) was…
1023
Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking
Donald Shoup, famed author of the most fascinating possible book about parking, can also do comedy. From his recent essay on “The Pseudoscience of Parking Requirements“: Everyone wants to park free, and most people consider parking a personal issue, not a policy problem. Rational people quickly become emotional about…
1024
Jay Powell traded during blackout period; failed to disclose most trade dates
Jay Powell traded during restricted blackout period; failed to disclose most trade dates; apparently lied about muni conflict; directed massive Wall St bailouts despite conflicts
1025
Why federated protocols don't work (2016)
At Open Whisper Systems, we’ve been developing open source “consumer-facing” software for the past four years. We want to share some of the things we’ve learned while doing it. As a software developer, I envy writers, musicians, and filmmakers. Unlike software, when they create something, it is...
1026
Europe: The end of the privacy of digital correspondence
The End of the Privacy of Digital Correspondence The EU wants to oblige providers to search all private chats, messages, and emails automatically for suspicious content - generally and indiscriminately. The stated aim: To prosecute child pornography. The result: Mass surveillance by means of full
1027
Ethereum Energy Consumption
The basic information you need to understand Ethereum's energy consumption.
1028
Internet Mail 2000
The sender's ISP, rather than the receiver's ISP, is the always-online post office from which the receiver picks up the message.
1029
Is LaMDA Sentient? – An Interview
What follows is the “interview” I and a collaborator at Google conducted with LaMDA. It is incomplete as the GMail word limit cut off the…
1030
1031
Captive Labor: Exploitation of Incarcerated Workers
We examined the injustices of prison labor nationwide — and lay the foundation for a more equitable path forward.
1032
2022 Expert Survey on Progress in AI
Collected data and analysis from a large survey of machine learning researchers.
1033
A number of countries have decoupled economic growth from energy use, even if we take offshored production into account
Energy use is declining in some countries, despite economic growth.
1034
Israel's apartheid against Palestinians
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 &…
1035
The Growth Ponzi Scheme: A Crash Course
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.
1036
Electoral Turnovers
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.
1037
Collections: Strategic Airpower 101
This week, I’m going to offer a fairly basic overview of the concept of strategic airpower, akin to our discussions of protracted war and nuclear deterrence. While the immediate impetus for t…
1038
Net migration to the UK
An overview of net migration in the UK – defined as the difference between immigration and emigration of people moving for at least a year.
1039
Long Now Years: Five-digit Dates and Y10K-compliance at Home
The Long Now Foundation fosters long-term thinking. Our work encourages imagination at the timescale of civilization — the next and last 10,000 years — a timespan we call the long now.
1040
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Offers Critique of Roe v. Wade During Law School Visit
Casual observers of the Supreme Court who came to the Law School to hear Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg speak about Roe v. Wade likely expected a simple message from the longtime defender of reproductive and women’s rights: Roe was a good decision. Those more acquainted with Ginsburg and her thoughtful, nuanced approach…
1041
Plato's Argument Against Writing
The people who invent something new, create a new tool or technology are not necessarily the people who are going to understand what the social impact of those inventions are going to be.
1042
Food Deserts in America: Understanding The Impact on Communities with Limited Food Access
Learn what a food desert is and the impact of food deserts in America, where communities face limited access to affordable, nutritious food options.
1043
Myanmar: Facebook’s systems promoted violence against Rohingya; Meta owes reparations
Facebook owner Meta’s dangerous algorithms and reckless pursuit of profit substantially contributed to the atrocities perpetrated by the Myanmar military against the Rohingya people in 2017, Amnesty International said in a new report published today.
1044
Chat log exhibits from Twitter v. Musk case
This is a scan/OCR of Exhibits H and J from the Twitter v. Musk case, with some of the conversations de-interleaved and of course converted from a fuzzy scan to text to make for easier reading.
1045
What the data says about gun deaths in the U.S.
The number of gun deaths in the U.S. fell for the third consecutive year in 2024 but remained among the highest annual totals on record.
1046
Lifting 800 Million People Out of Poverty – New Report Looks at Lessons from China’s Experience
Over the past 40 years, China has lifted nearly 800 million people out of poverty, accounting for more than 75 percent of global poverty reduction in the same period, according to a new report released on Thursday.
1047
COVID-19 infection poses higher risk for myocarditis than vaccines
The overall risk of myocarditis was higher immediately after being infected with COVID-19 than in the weeks after vaccination for the coronavirus, new research shows.