Curated Reading list for CAT -Technology/Industry/Science | 291 min read

This post contains loads of articles categorised under Technology, Industry and Science. These are handpicked articles over the course of years for CAT Aspirants. This is the last of 2 posts. Click on the following link to go to the previous post: LINK here.

Every Article will have blurb, either written by me or an extract from the original post (mostly the latter) followed by the link to reach the article.

Article 178

The high price we pay for social media. This might resonate (or not) with the Millennial/Gen-Z folks! 🙂

https://bit.ly/3PUXXuY

Article 177

New data show the climate costs of the eating habits of different countries

https://bit.ly/3Jf7wCo

Article 176

Facebook’s founder is setting a relentless pace as he pushes his company through a tech transformation during a global economic slowdown.

https://nyti.ms/3bfU44v

Article 175

Questions over how to feed China’s hog herd remain a growing challenge for Beijing and a threat to global food security.

https://bit.ly/3BkxDWM

Article 174

Big firms and wealthy individuals are just as prone to making bad decisions as anyone else

https://bit.ly/3cBKgSP

Article 173

A glimpse into the e-commerce giant’s ruthless efficiency.

https://bit.ly/3yqpkH0

Article 172

A new CRISPR-based map ties every human gene to its function using a tool called Perturb-seq. The work was led by Jonathan Weissman and colleagues at MIT and the Whitehead Institute and is free for other scientists to use.

https://bit.ly/3OqzYCR

Article 171

A bacterium found on a remote Pacific island first became the obsession of a Punjabi microbiologist. It then became a wonder drug that gave hope to millions around the world

https://bit.ly/3zAlVX8

Article 170

Oh… are we still talking about this?

https://bit.ly/3GMhpGq

Article 169

Go and replace “watch” in any YouTube video URL with “wtch” and see what happens. I set out to find why.

https://bit.ly/3MfvHkb

Article 168

The Twitter founder, Block CEO, and Elon Musk buddy is gazing into the future with laser eyes, and he wants you to follow him.

https://bit.ly/3mmhPtX

Article 167

The fact that the dead can literally replace living faculty members is a perfect metaphor for what is happening across higher education.

https://bit.ly/3x34eha

Article 166

Last fortnight, Indian upstart Hasura enabled GraphQL hot on the heels of becoming India’s newest DevOps unicorn

https://bit.ly/3NojbQk

Article 165

An unprecedented heatwave is turning cities into death traps for outdoor workers

https://bit.ly/3yENfTv

Article 164

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The old good email remains the most critical digital communication tool. What makes the venerable email so useful and sustainable over the long time is its openness and standardization.

https://bit.ly/3Me2Tcx

Article 163

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Medical professionals are embracing the technology to help patients deal with PTSD, anxiety disorders and more

https://bit.ly/3yvf68L

Article 162

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How cellphones transformed life in a women’s prison in Argentina
A temporary measure at the start of the pandemic has become permanent in Argentina, making life easier for both inmates and guards.

https://bit.ly/3PlOhtE

Article 161

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Ever Had a Really Long Acid Trip? Now Science Knows Why
A new paper finally reveals the secret of the LSD Trip Gone Far Too Long: The drug binds to receptors in your brain in a fascinating way.

https://bit.ly/3OX6Qny

Article 160

“My Ancestral Home, The Mall
Lil Miquela’s Post-Racial Society”

https://bit.ly/3Oykk9b

Article 159

“The Automation Myth
Robots won’t build the classless society”

http://bit.ly/3M8NEBh

Article 158

“Massive Black Holes Shown to Act Like Quantum Particles
Physicists are using quantum math to understand what happens when black holes collide. In a surprise, they’ve shown that a single particle can describe a collision’s entire gravitational wave.”

https://bit.ly/3M5cQIT

Article 157

“Requiem for a War Robot
An anthropologist explores the brave new world of virtual warfare—and the fraught relationship between humans and machines.”

http://bit.ly/3j2qQqp

Article 156

“Microplastics found in human blood for first time
Exclusive: The discovery shows the particles can travel around the body and may lodge in organs”

https://bit.ly/36Vn1QE

Article 155

“It’s Like GPT-3 but for Code—Fun, Fast, and Full of Flaws
OpenAI’s new tool can autocomplete lines of programming or conjure software from a simple prompt. It could also riddle the internet with even more bugs.”

https://bit.ly/3Jk6ynL

Article 154

“I Interviewed AI GPT-3 Davinci-002, and This is What it Said.
The Interview Between A.I. and Myself.”

https://bit.ly/3Jub6Ia

Article 153

“Love Is Biological Bribery
Evolution uses all its tricks to make sure we procreate. But love in humans is a many-splendored thing.”

http://bit.ly/3C1aiYn

Article 152

When You’ve Been THIS Stupid, You’ll Never Want To Be Sensible Again.

https://bit.ly/3gIdRZN

Article 151

“NON-FUNGIBLE TOKENS HAVE SPRUNG ONTO OUR FEEDS RECENTLY, CLAIMING TO BE THE NEXT BIG THING. BUT IS THIS AN ONLINE POPULIST UPRISING OR JUST AN ENVIRONMENTALLY DESTRUCTIVE FAD?”

https://bit.ly/3oxcb9z

Article 150

“Bill Gates Invests in Carbon Capture Startup After Tech Breakthrough”

https://bit.ly/3rocrcU

Article 149

“In an ever-changing landscape, the company needs to move quickly and so if they’re constantly trying to negotiate with third parties or waiting to produce the next blockbuster.”

https://bit.ly/3AWaN5l

Article 148

“We mined roughly 13 bitcoins and then ripped up our private key. We were stupid—but not alone.”

https://bit.ly/32GsQjt

Article 147

“Thwaites Glacier is crumbling, and fast—if it melts entirely, it could add 10 feet to sea levels. Now Antarctic scientists are racing to survey the damage.”
https://bit.ly/3qgf5Rj

Article 146

“The word game has gone from dozens of players to hundreds of thousands in a few months. It was created by a software engineer in Brooklyn for his partner.”
https://nyti.ms/3HPFOtX

Article 145

“Bonus-led traps, penalty-driven drives,endless working hours, accidents and anxiety”

https://bit.ly/3n5k19J

Article 144

“Everyone from tech companies to churches wants a say in how the EU regulates AI that could harm people.” https://bit.ly/3FsXaMi

Article 143

“In light of Epic’s vision, the Meta concept is an underwhelming replica”
https://bit.ly/3kgskOy

Article 142

“From India to Ethiopia, Rest of World breaks down how Facebook’s neglect put millions at risk around the world.”
https://bit.ly/2ZLWPVf

Article 141

“What’s bigger? A quarter of a pound? Or a third?”
https://bit.ly/3nfSNN6

Article 140

“This is the rare coding language comparison where there’s an obvious answer, no matter what the context.”
https://bit.ly/307bdYg

Article 139

“One of the great mysteries facing humanity is the question of how we sense our environment. The mechanisms underlying our senses have triggered our curiosity for thousands of years, for example, how light is detected by the eyes, how sound waves affect our inner ears, and how different chemical compounds interact with receptors in our nose and mouth generating smell and taste.”
https://bit.ly/3BcNNOS

Article 138

“The most resilient parasite Christopher Nolan’s Inception and viral ideas”
https://bit.ly/3F6ReJf

Article 137

“The Pole Reversal Process Has Begun: What Could This Mean For Our Future? The Earth’s north magnetic pole is on the move.”
https://bit.ly/3CTWjmo

Article 136

“The Notorious MSG’s Unlikely Formula For Success
The “umami” craze has turned a much-maligned and misunderstood food additive into an object of obsession for the world’s most innovative chefs. But secret ingredient monosodium glutamate’s biggest secret may be that there was never anything wrong with it at all.”
http://bzfd.it/3CfkUSl

Article 135

“The food wars
Vitamins or whole foods; high-fat or low-fat; sugar or sweetener. Will we ever get a clear idea about what we should eat?”
http://bit.ly/3kRWffy

Article 134

“Apple’s Double Agent
He spent years inside the iPhone leaks and jailbreak community. He was also spying for Apple.”
https://bit.ly/3yDKaPS

Article 133

“Big Tech call center workers face pressure to accept home surveillance
Workers at one of the world’s largest call center companies said additional monitoring would violate the privacy of their families in their homes.”
http://nbcnews.to/2W3hH8R

Article 132

“The Jessica Simulation:
Love and loss in the age of A.I.
The death of the woman he loved was too much to bear. Could a mysterious website allow him to speak with her once more?”
https://bit.ly/37kUIbC

Article 131

“Welcome To The Age Of The All-Electric Hypercar
Boasting up to 2,000bhp with no fuel cap, a trio of new releases from Lotus, Pininfarina and Rimac are here for when your Ferrari just isn’t fast enough”
https://bit.ly/3hHHNFf

Article 130

“World wide open
Deep brain stimulation not only treats psychiatric disease – it changes the whole person, boosting confidence and openness”
https://bit.ly/3xkTZSV

Article 129

“Same or Different? The Question Flummoxes Neural Networks.
For all their triumphs, AI systems can’t seem to generalize the concepts of “same” and “different.” Without that, researchers worry, the quest to create truly intelligent machines may be hopeless. “
https://bit.ly/36ci7Lx

Article 128

“Are you ready for cyborg workers?
Augmented colleagues are coming – but how will HR cope?”
https://bit.ly/3w6EDzX

“This Twist on Schrödinger’s Cat Paradox Has Major Implications for Quantum Theory
A laboratory demonstration of the classic “Wigner’s friend” thought experiment could overturn cherished assumptions about reality”
https://bit.ly/35K2xGL

Article 127

“The $149 Smartphone That Could Bring The Linux Mobile Ecosystem to Life
The low-cost PinePhone isn’t a perfect device, but the nuanced ecosystem it’s going to build for Linux-based smartphones is going to be amazing.”

http://bit.ly/2S8L8Ey

Article 126

“Inside Pirelli’s Massive Formula One Tire Operation
When trawling through a Formula One paddock very briefly for the first time back in 2015, my first thought (after I got over the glamour of it all) was, my God there are a lot of tires here”
http://bit.ly/3ctY0we

Article 125

Super interesting and super detailed article that decodes the possible beginning of SARS-cov19
“Origin of Covid – Following the Clues
Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?”
https://bit.ly/3yXLtL1

Article 124

“The Secret Auction That Set Off the Race for AI Supremacy
How the shape of deep learning—and the fate of the tech industry—went up for sale in Harrah’s Room 731, on the shores of Lake Tahoe.”
https://bit.ly/2RdNKR4

Article 123

“The Cure
When it comes to life-saving, even India’s jingoists take modern medicine for granted. This is how that happened.”
https://bit.ly/3u9cLue

Article 122

“The Largest Cells on Earth
Deep in the ocean abyss, xenophyophores are worlds unto themselves.”
https://bit.ly/2T7f0l1

Article 121

“Android Becomes Basically Unusable If You Turn Off All of Google’s Tracking
I know, because I tried”
https://bit.ly/3ep9OkB

Article 120

“A Nude ‘Playboy’ Photo Has Been a Mainstay in Testing Tech for Decades
The documentary ‘Losing Lena’ is about the many small ways in which women are told they don’t belong in tech”
http://bit.ly/3xsHJAm

Article 119

“A 23-Year-Old Coder Kept QAnon Online When No One Else Would
Nick Lim provides tech support to the U.S. networks of White nationalists and conspiracy theorists banned by the likes of Amazon.”
http://bloom.bg/3draqWy

Article 118

“People’s Expensive NFTs Keep Vanishing. This Is Why
“There was no history of my ever purchasing it, or ever owning it,” said one confused NFT buyer. “Now there’s nothing. My money’s gone.””
http://bit.ly/3ga1mXK

Article 117

Super Long & Intersting Read! Must read
“Secrets of the Little Blue Box
“You see, a few years ago the phone company made one big mistake,” Gilbertson explains two days later in his apartment. “They were careless enough to let some technical journal publish the actual frequencies used to create all their multi-frequency tones. Just a theoretical article some Bell Telephone Laboratories engineer was doing about switching theory, and he listed the tones in passing.”
https://bit.ly/3uQZ0kL

Article 116

“The Rise of Junk Science
Fake publications are corrupting the world of research—and influencing real news”
http://bit.ly/2Pa9rQU

Article 115

“The race to build the world’s first sex robot
The $30bn sex tech industry is about to unveil its biggest blockbuster: a $15,000 robot companion that talks, learns, and never says no”
http://bit.ly/3rBPYXv

Article 114

“Gravitational Waves Probe Exotic Matter inside Neutron Stars
A new analysis of light and gravitational waves from colliding neutron stars helps reveal what’s inside these ultradense objects”
http://bit.ly/300M7qP

Article 113

“The Dawn of CRISPR Mutants
An anthropologist dives into the world of genetic engineering to explore whether gene-editing tools such as CRISPR fulfill the hope of redesigning our species for the better.”
http://bit.ly/3klBf03

Article 112

“What Pornhub and Peloton Have in Common With FacebookAn online speech expert explains why no online platform will be spared from content-moderation controversy”
http://bit.ly/37uDadt

Article 111

“TikTok and the Sorting Hat
The 2010’s were a fascinating time to follow the consumer tech industry in China. Though I left Hulu in 2011, I still kept in touch with a lot of the team from our satellite Hulu Beijing office, many of whom scattered out to various Chinese tech companies throughout the past decade. On my last visit to the Hulu Beijing office in 2011, I was skeptical any of the new tech companies out of China would ever crack the U.S. market.”
http://bit.ly/2YzjGzA

Article 110

“Asian rivers are turning black. And our colorful closets are to blame Textile dyeing is one of the most polluting aspects of the global fashion industry, devastating the environment and posing health hazards to humans.”
http://cnn.it/371c0uj

Article 109

“Everything You Should Know About Sound
We think of sound as something we hear—something that makes noise. But in pure physics terms, sound is just a vibration going through matter.”
http://bit.ly/3aQiopl

Article 108

“The Mystery Of India’s Plummeting COVID-19 Cases”
http://n.pr/39CbTqV

Article 107

“A Movie of the Evolving Universe Is Potentially Scary
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory will reveal all sorts of short-term changes in the cosmos—and some could have dire consequences for humanity”
http://bit.ly/38XlPuS

Article 106

“The Most Famous Paradox in Physics Nears Its End
In a landmark series of calculations, physicists have proved that black holes can shed information, which seems impossible by definition. The work appears to resolve a paradox that Stephen Hawking first described five decades ago.”
https://bit.ly/2MNwCiD

Article 105

“Back-up brains: The era of digital immortality
These largely un-interrogated questions also begin to touch on more fundamental issues of what it means to be human. Would an emulated brain be considered human and, if so, does the humanity exist in the memories or the hardware on which the simulated brain runs? “
http://bbc.in/2KPKJU7

Article 104

One last article for 2020 is here!
“The rise and fall of Flash, the annoying plugin that shaped the modern web
Before 1996, the web was a static, dull place. But the accidental creation of Flash turned it into a cacophony of noise, colour, and controversy, presaging the modern web”
http://bit.ly/2MiZ1Nb

Article 103

 “A Twisted Path to Equation-Free Prediction.
Complex natural systems defy standard mathematical analysis, so one ecologist is throwing out the equations.”
https://bit.ly/372ZTgY

Article 102

“The extra materials and energy involved in manufacturing a lithium-ion battery mean that, at present, the carbon emissions associated with producing an electric car are higher than those for a vehicle running on petrol or diesel – by as much as 38%, according to some calculations. Until the electricity in national grids is entirely renewable, recharging the battery will involve a degree of dependence on coal or gas-fired power stations.”
http://bit.ly/37t0EA7

Article 101

 “Computer Scientists Break Traveling Salesperson Record
After 44 years, there’s finally a better way to find approximate solutions to the notoriously difficult traveling salesperson problem.”
https://bit.ly/2UzXa7B

Article 100

“Hopefully, this attention to them can also bring about a sense of humility, which will surely benefit a species brought to its knees not by alien invaders, but by a coronavirus spread through microscopic droplets.”
https://bit.ly/34SPyTG

Article 99

 “How Facebook and Other Sites Manipulate Your Privacy Choices
Social media platforms repeatedly use so-called dark patterns to nudge you toward giving away more of your data.”
https://bit.ly/3dOuy39

Article 98

“Cryptography Pioneer Seeks Secure Elections the Low-Tech Way
Ronald Rivest helped come up with the RSA algorithm, which safeguards online commerce. Now he’s hoping to make democratic elections more trustworthy.”
https://bit.ly/3d0UHeW

Article 97

“Can the Internet Survive Climate Change?
How a warming world is sparking calls for a greener web”
https://bit.ly/3dcBOWr

Article 96

“The Big and the Small”
https://bit.ly/2Se1rfV

Article 95

“Mitochondria May Hold Keys to Anxiety and Mental Health
Research hints that the energy-generating organelles of cells may play a surprisingly pivotal role in mediating anxiety and depression.”
https://bit.ly/36fyVm6

Article 94

“For Math Fans: A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Number 42
Here is how a perfectly ordinary number captured the interest of sci-fi enthusiasts, geeks and mathematicians”
https://bit.ly/331QqUV

Article 93

“Coffee Rust Is Going to Ruin Your Morning
Coffee plants were supposed to be safe on this side of the Atlantic. But the fungus found them.”
https://bit.ly/364Ia8E

Article 92

“Pharma Companies Argue That Lower Drug Prices Would Mean Fewer Breakthrough Drugs. Is That True?”
https://bit.ly/33U2ruS

Article 91

“‘The goal is to automate us’: welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism
Shoshana Zuboff’s new book is a chilling exposé of the business model that underpins the digital world. Observer tech columnist John Naughton explains the importance of Zuboff’s work and asks the author 10 key questions”
https://bit.ly/33VhDbt

Article 90

“Why Guerrilla Games stubbornly built its amazing game engine from scratch
Meet Decima, the engine that birthed several of your beloved games”
https://bit.ly/35JoO9a

Article 89

In continuation from yesterday’s article, we go one step back and look at how GPT-2 worked.

“How this A.I became a communist
This A.I was able to change his understanding of life after reading communist books.”
https://bit.ly/3izG8Rk

Article 88

“A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?
GPT-3
We asked GPT-3, OpenAI’s powerful new language generator, to write an essay for us from scratch. The assignment? To convince us robots come in peace”
https://bit.ly/3kfWLSx

Article 87

“Catastrophes and calms Evolution is extraordinarily creative in the wake of a cataclysm. How does life keep steadily ticking over in between?”
https://bit.ly/3ivR6Yl

Article 86

“How a Tiny Bacterium Called Wolbachia Could Defeat Dengue Scientists are immunizing mosquitoes against disease with the help of a common microbe”
https://bit.ly/3heZWrZ

Article 85

“The Life-Saving Car Technology No One Wants Safety features that would make vehicles far less lethal to pedestrians exist right now. Why aren’t they required?”
https://bloom.bg/33cnZm2

Article 84

“Extra DNA May Make Unlikely Hybrid Fish Possible The unintentional creation of “sturddlefish” hybrids may illuminate the genomic mechanisms that govern whether species can interbreed.”
https://bit.ly/3lX5GtO

Article 83

“Mathematicians Will Never Stop Proving the Prime Number Theorem
Why do mathematicians enjoy proving the same results in different ways?”
https://bit.ly/32GeBHr

Article 82

“My Pacemaker Is Tracking Me From Inside My Body
Cloud-connected medical devices save lives, but also raise questions about privacy, security, and oversight. An Object Lesson.”
https://bit.ly/2EyGpFf

Article 81

“Android Phones Might Be More Secure Than iPhones Now
What the market for zero-day exploits tells us about our phones”
https://bit.ly/2YtTlTK

Article 80

“The Brave New World of Chemical Romance
How love drugs will shape the future of our relationships.”
https://bit.ly/3gPU34U

Article 79

“How to safely reopen offices, schools and other public spaces while keeping people six feet apart comes down to a question mathematicians have been studying for centuries.”
https://bit.ly/3iqA3WR

Article 78

“You Can’t Kill the Bloomberg Terminal. But If You Were Going to Try, Here’s How. Bloomberg is one of the best software companies in history, so good luck and best wishes”
https://bit.ly/33BEERQ

Article 77

Brilliant experiential writing on Youtube algorithm form a Individual POV.
“See Zeynep Tufekci, in the New York Times: “Given its billion or so users, YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.” And Kevin Roose’s extraordinary front-page Times article “The Making of a YouTube Radical.””
https://bit.ly/2D0rRgI

Article 76

“What Happened When I Switched From Mac to Windows
Fed up with the rising cost and declining quality of Apple laptops, I migrated to Microsoft. It has been both a total joy and a complete pain in the neck.”
https://bit.ly/2CWbjqj

Article 75

“How a Defense of Christianity Revolutionized Brain Science”
https://bit.ly/3fBSWFx

Article 74

The Walkman, Forty Years On
The gadget that taught the world to socially distance.”
https://bit.ly/2DwzxYo

Article 73

“The Myth of Drug Expiration Dates
Hospitals and pharmacies are required to toss expired drugs, no matter how expensive or vital. Meanwhile the FDA has long known that many remain safe and potent for years longer.”
https://bit.ly/38Fjz9G

Article 72

“What’s wrong with WhatsApp
As social media has become more inhospitable, the appeal of private online groups has grown. But they hold their own dangers – to those both inside and out.”
https://bit.ly/2O0fpzX

Article 71

Brilliant longform article!
“Move Mirror: An AI Experiment with Pose Estimation in the Browser using TensorFlow.js
Pose estimation, or the ability to detect humans and their poses from image data, is one of the most exciting — and most difficult — topics in machine learning and computer vision. Recently, Google shared PoseNet: a state-of-the-art pose estimation model that provides highly accurate pose data from image data. This is the story of the experiment that prompted us to create this pose estimation library for the web in the first place.” https://bit.ly/2AgO0X4

Article 70

“The rating game: how Uber and its peers turned us into horrible bosses.
Soon, you’ll be able to go to the Olive Garden and order your fettuccine alfredo from a tablet mounted to the table. After paying, you’ll rate the server. Then you can use that tablet to hail an…”
https://bit.ly/31ioY54

Article 69

“Apple Just Crippled IDFA, Sending An $80 Billion Industry Into Upheaval”
https://bit.ly/383LEan

Article 68

“A Deadly Mosquito-Borne Illness Is Brewing in the Northeast
EEE kills almost half of its victims, and cases are on the rise”
https://bit.ly/2MOPWc6

Article 67

“Each night I lay in my bed beside my boyfriend with one eye closed against the pillow and with the other, wheeled down Instagram’s infinite scroll. Each morning, I woke up to my phone alarm and rolled over to tap it off and, if I had time, looked at Instagram while still half-asleep. I easily spent an hour on it a day – in bed, on the subway or at my desk during lunch. Compared with the hours I spent elsewhere on the internet, it felt like nothing.”
https://bit.ly/2Ag5IcV

Article 66

“How Time Is Encoded in Memories
Rats and equations help researchers develop a theory of how our brains keep track of when events took place.”
https://bit.ly/36uRGAe

Article 65

“In March 2017, Loeb caused a media frenzy by suggesting that FRBs could actually be of alien origin – solar-powered radio transmitters that might be interstellar light sails pushing huge spaceships across galaxies.”
https://bit.ly/2xozHhF

Article 66

“In his first year at university, Li was extremely shy. He came up with a personal algorithm for making friends in the canteen, weighing data on group size and conversation topic to optimise the chances of a positive encounter. The method helped him to make friends, so he developed others: how to master English, how to interpret dreams, how to find a girlfriend. While other students spent the long nights studying, Li started to think about how he could apply his algorithmic approach to business. When he graduated at the turn of the millennium, he decided that he would make his fortune in the field he knew best: education.”
https://bit.ly/3f2xOIJ

Article 64

“Two weeks back, Zoho Corporation sued Freshworks for copying its trade secrets. I wrote a report on comparing the two businesses during my MBA as part of a course requirement. In the wake of recent developments, I believe it will be an interesting read: attaching below, a version of the essay.”
https://bit.ly/3bcNIxA

Article 63

“As my colleagues Alexis Madrigal and Robinson Meyer have reported, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention developed and distributed a faulty test in February. Independent labs created alternatives, but were mired in bureaucracy from the FDA. In a crucial month when the American caseload shot into the tens of thousands, only hundreds of people were tested. That a biomedical powerhouse like the U.S. should so thoroughly fail to create a very simple diagnostic test was, quite literally, unimaginable. “I’m not aware of any simulations that I or others have run where we [considered] a failure of testing,” says Alexandra Phelan of Georgetown University, who works on legal and policy issues related to infectious diseases.”
https://bit.ly/2UAm0F9

Article 62

“What if I open a program (an Internet-browsing “app,” say), swipe it away, and then open it again? If that program is already running, the system will bring that program to the front again—but shouldn’t I know whether it’s maximizing an already-opened program, or starting it anew? And what if I want to open a second instance of that program instead? These operating systems treat us like we’re children, and I don’t appreciate it.”
https://bit.ly/2xkFK6y

Article 63

“So why is the fatality rate close to 4%?

If 5% of your cases require intensive care and you can’t provide it, most of those people die. As simple as that.”
https://bit.ly/2WEJLx9

Article 61

“If you’re wondering whether it’s an overreaction to cancel large gatherings and public events (and I love basketball), here’s a useful primer as to why these measures can slow the spread of the virus and save lives. We have to look out for each other. – Barack Obama”

“Hospitals filled with Covid-19 patients won’t just strain to care for those patients — doctors may also have to prioritize them over others. “Right now there’s always a doctor available when you need one, but that may not be the case if we’re not careful,” Landon said.”
http://bit.ly/3b2L8Kn

Article 60

“Today, China uses almost half the world’s concrete. The property sector – roads, bridges, railways, urban development and other cement-and-steel projects – accounted for a third of its economy’s expansion in 2017. Every major city has a floor-sized scale model of urban development plans that has to be constantly updated as small white plastic models are turned into mega-malls, housing complexes and concrete towers.”
http://bit.ly/2VvFBYa

Article 59

““Cancer,” Bryson reports, “is above all an age thing. Between birth and the age of forty, men have a just one in seventy-one chance of getting cancer and women one in fifty-one, but over sixty the odds [rise] to one in three for men and one in four for women.” With cancer come the complications of radiation and the nightmare of chemotherapy. At what age does one decide to forego treatment and give up the ghost? A gastroenterologist I used to see on occasion showed me a letter one day from a patient, a man of seventy-one, who had decided to forgo any efforts to stave off his recently discovered stomach cancer, preferring death to treatment. He had, he wrote in the letter, “had enough of life.””
http://bit.ly/2PBAEZO

Article 58

“Brain decoding took off about a decade ago1, when neuroscientists realized that there was a lot of untapped information in the brain scans they were producing using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). That technique measures brain activity by identifying areas that are being fed oxygenated blood, which light up as coloured blobs in the scans. To analyse activity patterns, the brain is segmented into little boxes called voxels — the three-dimensional equivalent of pixels — and researchers typically look to see which voxels respond most strongly to a stimulus, such as seeing a face. By discarding data from the voxels that respond weakly, they conclude which areas are processing faces.”
https://go.nature.com/2SYUe4n

Article 57

“Winston discovered he had millions of Chinese fans who had never even been on YouTube. He was constantly approached by Chinese fans explaining that they saw his videos on Chinese streaming sites. “This is how China works,” says Winston, “they take your property and make it their own.” Even fewer Westerners are on Chinese social media than Chinese are on Western social media so there is little chance of thieves ever being discovered and, while intellectual property and creative content theft is common in China, the theft is always going towards China, not away.”
http://bit.ly/3bCmJvU

Article 56

“How does it know? There are no dials and settings on the Pot. As far as you can tell, there is only a heating element beneath. There doesn’t look like room for anything else to hide. How does the Pot know how long to cook the rice? It is a mystery of the Orient. Don’t ask questions you don’t need the answers to. The point here is to save you some time and money. If you want gourmet cooking, you aren’t going to learn about it here.”
http://bit.ly/2UGptm8

Article 55

“His only hope of seeing his father resurrected is to live to see the Singularity — the moment when computing power reaches an “intelligence explosion.” At this point, according to transhumanists such as Kurzweil, people who are merged with this technology will undergo a radical transformation. They will become posthuman: immortal, limitless, changed beyond recognition. Kurzweil predicts this will happen by the year 2045. Unlike his father, he, along with those of us who are lucky enough to survive into the middle of this century, will achieve immortality without ever tasting death.”
http://bit.ly/2vQviTz

Article 54

“Amazon “generates meager profits,” electing to keep prices low while “choosing to expand at a speed and scale that is pushing it into the red,” she writes. It has risen to become the world’s second most valuable firm, worth about $1 trillion, because it is “at the center of e-commerce” and owns “essential infrastructure for a host of other businesses that depend upon it.””
http://bit.ly/39ZfRIq

Article 53

“It doesn’t matter that its shatterproof windows aren’t very shatterproof at all, or that, based on its design, the Cybertruck sucks at being an actual truck. Seemingly, the Cybertruck is a physical manifestation of Musk’s hubris: He’s built a fandom of nerds so vast and so wealthy, he believes he can sell them a $40,000 truck that looks like an extra from the video game Twisted Metal.”
http://bit.ly/34P2JBW

Article 52

“The flavor industry is highly secretive. Its leading companies will not divulge the precise formulas of flavor compounds or the identities of clients. The secrecy is deemed essential for protecting the reputations of beloved brands. The fast-food chains, understandably, would like the public to believe that the flavors of the food they sell somehow originate in their restaurant kitchens, not in distant factories run by other firms. A McDonald’s french fry is one of countless foods whose flavor is just a component in a complex manufacturing process. The look and the taste of what we eat now are frequently deceiving — by design.”
http://bit.ly/2EKcQwY

Article 51

“A popular trope about Silicon Valley involves its skill of regurgitation. Its companies vie to replace public services or brick-and-mortar businesses, after deeming these business models inefficient. Then they dress up those same models and spit them back out as their own revenue plans. In 2017, Lyft rolled out Shuttle, where commuters wait at designated locations to share rides: a bus service. MakeSpace raised millions of dollars for its product: “Cloud storage for physical stuff” – or storage lockers. Apple’s human curators of news are editors. WeLive’s co-living spaces are hostels and dorms. Uber Health is the ambulance.”
http://bit.ly/2RBOwVT

Article 50

“The Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program, founded in 2007, took a two-pronged approach, pairing novice speakers with older speakers who were fluent in the Chickasaw language, and using technology to reach a wider audience. Language learners were paired with expert speakers in a master/apprentice program for immersive lessons that lasted several hours a day, five days a week. Hinson credits his ability to learn so much of the language in just a few years to this type of approach and to his own dogged determination. Under Hinson’s direction, the tribe also built an online television network with six different channels that include language lessons, cultural events, and oral histories.”
http://bit.ly/341ZhDj

Article 49

“Ian Malcolm’s web page stayed up for several months. Stu-Bot would periodically replace the old paper titles with sometimes plausible (and often hilarious) new ones. I don’t know how many people came across this site and actually believed it was real. When the higher-ups at SFI finally got wind of it, they declared it inappropriate and quickly shut down the site.”
http://bit.ly/2L9hfgA

Article 48

“A visit to Chatroulette usually begins with a few rushed clicks of the “Next” button, either out of a sense of danger—do you really want to engage with that empty-eyed guy lounging in bed?—or out of curiosity about what’s around the corner. The majority of Chatroulette users are male and under thirty-five, and many of them are trolling for girls, so they “next” each other at barbaric rates. When you do decide to stop and engage, things can get a little awkward. On one of my first Chatrouletting attempts, I found myself talking to a man from Lyons, who had muted the sound. We watched each other typing and reacting to the words that scrolled next to our images, co-stars in a postmodern silent film.”
http://bit.ly/2R1Q23i

Article 47

“With its cheap geothermal energy and low crime rate, Iceland has become the world’s leading miner of digital currency. Then the crypto-crooks showed up.”
http://bit.ly/2rKq3ml

Article 46

“She hadn’t had much Airbnb experience when she and her daughter decided to book a place in Marina del Rey, California, this past spring, she said. But as a criminal defense attorney, she figured she had a pretty good barometer for bullshit.Just before check-in, Patterson had gotten a call that was almost exactly the same as the one I had received. The man on the other end of the line said that the property’s bathroom wasn’t working, but that he was able to put them up in a much bigger place until a plumber could fix the problem.”
http://bit.ly/2NQI7mm

Article 45

“Thanks to his clever use of social media, he was dubbed the first prime minister of the Instagram age – but after four years in power, cracks in his image have started to show.”
http://bit.ly/2CgWGdv

Article 44

“So far, though, Silicon Valley’s response has been sluggish at best. The tech giants claim immunity under a law that likens social media companies to newsstands rather than to publishers responsible for the content on their platforms. In other words, they argue, social media companies don’t create the offensive material that ends up on their pages, so they can’t be held liable. The law is the subject of fierce debate inside DC’s Beltway and is at the heart of many battles over the publication of hate manifestos, terror screeds, sex ads, fake news, and, more recently, drugs.”
http://bit.ly/2WauDFu

Article 43

“Purdue Pharma, owned by the Sacklers, marketed the drug so heavily that they were eventually convicted of felony “misbranding.” They said it was non-addictive, abuse-proof. Purdue bought and sold doctors to over-prescribe the medicine across America, bringing in billions of dollars in profits. Rich and poor, black and white, Purdue Pharma bought lunches and dinners and weekends on yachts for the doctors who prescribed the most pills to the most humans. Reps were given bonuses for getting doctors to prescribe more pills and higher doses.”
http://bit.ly/2MBXUWP

Article 42

“Intuit also continues to use “dark patterns” — design tricks to get users of its website to do things they don’t necessarily mean to do — to ensure that as many customers as possible pay, former employees say. A marketing concept frequently invoked at Intuit, which goes by the acronym “FUD,” seeks to tap into Americans’ fear, uncertainty and doubt about the tax filing process.”
http://bit.ly/2MyW1dq

Article 41

“On the great dividing line of first- and second-world influence, anticommunist émigrés living in Western Germany provided a reliable stream of local content. Since the Soviet propaganda machine worked overtime spreading anti-American rumors and disinformation, the broadcasters working for the various U.S.-sponsored “Radio” properties in the Eastern bloc often improvised material to combat the communist threat. Journalists working for Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty cherry-picked interviews with recent defectors or accepted unsubstantiated rumors as fact.”
http://bit.ly/35PFPMc

Article 40

Advice from 1982 on how and why one should buy a computer. “I can hardly bring myself to mention the true disadvantage of computers,” Fallows writes, “which is that I have become hopelessly addicted to them.”“My computer has a 48K memory. Since each K represents 1,024 bytes of information—each byte representing one character or digit—the machine can manipulate more than 49,000 items of information at a time. In practice, after allowing for the space that The Electric Pencil’s programming instructions occupy in the computer’s memory, the machine can handle documents 6,500 to 7,500 words long, or a little longer than this article. I break anything longer into chunks or chapters and work with them one at a time.”
http://bit.ly/2p7okGD

Article 39

“The MQ-1B Predator drone, or the “Pred,” as its crews call it, is flown from here. Underground and underwater fiber-optic cables link these trailers—ground-control stations, really—to Europe, where a satellite dish makes the connection directly to every Predator in the air over Baghdad, and along the Afghan-Pakistani border, and wherever else they are needed. Local airfields get them into the air, then Las Vegas takes over.”
http://bit.ly/2LOwMDi

Article 38

“TikTok-famous teens, the envy of their generation, are all too aware that their fame could go away at any moment. What goes unspoken is that there is always someone funnier or prettier or more likable or who works harder, and that soon their own face may show up less and less on strangers’ screens. That so many people will become TikTok-famous or Instagram-famous or Twitter-famous that it will cease to mean quite so much; that someday there will be simply too many influencers and not enough eyeballs and money. That if everyone is a little bit famous, no one is.”
http://bit.ly/30Jqut2

Article 37

“We are given only the noisy half of probability that its cause is located inside of ourselves and never the quiet part of probability that cancer’s source pervades our shared world. Our genes are tested: our drinking water isn’t. Our body is scanned, but not our air. We are told it is in the error of our feelings or told it is in the inevitabilities of our flesh. We are told there is a difference between illness and health, between what is acute and what is chronic, between living and dying, too.”
http://bit.ly/34XORGN

Article 36

“My belief is the distinguishing characteristic of humanity is this keystone ability to have descriptions with which we construct stories. I think stories are what make us different from chimpanzees and Neanderthals. And if story-understanding is really where it’s at, we can’t understand our intelligence until we understand that aspect of it.”
http://bit.ly/2p9JVxX

Article 35

“There’s a lot of people that will teach you how to make money. It’s just, the thing is, like, an information product in that niche, is, I mean, how tangible is that information? What is someone going to do with what you tell them. Most people won’t do anything with it. You know, 90% of the people who get that information product, really aren’t going to do anything with it. It’s no different than when our country tells people to go to college for, you know, eight years, four years, like I did and expect a job when they come out. And then there’s no job.”
http://bit.ly/2mQVUQj

Article 34

“But at some point, each of them looked up and noticed the same strange thing: the tiny light beside their webcam glowing. At first they figured it was some kind of malfunction, but when it happened repeatedly—the light flicking on, then off—the girls felt a chill. One by one, they gazed fearfully into the lenses, wondering if someone was watching and if, perhaps now, they were looking into the eye of something scary after all. Nila, for one, wasn’t taking any chances. She peeled off a sticker and stuck it on the lens.” http://bit.ly/2m4YHEH

Article 33

“Once upon a time” refers to relatively recent years (2001-2006), during which I wrote several books and published more than 50 pieces of magazine journalism and criticism – a total output of, give or take, 4,500 manuscript pages. I rarely felt very disciplined during this half decade, though I realise this admission invites accusations of disingenuousness. Obviously I was disciplined. These days I have read from start to finish exactly two works of fiction – excepting those I was also reviewing – in the last year. These days I play video games in the morning, play video games in the afternoon and spend my evenings playing video games.””
http://bit.ly/2mlWZ1L

Article 32

“And this job is just about the only game in town, like it is in lots of towns, and eventually will be in more towns, with US internet retail sales projected to grow 10 percent every year to $279 billion in 2015 and with Amazon, the largest of the online retailers, seeing revenues rise 30 to 40 percent year after year and already having 69 giant warehouses, 17 of which came online in 2011 alone. So butch up, Sally.”
http://bit.ly/2kvH9RX

Article 31

“The story of the Max is ultimately the story of the Darwinian business cycle where mature companies like Boeing face constant threats from new products, new competitors, and the search for new growth. Sometimes this motivates them to new heights of innovation and progress. Other times, it prompts them to pull everything back in the name of cost-cutting.”
http://bit.ly/2k73mVZ

Article 30

“I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he said tensely. The only solution was using unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”After one executive left that meeting, he booked a flight to Shenzhen. If Mr. Jobs wanted perfect, there was nowhere else to go.
https://nyti.ms/2lzOhfW

Article 29

“To celebrate the Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1900, a number of French artists were commissioned to produce a series of cigar box cards on the theme ‘En l’an 2000’. They came up with some fantastic imagery: in the future world they portrayed there was clearly going to be a great deal of aerial warfare and submarine sport, and a lot of electricity. The denizens of the year 2000 would put on their makeup with electricity, they would farm with electricity, and travel everywhere by electricity.” http://bit.ly/2HbQ3vZ

Article 28

“Technology companies engage in “data relations,” which turn our daily lives into a highly profitable “data stream.” This process enacts “a new form of data colonialism, normalizing the exploitation of human beings through data, just as historic colonialism appropriated territory and resources and ruled subjects for profit.” Ultimately, they believe, data colonialism “paves the way for a new stage of capitalism whose outlines we only glimpse: the capitalization of life without limit.””
http://bit.ly/2OXHbQM

Article 27

“His models bear striking resemblance to the one-dimensional cellular automata—life-like lattices of numerical patterns—championed by Stephen Wolfram, whose search tool Wolfram Alpha helps power the brain of Siri on the iPhone. Nonconformist biologist Craig Venter, in defending his creation of a cell with a synthetic genome—“the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer”—echoes Barricelli.”
http://bit.ly/2TkiUmt

Article 26

The term Beats by Dre” was already coined through the failed collaboration, and SLS had come up with a rough prototype headphone that would shape the entire lineup though the present day: giant ear cups, a thick, streamlined headband, and enough gloss for a Formula 1 car. ”
http://bit.ly/2LfeIn1

Article 25

Facebook’s response would be to adopt a “mature role”, not “shunning” but “advocating” the new rules. For a company that has fiercely resisted new laws, Clegg’s message aimed to persuade us that the page had turned. Yet his remarks sounded like Newspeak, as if to obscure ugly facts.
http://bit.ly/2XhVQVO

Article 24

In a relatively coherent set of texts by a single author, a writer’s idiosyncratic linguistic choices leave a mark analogous to a fingerprint. In order to recognize that fingerprint, you need a reasonably large, reasonably similar set of texts to compare with the one you’re curious about, and the one you’re curious about should be long enough to exhibit the fingerprint patterns.
http://bit.ly/2YpzFhM

Article 23

Facebook, in short, is here to help. The immensely arrogant assumption baked into this project, of course, is that the world’s unbanked need access to financial services, much less those furnished by Facebook and its partners like Mastercard and Uber.
http://bit.ly/2ZMkKyp

Article 22

Small but super interesting article. Answered one long standing question I had in my life. Where in life is ever something like fourier transform being used. Must Read. “The Fourier transform also tells you how much of each note contributes to the song, so you know which ones are essential. The really high notes aren’t so important (our ears can barely hear them), so MP3s throw them out, resulting in added data compression. Audiophiles don’t like MP3s for this reason—it’s not a lossless audio format, and they claim they can hear the difference.”
http://bit.ly/2Rg7krs

Article 21

New vendors will offer free samples and price-match guarantees to establish their reputation. Promotional campaigns are rife on April 20, also known as Pot Day, the darknet’s equivalent of Black Friday. (The date of Pot Day comes from the North American slang term for smoking cannabis which is 4/20.) “It’s not anonymity, Bitcoins, or encryption that ensure the future success of darknet markets,” writes Jamie Bartlett, author of The Dark Net. “The real secret of Silk Road is great customer service.”
http://bit.ly/2QQr1pu

Article 20

“Dyson had been given £1,000 for travel costs in 1918 (about $75,000 today). During wartime, that was an enormous grant – he decided he could stretch that money to cover expeditions to both sites, important insurance against bad weather or other mishap, dramatically increasing the chance of success.””
http://bit.ly/2HIjE0t

Article 19

“The paper tells you how to make small crystals of the alpha form, which is not too bad, as long as you keep it moist and in the dark, and never, ever, do anything with it. You can make larger crystals, too, by a different procedure, but heed the authors when they say: “This procedure is only recommended on a small scale, since crystalline α-Hg(N3)2 is very sensitive to impact and friction even if it is wet. Heavy detonations occur frequently if crystalline α-Hg(N3)2 is handled in dry state”.”
http://bit.ly/2M6ukdC

Article 18

“And yet, the meaning of “deep” in this context comes simply from the fact that these neural networks have more layers (12, say) than do older networks, which might have only two or three. But does that sort of depth imply that whatever such a network does must be profound? Hardly. This is verbal spinmeistery.””the bridging act not only should maintain clarity, but also should give a sense for the flavor, quirks, and idiosyncrasies of the writing style of the original author”
http://bit.ly/2M4Lx74

Article 17

“Aging has no point; it is the infuriating absence of a point. Having reproduced ourselves externally, we fall down on replicating ourselves internally. The processes of cellular replication that allow us to be boats rebuilt even as they cross the ocean cease acting efficiently, because they have no evolutionary reward for acting efficiently. They are like code monkeys in a failing tech business: they can mess up everything, absent-mindedly forget to code for the color of our hair or the elasticity of our skin, and no penalty is exacted for the failure. We’ve already made all the kids we are going to make.”
http://bit.ly/2HEvTtV

Article 16

I loved reading this article on the other side of Disney World. Fantastic piece of writing. Must read!”This is the story Americans have been sold: the one that pardons the powerful and makes us pay for our own numbness. We submit to a story that tells us we will be good—that we will be made good, and therefore safe—as long as we follow the rules, as long as we forget that there are rules. We enter the castle gates because there can be no danger here, no cruelty, and no adulthood, for as long as we believe: we will be saved not just from the harm that comes to those who are of no value here, but from the knowledge that they even exist. The dream still works, and it will work for at least a little longer. Buy a ticket. See if it’s worth the price.”
http://bit.ly/2JIjW9a

Article 15

“When British manufacturers installed power looms in their factories, workers lost their jobs, and the unemployed masses, desperate for work, dragged down wages for everyone. Those who remained, produced more in less time, earning greater profits for their bosses even as wages slipped. Mechanization simply meant workers spent a greater fraction of their day producing value for someone else.”
http://bit.ly/2VbS7bu

Article 14

“The Earth is, in some ways, in a precarious spot in the solar system. There’s a range of orbital distances inside which a planet can have both liquid surface water (which is believed to be necessary for life) and enough atmospheric CO2 to carry on photosynthesis. This range is called the photosynthesis habitable zone. The Earth orbits barely within the sun’s zone. Some scientists estimate that the inner edge lies just 7.5 million kilometers away, which is only 5 percent of the distance between the Earth and the sun.”
http://bit.ly/2Jd5NQZ

Article 13

“With eight movie ratings (of which two may be completely wrong) and dates that may have a 14-day error, 99% of records can be uniquely identified in the dataset.” The research showed that for many people, much less information is required to establish unicity: “For 68% [of users], two ratings and dates (with a three-day error) are sufficient.””
http://bit.ly/2GX1NBk

Article 12

“The high-powered cameras send what they see to 16 monitoring centers in Ecuador that employ more than 3,000 people. Armed with joysticks, the police control the cameras and scan the streets for drug deals, muggings and murders. If they spy something, they zoom in.This voyeur’s paradise is made with technology from what is fast becoming the global capital of surveillance: China.”
https://nyti.ms/2LcqizR

Article 11

“At night, I would read and take notes on the device in bed, in a tent, on a train. It was an incredible user experience, full of perceived value, delightful in its absurdity. Most importantly, using the device in these ways felt like an investment in the future of books and reading. Each Kindle book I bought was a vote with the wallet: yes – digital books! Every note I took, every underline I made was contributing to a vast lattice collection of reader knowledge that would someday manifest in ways beautiful or interesting or otherwise yet unknowable.”
http://bit.ly/2DBr4jD

Article 10

“This has the potential to have very destructive fallout for the open source world,” Zitzman says. “When a corporate giant like AWS doesn’t play fair, they are actually shooting themselves in the foot, as they will eventually find themselves without open technologies to roll out.”
http://bit.ly/2ZuhY1L

Article 9

“The problem is that, online, we think we’re reconnecting to that smaller grid—we follow our IRL friends, like their posts, and watch their stories! —when that connection is really mediated by a corporate entity less human than the magazine editors or television producers of the past. We are in the grid of social-media users created by that 21st-century bogeyman, the Algorithm. Loosely defined, the Algorithm—Twitter’s, Facebook’s, Spotify’s, Amazon’s, Google’s, so on and so forth—mediates what we read, watch, and listen to online, encouraging us to consume whatever appears on the screen. It regulates how often we get updates from our friends, whose unpopular posts or opinions we might not see if we don’t seek them out. Based on the data it collects, it can tell when we’re flush, lonely, engaged, or pregnant and then sell us products accordingly.”
http://bit.ly/2PnSpuC

Article 8

“When the execs are extremely smart people making ten times what you do, there’s a tendency to give them the benefit of the doubt.”
http://bit.ly/2v3lwKd

Article 7

“The moment she stepped off the elevator, she was met by co-worker after co-worker who needed and wanted to talk to her — one about a health concern, another about his kid excelling at school, another about a disintegrating marriage. She comforted, celebrated with, and listened to each one in turn. She didn’t, however, price the product.”
http://bit.ly/2YQAtNx

Article 6 “YouTube doesn’t give an exact recipe for virality. But in the race to one billion hours, a formula emerged: Outrage equals attention. It’s one that people on the political fringes have easily exploited, said Brittan Heller, a fellow at Harvard University’s Carr Center. “They don’t know how the algorithm works,” she said. “But they do know that the more outrageous the content is, the more views.””
https://bloom.bg/2VnbVt2

Article 5

“Personally, I feel as if I have suddenly gained all that I want in life and no longer have anything to fear. I am perfectly content both mentally and emotionally. All the tension slips from my body and I feel warm and utterly comfortable, as if I were sitting beside a roaring fire, wrapped in a delicate cashmere blanket, rocking gently back and forth. Communication is pleasant but unnecessary. Under the influence of oxycodone, no companionship is needed. I accept myself and the world just as we are, not begrudgingly, but eagerly, ecstatically even.”
http://bit.ly/2uwyJuT

Article 4

“Today, electric vehicles look like the best way to slash both sorts of pollution, another place where the goals of a healthy climate and healthy bodies converge. Electricity by itself is no guarantee of climate friendliness. But it is a necessary prerequisite to powering cars from clean sources such as wind and solar.”
http://bit.ly/2Fvi5lB

Article 3

“But, of course, companies design for performance and sales, not life span. They make money when they sell more units, and they’re not financially responsible for disposing of products when consumers are finished using them. Nadim Maluf, the founder of the battery consultancy Qnovo, told me that a decade ago, he went to big tech companies telling them he could help them double the longevity of their products, by extending the life of the lithium-ion batteries they were beginning to use. “No one really cared,” he told me. “Extending product life wasn’t consistent with growth on the financial side.””
http://bit.ly/2HNzLdJ

Article 2

“Since 2012, Chinese GDP has grown at an annual rate of 6-8 per cent – weaker than in the pre-crisis period (growth peaked at 14 per cent in 2007) – but still strong enough to support the growth of the Chinese middle class and stimulate the economies of its major trading partners. The US recovery has been slow by historic standards but growth in 2018 (2.9 per cent) was buoyed by Donald Trump’s tax cuts, which dramatically inflated corporate profits. Japan’s growth has been low but stable – unsurprising in view of its rapidly falling population (which declined by 449,000 in 2018). Only the eurozone has continued to struggle, growing by just 1.8 per cent in 2018.”
http://bit.ly/2CuMXkd

Article 1

“Looking at this incredible flurry of funding and activity, it’s worth asking: These companies have done so much—upended labor markets, changed industries, rewritten the definition of a job—and for what, exactly?””The haves and the have-nots might be given new names: the demanding and the on-demand.””For centuries, a woman’s social status was clear-cut: either she had a maid or she was one” “What the combined efforts of the Uber-for-X companies created is a new form of servant, one distributed through complex markets to thousands of different people.”
http://bit.ly/2TH5Mvh