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Robotic police dogs: Useful hounds or dehumanizing machines?
If you're homeless and looking for temporary shelter in Hawaii's capital, expect a visit from a robotic police dog that will scan your eye to make sure you don't have a fever. That's just one of the ways public safety agencies are starting to use Spot, the best-known of a new commercial category of robots that trot around with animal-like agility.
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Today in "the fall of western civilization": For the first time ever, the amount that investors are parking at a major central bank facility is more than $1 trillion. This will clearly end well..
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The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy (IEEE Specturm)
"In carefully crafting a lightbulb with a relatively short life span, the cartel thus hatched the industrial strategy now known as planned obsolescence."
Today's Big Tech are the masters of planned obsolesence - and many celebrates them for it...
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A Soil-Science Revolution Upends Plans to Fight Climate Change (quantamagazine)
#Comment: Once again a case where the scientific community is finally admitting that they have been terribly off-track for centuries - a fact practitioners pointed out all along. Science is good at many things, but practicing humility, listening, inclusivity and general respect for Nature are not among them.
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The Chinese ‘lying flat’ movement (tangping, 躺平)
An illustration making the rounds on China’s internet in May 2021 shows a man “lying flat.” “You want me to get up?” he asks. “That’s not possible in this lifetime.” The drive toward self-reliance has encountered an unlikely form of resistance in a generation of young Chinese who balk at the Party’s high-minded calls for “continued struggle” alongside an deeply engrained culture of overwork without the promise of real advancement. They opt instead for “lying flat,” or tangping (躺平). The “lying flat” movement calls on young workers and professionals, including the middle-class Chinese who are to be the engine of Xi Jinping’s domestic boom, to opt out of the struggle for workplace success, and to reject the promise of consumer fulfilment.
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Detail of “Sickened by Corporate Parasites,” Darryl Brown, Digital, October 2020.
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"Economic and Political Privilege are the single most expensive thing" - Catherine Austin Fitts
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Genetically engineered 'Magneto' protein remotely controls brain & behaviour (Guardian)
"Researchers in the United States have developed a new method for controlling the brain circuits associated with complex animal behaviours, using genetic engineering to create a magnetised protein that activates specific groups of nerve cells from a distance."
(paper)
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England’s Upper Classes - A Dangerous Cult
For centuries, these ‘elite’ families have been as effective at spinning their own inimitability even as they have been at clinging onto their money, power and influence. The origins of that wealth are usually kept deliberately opaque and with good reason: nobody ever got fabulously wealthy on altruism. Many of Britain’s poshest families built their fortunes on the suffering of others.
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Controlled Opposition: The majority of anything that is popular online, no matter which side.
