May 12, 2023 2 min read

You Should Read - May 12

Just One Thing

Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?: As it’s currently imagined, the technology promises to concentrate wealth and disempower workers. Is an alternative possible?

⇛ Anything Ted Chiang writes about AI is an instant "Just One Thing".

Collected Ephemera

Business Insider Walmart and Target Employees Reveal the Most Dangerous Parts of Working in Retail, From Towers of Boxes to Armed Customers and Inattentive Drivers

Heated Climate Misinformation Is Becoming Law: Fossil fuel interests are no longer just marketing lies about "natural gas." They’re getting them codified into law.

NBC News ‘Trump Was Great at This’: How Conservatives Transformed a Colorado School District: A new school board quickly enacted its agenda in Woodland Park. Now teachers are leaving and the board faces growing opposition, including from lifelong GOP voters.
⇛ I'm glad to see this NBC News investigation getting picked up all over the place. Right-wing candidates are trying to take over schools boards across the country. And they are not concerned if their fascist policies destroy the public education system. If anything, that's icing on the cake.

New York Times Timothy McVeigh’s Dreams Are Coming True

Not all mass shootings are ideologically motivated — far from it. But when there is an ideology involved, it’s usually a far-right one. “All the extremist-related murders in 2022 were committed by right-wing extremists of various kinds,” said a February report from the Anti-Defamation League. Sixty percent of these deaths came from two mass shootings, in Buffalo and Colorado Springs.

Mozilla The Internet Deserves a Better Answer to Social
⇛ I'm eager to see how this Mozilla social service develops. My usage of Twitter is now pretty much zero and honestly, I don't use Mastodon much. It may be that the era this mode of social sharing has come and gone, much like instant messenger networks of the mid-2000s.

worklife IT Workers Push Back on Orders to Digitally Spy on Colleagues

The effect of surveillance tech on employees’ mental health has been well documented over the last year. But the harm it is doing to IT workers and managers pushed to deploy it has had less air time.

George RR Martin Writers On Set

The Intercept The “Electrify Everything” Movement’s Consumption Problem: Electrification offers an opportunity to rethink how we use energy. Will we squander it?

Futurism Amazon Is Being Flooded With Books Entirely Written by AI: It's the tip of the AIceberg.

Scientific American Masks Work. Distorting Science to Dispute the Evidence Doesn’t: New mask studies relying on a medical paradigm do not erase decades of engineering and occupational science that show they work

The Guardian ‘Too Greedy’: Mass Walkout at Global Science Journal Over ‘Unethical’ Fees

Texas Tribune A Trio of Texas Churches Donated to Political Candidate Despite Clear IRS Prohibition: A candidate for the Abilene City Council said that three churches made an honest mistake by donating to his campaign and that he is returning the money. The race has been beset by allegations of electioneering by churches.
⇛ It's hard to imagine making "an honest mistake" like this, when this sort of action by churches has long been completely and utterly prohibited.

GROW Biology’s Sharp Left Turn: How radical biologists joined forces with the Black Panthers to challenge the politics of the life sciences

GROW Against Scale: The natural world shows us how to grow without leaving behind a trail of ruin.

The Wabbit Hole