ROUGH TYPE | Nicholas Carr's blog - 0 views
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The smartphone has become a repository of the self, recording and dispensing the words, sounds and images that define what we think, what we experience and who we are. In a 2015 Gallup survey, more than half of iPhone owners said that they couldn’t imagine life without the device.
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So what happens to our minds when we allow a single tool such dominion over our perception and cognition?
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Not only do our phones shape our thoughts in deep and complicated ways, but the effects persist even when we aren’t using the devices. As the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens.
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This Is Not a Market | Dissent Magazine - 0 views
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Given how ordinary people use the term, it’s not surprising that academic economists are a little vague about it—but you’ll be glad to hear that they know they’re being vague. A generation of economists have criticized their colleagues’ inability to specify what a “market” actually is. George Stigler, back in 1967, thought it “a source of embarrassment that so little attention has been paid to the theory of markets.” Sociologists agree: according to Harrison White, there is no “neoclassical theory of the market—[only] a pure theory of exchange.” And Wayne Baker found that the idea of the market is “typically assumed—not studied” by most economists, who “implicitly characterize ‘market’ as a ‘featureless plane.’
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When we say “market” now, we mean nothing particularly specific, and, at the same time, everything—the entire economy, of course, but also our lives in general. If you can name it, there’s a market in it: housing, education, the law, dating. Maybe even love is “just an economy based on resource scarcity.”
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The use of markets to describe everything is odd, because talking about “markets” doesn’t even help us understand how the economy works—let alone the rest of our lives. Even though nobody seems to know what it means, we use the metaphor freely, even unthinkingly. Let the market decide. The markets are volatile. The markets responded poorly. Obvious facts—that the economy hasn’t rebounded after the recession—are hidden or ignored, because “the market” is booming, and what is the economy other than “the market”? Well, it’s lots of other things. We might see that if we talked about it a bit differently.
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Investment - Econlib - 0 views
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nvestment is one of the most important variables in economics.
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Its surges and collapses are still a primary cause of recessions.
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By investment, economists mean the production of goods that will be used to produce other goods. This definition differs from the popular usage, wherein decisions to purchase stocks (see stock market) or bonds are thought of as investment.
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Opinion | Why a Digital Diary Will Change Your Life - The New York Times - 0 views
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At first, my plan was to do what I always do when I see something halfway noteworthy, which is to tell a few hundred thousand people on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or, in my lowest moments, even LinkedIn.
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Smartphones and social networks have turned me into a lonely, needy man who requires constant affirmation. In desperate pursuit of such affirmation, my mind has come to resemble one of those stamping-machine assembly lines you see in cartoons, but for shareable content: The raw, analog world in all its glory enters via conveyor belt on one end, and, after some raucous puffs of smoke, it gets flattened and packaged in my head into insipid quips meant to inspire you to tap a tiny heart on a screen.
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instead of sharing the silly lampshade joke, I journaled it in Day One, a magnificent digital diary app that has transformed my relationship with my phone, improved my memory, and given me a deeper perspective on my life than the one I was getting through the black mirror of social media.
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Private Border Wall Continues To Rise In Texas - 0 views
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A contractor who owns hundreds of miles of property along the U.S-Mexico border says he’s got a deal for President Donald Trump.
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Fisher has already built 1,500 feet of the steel bollard fence and if he completes it within his deadline, he’d make good on his claim of efficiency — the federal government has built only about a mile of a border wall since Trump took office three years ago.
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It’s not Fisher’s first wall project. The Department of Homeland Security awarded his company, Fisher Sand & Gravel, a $400 million federal contract to build 31 miles of border fence in Arizona, although that contract is under a Department of Defense audit.
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Opinion | Standard metrics won't suffice. Here's how to measure Trump's failures so the... - 0 views
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Maybe what’s needed are different units for measuring the Trump administration’s failures and scandals, since the standard metrics aren’t registering. His record should be quantified in scales that a Fox News viewer might be more familiar with: not body counts or dollars, but Benghazis and Solyndras.
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For instance, sometimes pundits try to put the 183,000 covid-19 deaths in context by noting that cumulative deaths per capita in the United States are double those of Canada, quintuple those of Germany, 20 times those of Australia, 90 times those of South Korea, and so on.
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here’s a different way to contextualize this national trauma: The number of lives lost to covid-19 is roughly equal to the death toll of 60 9/11 attacks.
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Can Political Theology Save Secularism? | Religion & Politics - 0 views
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Osama bin Laden had forced us to admit that, while the U.S. may legally separate church and state, it cannot do so intellectually. Beneath even the most ostensibly faithless of our institutions and our polemicists lie crouching religious lions, ready to devour the infidels who set themselves in opposition to the theology of the free market and the messianic march of democracy
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As our political system depends on a shaky separation between religion and politics that has become increasingly unstable, scholars are sensing the deep disillusionment afoot and trying to chart a way out.
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At its best, Religion for Atheists is a chronicle of the smoldering heap that liberal capitalism has made of the social rhythms that used to serve as a buffer between humans and the random cruelty of the universe. Christian and Jewish traditions, Botton argues, reinforced the ideas that people are morally deficient, that disappointment and suffering are normative, and that death is inevitable. The abandonment of those realities for the delusions of the self-made individual, the fantasy superman who can bend reality to his will if he works hard enough and is positive enough, leaves little mystery to why we are perpetually stressed out, overworked, and unsatisfied.
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The Fascinating Economics Of The Hedge Funds' Private Brexit Exit Polls - Forbes - 0 views
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This is our efficient markets hypothesis in action. The EMH does not insist, not at all, that markets are the efficient manner of organising everything. Rather, simply that markets are efficient at processing the information about what prices should be in a market. And this is one of the ways this works. We don’t know the result of that coming referendum. But we do know that it will have major effects on prices either way. Leave and sterling tumbles, stay in and it rises (largely offsetting that current risk of it falling). And obviously we’ll not actually know until the votes have been counted.
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Firstly, information about what will happen in the future gets incorporated into prices today. Because people trade on it today to profit from that future event. Secondly, there’s significant incentive to go out and find the information about what will happen in the future.
Sexual Freelancing in the Gig Economy - The New York Times - 0 views
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We constantly use economic metaphors to describe romantic and sexual relations. Few people today refer to women as “damaged goods” or wonder why a man would “buy the cow when he can get the milk for free,” but we have “friends with benefits” and “invest in relationships.” An ex may be “on” or “off the market.” Online dating makes “shopping around” explicit. Blog after blog strategizes about how to maximize your “return on investment” on OkCupid.
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he ways that people date — who contacts whom, where they meet and what happens next — have always been tied to the economy. Dating applies the logic of capitalism to courtship. On the dating market, everyone competes for him or herself.
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If you want to understand why “Netflix and chill” has replaced dinner and a movie, you need to look at how people work.
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Quitters Never Win: The Costs of Leaving Social Media - Woodrow Hartzog and Evan Seling... - 2 views
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Manjoo offers this security-centric path for folks who are anxious about the service being "one the most intrusive technologies ever built," and believe that "the very idea of making Facebook a more private place borders on the oxymoronic, a bit like expecting modesty at a strip club". Bottom line: stop tuning in and start dropping out if you suspect that the culture of oversharing, digital narcissism, and, above all, big-data-hungry, corporate profiteering will trump privacy settings.
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Angwin plans on keeping a bare-bones profile. She'll maintain just enough presence to send private messages, review tagged photos, and be easy for readers to find. Others might try similar experiments, perhaps keeping friends, but reducing their communication to banal and innocuous expressions. But, would such disclosures be compelling or sincere enough to retain the technology's utility?
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The other unattractive option is for social web users to willingly pay for connectivity with extreme publicity.
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The politics and philosophy of racism: Grand Racist Party? | The Economist - 0 views
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At best, Republicans on the whole are slightly more likely to have opinions commonly believed to be racist, and that is far from undeniable.
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In my experience, the real crux of the left-right divide on policies with fraught racial dimensions, such as welfare or affirmative action, is the question of structural coercion.
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I used to think that if negative rights to non-interference were strictly observed, liberty was guaranteed, but I don't now. Here's how I had thought about the matter. One racist acting in a private capacity on his or her racist beliefs can't violate anyone's legitimate, negative rights. (No one is entitled to another's good opinion!) Two racists acting as private citizens on their racist beliefs can't violate anyone's rights. Therefore, I inferred, thousands or millions of racists acting non-coercively on their racist beliefs can't coercively violate anyone's rights. I now think this is quite wrongheaded.
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A Treaty to Save Euro May Split Europe - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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European leaders, meeting until the early hours of Friday, agreed to sign an intergovernmental treaty that would require them to enforce stricter fiscal and financial discipline in their future budgets. But efforts to get unanimity among the 27 members of the European Union, as desired by Germany, failed as Britain refused to go along.
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all 17 members of the European Union that use the euro agreed to the new treaty, along with six other countries that wish to join the currency union eventually.
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Twenty years after the Maastricht Treaty, which was designed not just to integrate Europe but to contain the might of a united Germany, Berlin had effectively united Europe under its control, with Britain all but shut out.
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Disruptions: Internet's Sad Legacy: No More Secrets - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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many services that claim to offer that rarest of digital commodities — privacy — don’t really deliver. Read the fine print.
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Snapchat’s privacy page explains that private images are stored on someone’s phone — and on its own servers. “Forensically, even after they are deleted,” Snapchat says, those images can be retrieved. Whisper’s privacy page says the company owns the intellectual property, both images and text, that people post; Whisper reserves the right to sell that stuff to third parties. And Telegram, while seemingly less innocuous with its claims, nonetheless leaves out something you might want to know: someone can just take a screenshot or picture of that “private” conversation.
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Don’t have a smartphone yet? They still know where you are and where you’ve been. The American Civil Liberties Union released a report this year that found that technologies that let governments scan license plates are being used to build databases of vehicle locations across the United States.
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Revelations That Ikea Spied on Its Employees Stir Outrage in France - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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kea’s investigations were conducted for various reasons, including the vetting of job applicants, efforts to build cases against employees accused of wrongdoing, and even attempts to undermine the arguments of consumers bringing complaints against the company. The going rate charged by the private investigators was 80 to 180 euros, or $110 to $247, per inquiry, court documents show. Between 2002 and 2012, the finance department of Ikea France approved more than €475,000 in invoices from investigators.
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the spying cases occurred in a country that, in the digital age, has elevated privacy to a level nearly equal to the national trinity of Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité.
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Last month, the company’s current chief, Stefan Vanoverbeke, and financial director, Dariusz Rychert, were questioned along with Mr. Baillot for 48 hours by the judicial police before being placed under formal investigation. That set in motion a process in which the next step, if it comes, would be the filing of criminal charges.
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The New York Times > Magazine > In the Magazine: Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of... - 0 views
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The Delaware senator was, in fact, hearing what Bush's top deputies -- from cabinet members like Paul O'Neill, Christine Todd Whitman and Colin Powell to generals fighting in Iraq -- have been told for years when they requested explanations for many of the president's decisions, policies that often seemed to collide with accepted facts. The president would say that he relied on his ''gut'' or his ''instinct'' to guide the ship of state, and then he ''prayed over it.''
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What underlies Bush's certainty? And can it be assessed in the temporal realm of informed consent?
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That a deep Christian faith illuminated the personal journey of George W. Bush is common knowledge. But faith has also shaped his presidency in profound, nonreligious ways. The president has demanded unquestioning faith from his followers, his staff, his senior aides and his kindred in the Republican Party. Once he makes a decision -- often swiftly, based on a creed or moral position -- he expects complete faith in its rightness.
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Why a Harvard Professor Has Mixed Feelings When Students Take Jobs in Finance - NYTimes... - 0 views
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Many of the best students are not going to research cancer, teach and inspire the next generation, or embark on careers in public service. Instead, large numbers are becoming traders, brokers and bankers. At Harvard in 2014, nearly one in five students who took a job went to finance. For economics majors, the number was closer to one in two.
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I can’t help wondering: Is this the best use of talent?
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I wonder: Is this a good decision for society as a whole?
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How To Look Smart, Ctd - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - 0 views
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The Atlantic Home todaysDate();Tuesday, February 8, 2011Tuesday, February 8, 2011 Go Follow the Atlantic » Politics Presented by When Ronald Reagan Endorsed Ron Paul Joshua Green Epitaph for the DLC Marc Ambinder A Hard Time Raising Concerns About Egypt Chris Good Business Presented by Could a Hybrid Mortgage System Work? Daniel Indiviglio Fighting Bias in Academia Megan McArdle The Tech Revolution For Seniors Derek Thompson Culture Presented By 'Tiger Mother' Creates a New World Order James Fallows Justin Bieber: Daydream Believer James Parker <!-- /li
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these questions tend to overlook the way IQ tests are designed. As a neuropsychologist who has administered hundreds of these measures, I can tell you that their structures reflect a deeply embedded bias toward intelligence as a function of reading skills
New Statesman - Is Twitter the enemy of self-expression? - 0 views
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Twitter's how and why is essentially anti-literary, anti-creative; Twitter is all about fitting in.
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instead of blithely thinking of it as a place of free expression, it might be a good time to wonder if the commingling of public and private realms doesn't potentially make expressing opinions more difficult?Considered in this light, Twitter functions as banally as a school hierarchy: who to like, who not to, who you're allowed to criticise, who you can't etc.
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the most striking thing about it is its uniformity of tone, how difficult it is to create any distinctive voice in its tight-lipped text box. Tweets can cause misunderstandings aplenty, but there isn't much room for subtlety.
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A Grimmer View of a Perpetually Distracted Race - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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the new media flatter us with attention—with our own personal ring tones and media feeds. Everything is addressed to us.
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the public sphere has hollowed out the private sphere. People no longer defend the solid, private domain that is one’s own from the onrush of images and sensation. Instead, the self becomes liquid, a series of presented images. “The harder one tries to experiment with successive tentative approaches and to laboriously patch up successive public images, the less likely seems the prospect of reaching the self-assurance and self-confidence whose promise triggered all those exertions.”
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Contemporary life is moodiness, the immediate feeling of the moment. Experience no longer comes tinged with feeling; it comes as feeling and often, it seems, without regard to its cognitive and/or active content.”
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