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Amazon behaves like a planned economy

Amazon behaves like a planned economy

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Malcolm Harris writes: Although they attempt to grow in a single direction, planned economies always destroy as well as build. In the 1930s, the Soviet Union compelled the collectivization of kulaks, or prosperous peasants. Small farms were incorporated into a larger collective agricultural system. Depending on who you ask, dekulakization was literal genocide, comparable to the Holocaust, and/or it catapulted what had been a continent-sized expanse of peasants into a modern superpower. Amazon’s decimation of small businesses (bookstores in particular)…

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The case for impeaching Clarence Thomas

The case for impeaching Clarence Thomas

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Jill Abramson writes: [Clarence] Thomas, as a crucial vote on the Supreme Court, holds incredible power over women’s rights, workplace, reproductive, and otherwise. His worldview, with its consistent objectification of women, is the one that’s shaping the contours of what’s possible for women in America today, more than that of just about any man alive, save for his fellow justices. And given the evidence that’s come out in the years since, it’s also time to raise the possibility of impeachment….

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Pistachio trees ‘talk’ to their neighbours, reveals statistical physics

Pistachio trees ‘talk’ to their neighbours, reveals statistical physics

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Philip Ball writes: The number of nuts on pistachio trees in any given year could be explained with a model from statistical physics that is normally used to study magnetic materials. That is according to researchers led by Alan Hastings, a mathematical ecologist from the University of California, Davis, who have used the “Ising model” to analyse the yields of pistachio trees in one particular orchard in California. Their work explains why the orchard does not always have a uniformly…

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Inside the two years that shook Facebook — and the world

Inside the two years that shook Facebook — and the world

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At Wired, Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein report: One day in late February of 2016, Mark Zuckerberg sent a memo to all of Facebook’s employees to address some troubling behavior in the ranks. His message pertained to some walls at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters where staffers are encouraged to scribble notes and signatures. On at least a couple of occasions, someone had crossed out the words “Black Lives Matter” and replaced them with “All Lives Matter.” Zuckerberg wanted whoever…

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As the U.S. weakens protections for wilderness, Peru moves to protect ‘one of the last great intact forests’

As the U.S. weakens protections for wilderness, Peru moves to protect ‘one of the last great intact forests’

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The New York Times reports: The remote rain forests in Peru’s northeast corner are vast — so vast that the clouds that form above them can influence rainfall in the western United States. The region contains species, especially unusual fish, that are unlike any found elsewhere on Earth. Scientists studying the area’s fauna and flora may gain insights into evolutionary processes and into the ecological health and geological history of the Amazon. Now the area has become home to one…

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Just 3% of Americans own more than half the country’s guns

Just 3% of Americans own more than half the country’s guns

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Paul Ratner writes: Americans are not as gun-obsessed as some would like their countrymen to believe. Linking gun ownership to the identity of being an American has been a successful sales tactic that is more myth than reality. The numbers show that a small, unrepresentative, but disproportionately vocal portion of the American population, aided by self-serving politicians and a powerful lobby organization, has enacted its agenda over the majority of Americans, who do not own guns and would rather see…

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How New Zealand became a new Ararat for Silicon Valley’s misanthropic billionaires

How New Zealand became a new Ararat for Silicon Valley’s misanthropic billionaires

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Mark O’Connell writes: Early last summer, just as my interests in the topics of civilisational collapse and Peter Thiel were beginning to converge into a single obsession, I received out of the blue an email from a New Zealand art critic named Anthony Byrt. If I wanted to understand the extreme ideology that underpinned Thiel’s attraction to New Zealand, he insisted, I needed to understand an obscure libertarian manifesto called The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the…

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Mass shootings highlight nexus between masculinity and gun violence

Mass shootings highlight nexus between masculinity and gun violence

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Laura Kiesel writes: The year 2017 brought the deadliest mass shooting in modern history to the United States, which has become home to more gun massacres than any other country in the world. The response offered by many of our political leaders, both Democrat and Republican, has been to focus on the role of mental illness in such shootings. The day after Stephen Paddock took to a hotel room in Las Vegas with 23 firearms and murdered 59 people this…

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As climate change intensifies droughts, Cape Town’s water crisis may signify a new normal

As climate change intensifies droughts, Cape Town’s water crisis may signify a new normal

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Laura Poppick writes: Last June, Piotr Wolski began transforming his Cape Town swimming pool into a water storage tank for his home. By September, he had directed all gutters from his roof to flow into the pool and had installed a pump to transport water into the house where he lives with his family of four. Wolski works as a hydrologist studying regional rainfall patterns at the University of Cape Town, but his retrofit was no research experiment. Rather, he…

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Cosmopsychism explains how the Universe became fine-tuned for life

Cosmopsychism explains how the Universe became fine-tuned for life

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Philip Goff writes: In the past 40 or so years, a strange fact about our Universe gradually made itself known to scientists: the laws of physics, and the initial conditions of our Universe, are fine-tuned for the possibility of life. It turns out that, for life to be possible, the numbers in basic physics – for example, the strength of gravity, or the mass of the electron – must have values falling in a certain range. And that range is…

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We’re killing our lakes and oceans

We’re killing our lakes and oceans

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Eelco Rohling and Joseph Ortiz write: On January 5, 2018, a paper published in the journal Science delivered a sobering message: The oxygenation of open oceans and coastal seas has been steadily declining during the past half century. The volume of ocean with no oxygen at all has quadrupled, and the volume where oxygen levels are falling dangerously low has increased even more. We’re seeing the same thing happen in major lakes. The main culprits are warming and — especially…

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