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Category: Society

The rise of a new American oligarchy: Top 10 billionaires’ collective wealth grew by $698bn in past year

The rise of a new American oligarchy: Top 10 billionaires’ collective wealth grew by $698bn in past year

The Guardian reports: The collective wealth of the top 10 US billionaires has soared by $698bn in the past year, according to a new report from Oxfam America published on Monday on the growing wealth divide. The report warns that Trump administration policies risk driving US inequality to new heights, but points out that both Republican and Democratic administrations have exacerbated the US’s growing wealth gap. Using Federal Reserve data from 1989 to 2022, researchers also calculated that the top…

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Zohran Mamdani has a point about rent control

Zohran Mamdani has a point about rent control

Rogé Karma writes: Few policies disgust academic economists quite like rent control. In the 1970s, the Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck famously described it as the “most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing.” In a 2012 poll of prominent economists, just 2 percent said that rent-control laws have had “a positive impact” on the “amount and quality of broadly affordable rental housing in cities that have used them.” (The Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler sarcastically proposed a…

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‘The greatest hunger catastrophe since the Great Depression’ as Americans brace for food stamps to run out

‘The greatest hunger catastrophe since the Great Depression’ as Americans brace for food stamps to run out

The Guardian reports: Two decades ago, Sara Carlson, then a mother of three, was newly single because of a traumatic event, and the US’s food stamp program, now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), helped her feed her children with free food supplies. “I wouldn’t have been able to afford to live,” said Carlson, 45, who lives in Rochester, Minnesota, and now works as an operations manager for a wealth-management firm and serves on the board of Channel One…

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Majority of Black and Latino Americans feel like strangers in their own country, poll finds

Majority of Black and Latino Americans feel like strangers in their own country, poll finds

Axios reports: Black and Latino Americans are reporting record levels of alienation and pessimism about the nation’s direction, as President Trump tightens his focus on immigration enforcement and civil rights rollbacks, per a new poll. Why it matters: More Latinos and Black voters supported Trump in 2024 than in his two previous presidential runs, but early into his second term the sense of exclusion has deepened among communities of color. The big picture: Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction, fueled…

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Inside tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures about the antichrist

Inside tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures about the antichrist

The Guardian reports: Peter Thiel, the billionaire political svengali and tech investor, is worried about the antichrist. It could be the US. It could be Greta Thunberg. Over the past month, Thiel has hosted a series of four lectures on the downtown waterfront of San Francisco philosophizing about who the antichrist could be and warning that Armageddon is coming. Thiel, who describes himself as a “small-o Orthodox Christian”, believes the harbinger of the end of the world could already be…

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Portland: Anarchic hellscape or a mecca for coffee drinkers?

Portland: Anarchic hellscape or a mecca for coffee drinkers?

Jacob Grier writes: I like bikes. I like coffee. I especially like biking to coffee, which is one of the things that drew me to moving to Portland, Oregon, many years ago. Sometimes I also like giving myself a big dumb project, like, say, biking to 100 different coffee shops. Did Portland even have 100 coffee shops within biking distance that were worth visiting? I didn’t check when I started, but it seemed plausible. So one sunny spring day following…

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The struggle for attention in an age of distractions

The struggle for attention in an age of distractions

Nathan Heller writes: On a subway train not long ago, I had the familiar, unsettling experience of standing behind a fellow-passenger and watching everything that she was doing on her phone. It was a crowded car, rush hour, with the dim but unwarm lighting of the oldest New York City trains. The stranger’s phone was bright, and as I looked on she scrolled through a waterfall of videos that other people had filmed in their homes. She watched one for…

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The old San Francisco tech scene is dead. What it’s morphing into is far more sinister

The old San Francisco tech scene is dead. What it’s morphing into is far more sinister

Ariana Bindman writes: While San Francisco’s tech world has always been obnoxious on a cultural level due to its own lack of self-awareness, what it’s morphing into now is downright terrifying. As websites like Teespring continue to peddle pumpkin spice propaganda to die-hard autumnal girlies, OpenAI and Anthropic are sucking up billions of dollars in funding, signaling a new dawn in the Bay Area’s capitalist landscape. Perhaps in a futile effort to keep up, powerful biotech, hardware and software companies…

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Society needs hope

Society needs hope

Carol Graham writes: Young people around the world are experiencing an unprecedented crisis of unhappiness and poor mental health. Many observers blame the expansion of social media that began in 2012-13, as well as the long-term negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the social lives of the young, and no doubt those things have exacerbated the decline in mental health. But the causes of the current crisis run deeper. They have to do with the increasingly uncertain futures that…

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Mapping France’s ‘Great Fear of 1789’ shows how misinformation spreads like a virus

Mapping France’s ‘Great Fear of 1789’ shows how misinformation spreads like a virus

Phys.org reports: Since the rise of the internet and social media, society has become well-acquainted with the idea of “virality” as the rapid spread of ideas and information (or misinformation). The relatively recent COVID-19 pandemic also reminded modern society of how rapidly viruses spread and how they impact society. As it turns out, the idea of information spreading like a virus is not just an apt metaphor—information virality can also be scientifically modeled in the same way as an actual…

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The new American inequality separating those who can or cannot escape from insufferable heat

The new American inequality separating those who can or cannot escape from insufferable heat

Jeff Goodell writes: Summer is not what it used to be. On a hot August day, an outdoor concert can feel like a picnic in Death Valley. A trip to Disney World is a roller-coaster ride through unshaded hell. The Beach Boys’ “All Summer Long” sounds like a love letter from another planet. In the hottest regions of the country, such as Texas, where I live, the climate crisis is not only changing our world; it is also dividing it….

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The era of degenerative-AI

The era of degenerative-AI

Charlie Warzel writes: It is a Monday afternoon in August, and I am on the internet watching a former cable-news anchor interview a dead teenager on Substack. This dead teenager—Joaquin Oliver, killed in the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida—has been reanimated by generative AI, his voice and dialogue modeled on snippets of his writing and home-video footage. The animations are stiff, the model’s speaking cadence is too fast, and in two instances, when it…

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In DC, Trump’s masked thugs voice their contempt for the people who pay their salaries

In DC, Trump’s masked thugs voice their contempt for the people who pay their salaries

Marisa Kabas writes: A delivery worker was tased, punched and kicked by multiple federal agents in the middle of the street outside a popular brunch spot in Northwest DC on Saturday morning, a video shared with The Handbasket shows. While customers sitting outside at the Logan Circle cafe munched on avocado smash and matcha pancakes, two and then an additional four masked agents beat the shit out of the man in broad daylight. This is America.   America’s largest cities…

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In Silicon Valley, eugenics is called ‘genetic optimization’ with breeding programs for smarter babies

In Silicon Valley, eugenics is called ‘genetic optimization’ with breeding programs for smarter babies

The Wall Street Journal reports: Tsvi Benson-Tilsen, a mathematician, spent seven years researching how to keep an advanced form of artificial intelligence from destroying humanity before he concluded that stopping it wasn’t possible—at least anytime soon. Now, he’s turned his considerable brainpower to promoting cutting-edge technology to create smarter humans who will be up to the task of saving us all. “My intuition is it’s one of our best hopes,” said Benson-Tilsen, co-founder of the Berkeley Genomics Project, a nonprofit…

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Zuckerberg ‘occupation’ trashes Palo Alto neighborhood

Zuckerberg ‘occupation’ trashes Palo Alto neighborhood

The New York Times reports: For decades, the Crescent Park neighborhood of Palo Alto represented the dream of California living. Doctors, lawyers, business executives and Stanford University professors lived in charming homes under oak, redwood and magnolia trees. The houses, an eclectic mix including Craftsman homes and bungalows, were filled with families who became fast friends. The annual block parties heaved with people. Daily life was tranquil, and the soundtrack was one of children laughing as they rode their bicycles…

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Violence against women is global and enduring

Violence against women is global and enduring

Rebecca Solnit writes: On 2 July, the jury delivered a guilty verdict on some of the charges against the music mogul Sean Combs, accused of horrific sexual abuse of women with the help of his extensive staff and deep pockets. He’s also accused in many civil suits of sexual abuse of adults and minors. It seems like everyone promptly forgot about Combs when the facts about the financier Jeffrey Epstein’s decades of horrific sexual abuse of at least a 100…

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