“What we are witnessing in many Republican-run states across the country is a voucher movement that has caught the car. Millions of parents are receiving educational welfare checks they don’t need to send their kids to private schools, and that money is cut from already impoverished public systems, the only place the poor and working…
Month: July 2024
“The “Multi-Multi-Multi-Million-Dollar” Art Fraud That Shook the World” – Luc Rinaldi (The Walrus)
“Morrisseau clearly cared. He and Vadas flew to Toronto, where the suit had been filed, to rally support from like-minded gallerists and settle the debate once and for all. But by then, the artist was in his mid-seventies and frail and was using a wheelchair; he’d suffered a stroke ten years earlier and had also…
“Proton Mail goes ‘AI’ – security focused userbase goes ‘what on earth’ (Pivot to AI)
“Proton Mail ran a user survey two months ago. They found some readers saying they were “interested in AI,” didn’t include a “hell no” option, and today, they’ve introduced Proton Scribe, claiming that “interested in AI” constituted user demand for this specific feature!” https://pivot-to-ai.com/2024/07/18/proton-mail-goes-ai-security-focused-userbase-goes-what-on-earth/
“An Existential Crisis in the German Auto Industry” – Das Spiegel
“Frustration among electric car buyers is helping to fuel a combustion boom. And it’s not just at Caritas that the shift to electric cars has stalled. The German federal government’s central modernization project is in danger of failing. Not only is the German populace not playing along, but manufacturers haven’t come up with attractive products…
“Put up or shut up” – Ed Zitron
“This idea was (and is), of course, total nonsense. From what I can tell — as Lattice didn’t really elaborate beyond a few screenshots and PR-approved gobbledygook — the company planned to create a profile for AI “workers” within the platform, which would then, in turn, allow something else to happen, though what that is…
“Working title (insurance)” – Bits about Money
“A really good mental model to carry around for analyzing the finance industry is one-shot versus iterated games. Real estate attorneys model (residential, owner-occupied) closings as effectively one-shot with respect to the client but iterated with respect to the other attorney. If one were conspiratorially-minded, one could say unkind words like “conflict of interest” at…
“Inside the Mafia of Pharma pricing” – Matt Stoller
“PBMs are big. Really big. The parent insurance companies of the biggest PBMs top nearly $1 trillion in revenue annually, roughly 4% of the GDP of America. Just the top four equal 22% of national healthcare expenditures, up from 14% in 2016. And no other country has anything like the PBM industry. The revenue of…
“Fuck the modern NBA” – Freddie DeBoer
“Jayson Tatum on a three-on-one break pulling up to clang yet another awkward three off the front rim, and doing so because that’s what he’s been explicitly coached to do, doesn’t look like dominance. It looks like an ugly, boring war of attrition. And I don’t care that it’s effective. I don’t care. I’m not…
“The dust settles” – John Elledge
“Once the dust had settled, and new Prime Minister Keir Starmer had begun appointing ministers on the basis of expertise rather than political expediency, and Chancellor Rachel Reeves had used her first speech to talk about the need for growth and the importance of planning reform – an important but politically contentious change which a…
“July 9, 2024” – Letters from an American
“From 2016 to 2019—mostly during Trump’s administration—those rural left-behind counties, which make up about 18% of the U.S. population, added 10,000 jobs. In 2023 alone, they added 104,000. Tankersley notes that Trump overwhelmingly won the support of voters in these counties, but their circumstances did not improve during his administration. Under Biden, they added jobs…