Pew Research reported that “U.S. newspapers have shed half of their newsroom employees since 2008” While print news has lost 36,000 employees, other parts of “journalism” have only added 10,000 for a net loss of 26,000. The BLS predicts that…
Blog Archives
Violence has been declining globally. Consider lynching in America.
Tuskegee University researchers looked for records of lynchings in newspapers published between 1882 – 1968 and generated this chart. The orange color are victims whose race is unknown. This isn’t a complete account of lynching victims. It is only a…
Posted in Violence & Peace
Do we have a responsibility to develop more millionaire superheroes?
Peter Singer’s book called The Life You Can Save is about one of his most famous thought experiments: Suppose on a walk you notice a young girl drowning in a lake. If you can swim, and you can save her…
Posted in Millionaire Superheroes, Philosophy and ethics
How social media technologies took advantage of our psychological weaknesses and created an accidental revolutionary movement.
Netflix has a great documentary called The Social Dilemma about how social media companies are using algorithms and artificial intelligence to manipulate and addict us in order to make money. They might not have developed artificial intelligence to the point…
Posted in Pence2018
Slavery was a core part of civilization for most of history
Anarchists are hard to find nowadays, and scholars who advocate anarchy are extremely rare, but James C. Scott is one such scholar and his work is excellent even if I disagree with his anarchist leanings. Although his work is highly…
Posted in Development
Unions and the mafia
There is very little scholarly research about unions and organized crime according to the article and book I found on the topic. It may be that the topic now seems unimportant because another article said that the mafia wasn’t particularly…
Posted in Labor
Why buy a lotto ticket when other kinds of gambling are much more profitable?
The lottery is much less efficient than most form of gambling than most because each lottery ticket has an expected loss of more than 50% after taxes whereas slot machines have an expected loss of only about 10% and the…
Posted in Labor
