Society

Silicon Valley is buying into the hype for "the metaverse" Zuckerberg ushered in when he announced Facebook's name change to Meta.

Momentum for a 32-hour week is gaining speed in countries around the world. Recruitment needs, along with greater productivity, are driving the trend.

Why Publishers Clearing House, a famously low-odds way of becoming rich beyond your wildest dreams, suddenly wants to pass down your winnings … if you win.

Nicholas Weaver: The technical underpinnings are so terrible that it is clear they exist only to hype the underlying cryptocurrencies. The actual utility of these "decentralized" systems is already available in modern distributed systems in ways that are several orders of magnitude more efficient and more capable. [...] So what does the supposed "web3" add to this vision? The cryptocurrency ...

This week’s Cyber is all about Popcorn Time, the Wu-Tang Clan, and a keyboard so good some people think it’s cheating.

The only trades which it seems possible for a joint stock company to carry on successfully, without an exclusive privilege, are those, of which all the operations are capable of being reduced to what is called a routine, or to such a uniformity of method as admits of little or no variation. Of this kind […]

The school zone has a speed limit of 15 miles per hour. It’s hard to be opposed to this sort of restriction, because the consequences are so dire and the cost is so low. The driver is making …

That is a physiological or biological concept, or it may appear in the other sciences.  It rarely plays a direct role in economics, though I think it is important for understanding regime shifts. I take any estimate of NAIRU, or indeed many other “steady-state” economic variables, as relative to a particular background level of stress.  […]

A new search engine needs an index of the web. And many sites don’t welcome any web crawler that isn’t Google or Bing.

Technology is not neutral. It can’t be, because by definition, advances in tech create change, and change always creates positives and negatives. We now live in a time of rapid technological …

Finland is the only EU country where homelessness is falling. Its secret? Giving people homes as soon as they need them – unconditionally

A normal day in the US involves a mass shooting. Here, we track the incidents since 2014

How the events of last January 6 put the existence of the United States in question

The Albanian dictator, Enver Hoxha, who died in 1985, has played only a very small part in my life. In my student days I knew a few youthful admirers of his; and some twenty years later I was acquainted with...

On paper you have everything society told you would make you feel whole. You’re doing better than 90% of people on the entire planet but somehow you still feel like a loser.

And preserve my mental bandwidth for what’s important

On our mailing list, there is a suggestion that we need a browser that kills all the advertising it sees on the Web. Not just the rude kind, or the tracking-based kind. The idea is to waste it all.…

The world is overpurchasing proof-of-work (POW) blockchains. How do we fix this?  Let me quickly outline the argument for why the world is b...

Over decades, productivity has risen while wages have stagnated, and work pressures have intensified. Is now the time for change?

May Louise Kelly for NPR spoke briefly with biostatistics professor Natalie Dean on the omicron surge and what we can take away from the data: Yeah, I mean, the public health impact is made up a lo…

As crypto continues to move into the public's consciousness, curious people who aren't familiar with it often ask me if central bankers at t...

Shared air is a social relation.