“You won't understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad – or good – it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
Things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully
“He got to see his friends differently, not as just appendages to his life but as distinct characters inhabiting their own stories; he felt sometimes that he was seeing them for the first time, even after so many years of knowing them.”
There were times when the pressure to achieve happiness felt almost oppressive, as if happiness were something that everyone should and could attain, and that any sort of compromise in its pursuit was somehow your fault.”
Edelman Trust Barometer 2021
After a year of unprecedented disaster and turbulence – the Covid-19 pandemic and economic crisis, the global outcry over systemic racism and political instability – the 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer reveals an epidemic of misinformation and widespread mistrust of societal institutions and leaders around the world. Adding to this is a failing trust ecosystem unable to confront the rampant infodemic, leaving the four institutions – business, government, NGOs and media – in an environment of information bankruptcy and a mandate to rebuild trust and chart a new path forward.
The Australian Taxation Office has quietly started trialling facial recognition technology from UK company iProov in its myGovID digital identity credentialing app to verify the identity of users.
iTnews can reveal the “liveness solution” public beta kicked off last week, allowing users to create a “strong” digital identity for the first time.
A strong identity, otherwise known as identity proofing level three (IP3), is the highest level of verification expected to be offered through the app, which has been available since mid-2019.
ATO pilots facial verification on myGovID
Study: Crowd-Sourced Fact-Checking Is Pretty Accurate
Let People Enjoy This Essay Gawker
The Psychology of Online Political Hostility: A Comprehensive, Cross-National Test of the Mismatch Hypothesis (preprint) PsyArXiv. From the Abstract: “[O]nline political hostility reflects the behavior of individuals predisposed to be hostile in all (including offline) contexts.” This is violence.
How Big Can the Quantum World Be? Physicists Probe the Limits. Quanta
Taylor Valdés - Creating an art vending machine business
Wired: “These firms could track whether you’ve visited your therapist’s office or your ex’s house. And without regulation, they’re a threat to democracy…In a new report for the Cyber Policy Program at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, I surveyed 10 major data brokers and the sensitive data they advertise. They openly and explicitly promulgate data on individuals’ demographic characteristics (from race to gender to income level) and political preferences and beliefs (including support for the NAACP, ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and the National LGBTQ Task Force), and on current US government and military personnel. Several of these firms also market another disturbing product: Americans’ geo-locations.
Acxiom, one of the largest brokers with data on billions of people worldwide, advertises“location-based device data” on individuals. Need to know if someone has visited a location multiple times in the past 30 days, like a church, their therapist’s office, or their ex’s house? They’ve got you covered, according to a company marketing document. What about other insights based on individuals’ locations? Check out data from marketing firm NinthDecimal, according to a 2018 fact sheet, an Acxiom “partner” that provides “mobile device location and location context insights.” Military personnel, Acxiom says, can be located too: It offers “verification and location of military servicemen (deployed but missing from base)” as part of commercial work for credit card issuers and retail banks…”
One Day—and One Night—in the Kitchen at Les Halles The New Yorker. From 2000
Mask Mandates Save Lives
Who’d have thunk it? Those crazy doctors in operating rooms are on to something. Masks work.
Role of the Supreme Court in generating or avoiding systemic risk
Edwards, Benjamin, Supreme Risk (August 18, 2021). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3907534 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3907534
“While many have discussed the social issues that might arise because of a majority-conservative Supreme Court, one critical consequence of the current Supreme Court has been overlooked: the role of the Supreme Court in generating or avoiding systemic risk. For some time, systemic financial risk has been regulated by a mix of self-regulatory organizations (SROs), such as the Depository Trust Corporation, and federal regulators such as the Financial Stability Oversight Council. However, the Supreme Court’s recent jurisprudence now creates real risk that federal courts will declare keystone SROs unconstitutional because they do not fit neatly into an eighteenth-century constitutional framework. SROs are under-appreciated regulatory entities comprised of industry members regulating their own industries with deferential oversight from federal administrative agencies. While ordinary civics discussions entirely omit SROs, they play a critical legal and economic roles and exercise enormous power delegated to them by the federal government. Yet as nominally private entities, they enforce federal law and their own rules without abiding by the restrictions imposed on governmental entities, such as providing due process. This article makes three contributions to the literatures in financial regulation and constitutional law—disciplines which rarely interact. First, it provides a detailed account of how SROs became functionally integrated into the federal government and serve as federal law enforcement and regulators. Second, it shows how four different constitutional doctrines, now resurging under a conservative-majority Supreme Court, pose existential threats to existing SRO models. Third, the Article explains how Supreme Court decisions declaring SROs unconstitutional. or limiting their powers generate systemic risk and may trigger a financial crisis.”
- Moral Phenomenology, by John Drummond and Mark Timmons.
Revised:
- Jacques Derrida, by Leonard Lawlor.
- Death, by Steven Luper.
- Impartiality, by Troy Jollimore.
- Two-Dimensional Semantics, by Laura Schroeter.
IEP ∅
- Phenomenology: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge Contemporary Introductions to Philosophy), by Walter Hopp is reviewed by David Woodruff Smith.
Recent Philosophy Book Reviews in Non-Academic Media ∅
- Home In The World by Amartya Sen is reviewed by at The Telegraph, and by Devangshu Datta at India Today.
- When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People, by Steven Nadler and Lawrence Shapiro is reviewed by Julian Baggini at The Wall Street Journal.
- The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan is reviewed by Damian Maher at Australian Book Review.
Compiled by Michael Glawson
BONUS: Sharp counterexample(Morganbesseresque)