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Friday, October 21, 2022

Tour Amazon’s dream home, where every appliance is also a spy

MONEY MAGAZINE ROLLS LEFT TO DIE:  Money magazine has an interesting way to rate the best places in the US to live.


Tour Amazon’s dream home, where every appliance is also a spy

Washington Post: “You may not realize all the ways Amazon is watching you. No other Big Tech company reaches deeper into domestic life. Two-thirds of Americans who shop on Amazon own at least one of its smart gadgets, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. Amazon now makes (or has acquired) more than two dozen types of domestic devices and services, from the garage to the bathroom. All devices generate data. But from years of reviewing technology, I’ve learned Amazon collects more data than almost any other company. Amazon says all that personal information helps power an “ambient intelligence” to make your home smart. It’s the Jetsons dream…”



Psychologists and other social scientists have been studying human sex differences for 100 years, and in recent decades have demonstrated that many of the differences that emerge in Western cultures are found in every other culture in which they have been studied.”

Plus: “Academia has changed in various ways over the past few decades. By no means are all of these changes the direct or inevitable result of changing sex ratios. Nevertheless, some of the most drastic developments over the past 25 years share a common theme: They reflect the priorities of women.”


IMF World Economic Outlook October 2022

“Global economic activity is experiencing a broad-based and sharper-than-expected slowdown, with inflation higher than seen in several decades. 

The cost-of-living crisis, tightening financial conditions in most regions, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the lingering COVID-19 pandemic all weigh heavily on the outlook. Global growth is forecast to slow from 6.0 percent in 2021 to 3.2 percent in 2022 and 2.7 percent in 2023. This is the weakest growth profile since 2001 except for the global financial crisis and the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Global inflation is forecast to rise from 4.7 percent in 2021 to 8.8 percent in 2022 but to decline to 6.5 percent in 2023 and to 4.1 percent by 2024. 

Monetary policy should stay the course to restore price stability, and fiscal policy should aim to alleviate the cost-of-living pressures while maintaining a sufficiently tight stance aligned with monetary policy. Structural reforms can further support the fight against inflation by improving productivity and easing supply constraints, while multilateral cooperation is necessary for fast-tracking the green energy transition and preventing fragmentation.




Brookings: “Over a quarter of a century after its 1996 enactment, the liability shield known as Section 230 is heading to the Supreme Court. Section 230(c)(1) provides, with some exceptions, that “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content providers. This sentence is sometimes referred to as the “26 words that created the internet,” because it freed websites that host third-party content from the impossible task of accurately screening everything posted by their users.

The Supreme Court and social media platform liability


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