We wrote @polycrisis
- 2024 is the biggest election year in history! phenomenalworld.org/analysis/a-yea 76 states will hold elections India - 1.4bn ppl EU - 448m US - 330m Indonesia -280m Pakistan-245m Bangladesh -175m Russia -144m Imagine all the fake AI & cross-border meddling!
US Army to test spy business jet that hears secrets from 51,000 feet Interesting Engineering
How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu
Interest in Japanese’s firm’s public sector deals – worth $15B in the UK alone since 2012 – spikes
Inequality: how dithering over money-laundering reforms is fuelling Australia’s house affordability crisis
Government is still dithering over laws slated to come in 16 years ago which would make Australian property more affordable. Michael West reports on the (lack of) progress on AML-CTF reforms to address the deluge of Chinese money in Australian property.
What to do (and avoid) after you’ve been scammed
Washington Post [read free] – If you’re not careful, the hours after a scam can lead to more lost money or stress – There’s a booming industry of criminals who target people at their worst moments, squeezing more money or information out of them in exchange for false hope. They’ll promise to get you back into a hacked Facebook account or reclaim money you lost to some other third party. They’re often lurking in legitimate-looking search results or your social media replies. We’ve given lots of advice about what to do to avoid being scammed, but what about right after it happens? You’re still vulnerable and in a heightened emotional state, something that online criminals often count on.”
How to get rich in the 21st century Economist
The Guys Who Killed Toys R Us are Coming for Doctors
skepchick: “This post contains a video, which you can also view here. You may be aware that here in the United States, we have a less than ideal healthcare system. For instance, compared to our neighbors to the north, we enjoy slightly shorter wait times for some procedures in exchange for worse coverage, higher cost, and poorer health outcomes. And to expand the picture, compared to Canada, Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK, the United States ranks last on access to care, administrative efficiency, equity, health outcomes, and overall healthcare performance.
There are many reasons why this may be, but one obvious one is that in the United States our healthcare is run by private for profit corporations with no option for single payer, despite the fact that every major poll shows that the majority of Americans think their government should guarantee health insurance for everyone. As an American, all of this is pretty depressing, but what if I told you that it could get way, way worse? Well, a study just published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association illustrates the way that a secondary player is managing to make our healthcare system even more dystopian than the pharmaceutical industry managed on its own: private equity firms.
First, let’s talk about what a private equity firm is, because the name isn’t terribly descriptive if you’re not into finance chat. Which I am not, either, by the way, so I will keep this simple and only talk about one type of private equity firm that engages in “leveraged buyouts”: in the best of all possible worlds, when a company is having trouble staying afloat or growing to their potential and needs an influx of investments, a private equity firm comes in with the necessary cash to buy the company and fix it up, allowing it to continue on or grow as needed, at which point the firm resells the company or takes it public to make a tidy profit. Everybody wins…”
BoingBoing: “Explore this soundmap of forests all over the world. This fun open source library allows users to click on a forest from the map, see where it’s located, and listen to an audio clip of what it would sound like to be there. If you’re interested in sound, nature, travel, or all of these things, this website is for you. It’s also a nice way to unwind and hear some calming audio after a long day. If you find a forest sound that you like, you can save or download the audio clip to listen to again. From Sounds of the Forest:
“We are collecting the sounds of woodlands and forests from all around the world, creating a growing soundmap bringing together aural tones and textures from the world’s woodlands. The sounds form an open source library, to be used by anyone to listen to and create from. Selected artists will be responding to the sounds that are gathered, creating music, audio, artwork or something else incredible, to be presented at Timber Festival 2021.”
