Even a PhD isn’t enough to erase the effects of class Fl

Loneliness is killing men – and without proper support and intervention nothing will change

Even a PhD isn’t enough to erase the effects of class Financial Times

Russia Sentences Evan Gershkovich to 16 Years in Prison on Spying Charges Moscow Times

How gravity falls down on falling down Physics World

What’s worse than thieves hacking into your bank account? When they steal your phone number, tooAssociated Press (Kevin W). Maybe this sort of thing will roll back one of my pet peeves, using SMS for 2FA?

Cloudflare Reports Almost 7% of Internet Traffic Is Malicious ZDNet. Seems about right, looking at the volume of phishing e-mails I receive. 

Rite Aid Says Breach Exposes Sensitive Details of 2.2 Million Customers ars technica. :-(. I was a Rite Aid customer then, but they would not have any gov’t ID from me. Hope no one here exposed.

“In June 2024, NewsGuard reported that so-called pink slime websites — sites posing as independent news outlets but secretly funded by partisan groups — now outnumber daily newspapers in the U.S. 

Below, we track the spread of pink slime websites, as compared to Northwestern Local News Initiative’s count of daily newspapers. (Northwestern’s tracker was last updated in December 2023.)…The odds are now better than 50-50 that if you see a news website purporting to cover local news, it’s fake.”

WSJ via MSN: “You’re on Facebook, LinkedIn or X and get a message. Maybe it’s from a stranger in your industry, maybe someone from your hometown claiming to know you from way back when. 

The person wants to reconnect or get your advice. This could all be wonderful. Or it could be the start of a scam. Unfortunately, security experts say, the latter is more likely, because personalized schemes to dupe internet users are on the rise. Trouble is, it is harder than ever to know whether that person showing up in your messages is real or not. A check mark next to someone’s name on social media used to mean their identity had been verified. That’s now not the case on all sites. Artificial intelligence can help bad actors replicate the voices and appearances of strangers. 

Online transactions—such as selling furniture on Facebook Marketplace—are magnets for fraud, banks and security experts warn. And schemers are cozying up to people online and pretending to kindle romance to gain access to their money, a form of fraud called “pig butchering.” The single best step to determine someone’s identity online and protect yourself is to slow down. 

Don’t rush to respond to an intriguing message. Instead do some vetting before taking things further. Tech companies are beginning to help, too, with Google, LinkedIn and Bumble introducing features to detect suspicious messages and users…”

Five Interesting, And Perhaps Flawed, Metaphors For Translation

Two of them involve Legos. One is about a quilt, another about Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, and yet another is about industrialized agriculture, with English as a monocrop. - The Paris Review

The cryptocurrency industry has been throwing money into politics unlike ever before, and that’s even after political donations from the industry skyrocketed in the 2022 election cycle. 

Despite the relatively small size of the industry, it has become one of the biggest spenders in the upcoming elections in the United States. Cryptocurrency companies have raised hundreds of millions of dollars to put towards buying crypto-friendly politicians and ousting those who have spoken up for stricter regulations to protect consumers in an industry that is fraught with hacks, scams, and fraud. Although parts of the industry have tried to portray this as a grassroots effort, the reality is that a very small number of crypto companies, and the billionaire executives and venture capitalists behind them, are spending millions with a singular goal: to obtain favorable crypto policy, no matter the cost. 

This website shines a much-needed spotlight on this spending, without the veneer of press releases in which these companies and executives still try to claim to be “apolitical” or “non-partisan”. 

Most of the money in the war chests amassed by cryptocurrency-focused PACs has yet to be deployed, and this project will give you a real-time view into where it’s being spent, by whom, and for whom. Join me in following the crypto…

Follow the Crypto is a project by Molly White, an independent technology writer, researcher, and software engineer. She is also the force behind Web3 is Going Just Great, where she documents only some of the many disasters in the cryptocurrency and web3 industries. She writes about crypto and about technology much more broadly in the Citation Needednewsletter.”

Bloomberg – Outages from Albania to Texas show how electricity networks aren’t ready for climate change. [unpaywalled] “…The climate crisis exposes electricity networks to flash floods ripping down transmission towers, droughts drying up hydro reservoirs and demand spikes from cooling during searing heat.

 “The whole power system was built and designed in one climatic era and now is being asked to work in a different climatic era,” said Michael Webber, a professor of energy at the University of Texas at Austin. “It just means more things can go wrong.” Unstable networks create instability for businesses, roil politics and threaten lives. Expanding the grid will cost about $24.1 trillion to meet net-zero goals by 2050, outpacing the investment needed in renewable-power capacity, according to BloombergNEF. Because of their vast areas and high energy use, the US and China face the biggest bills, but no country is spared…”

For Writer Tomi Adeyemi, Getting To Book Three Was A Long, Fraught Journey

Finishing a trilogy or a series isn’t easy for most writers, but Adeyemi faced physical challenges along the way. She says, "I like that I can stand in front of readers and say, “Hey, we know life’s going to knock us down. That’s life. Life is going to life.” - The New York Times

Bribery of officials in power in government has always occurred, but until now it has always been illegal.  The Supreme Court has now changed that.  Herewith some excerpts from an incisive commentary in an op-ed piece in The Guardian:

"Did you know you could give your local government officials tips when they do things you like? Brett Kavanaugh thinks you can. In fact, if you’re rich enough, says the US supreme court, you can now pay off state and local officials for government acts that fit your policy preferences or advance your interests. You can give them lavish gifts, send them on vacations, or simply cut them checks. You can do all of this so long as the cash, gifts or other “gratuities” are provided after the service, and not before it – and so long as a plausible deniability of the meaning and intent of these “gratuities” is maintained.

That was the ruling authored by Kavanaugh in Snyder v United States, a 6-3 opinion issued on Wednesday, in which the supreme court dealt the latest blow to federal anti-corruption law. In the case, which was divided along ideological lines, the court held that “gratuities” – that is, post-facto gifts and payments – are not technically “bribes”, and therefore not illegal. Bribes are only issued before the desired official act, you see, and their meaning is explicit; a more vague, less vulgarly transactional culture of “gratitude” for official acts, expressed in gifts and payments of great value, is supposed to be something very different. The court has thereby continued its long effort to legalize official corruption, using the flimsiest of pretexts to rob federal anti-corruption statutes of all meaning.

The case concerns James Snyder, who in 2013 was serving as the mayor of small-town Portage, Indiana. Late that year, the city of Portage awarded a contract to Great Lakes Peterbilt, a trucking company, and bought five tow trucks from them; a few weeks later, Snyder asked for and accepted a check for $13,000 from the company. Snyder was found guilty of corruption and sentenced to 21 months in federal prison. He argued that the kickback was not illegal because it came after he awarded a contract to the company that ultimately paid him off, not before.

Absurdly the US supreme court agreed, classifying such payments as mere tokens of appreciation and claiming they are not illegal when they are not the product of an explicit agreement meant to influence official acts in exchange for money...

For an example, we need look no further than the conservative justices of the supreme court itself, who have become notorious, in recent years, for accepting lavish gifts and chummy intimacy from rightwing billionaires. According to investigative reporting by ProPublica, Clarence Thomas has accepted vacations, real estate purchases, tuition for his young relatives, and seemingly innumerable private jet trips from the billionaire Harlan Crow, as well as financing for an RV from another wealthy patron, Anthony Welters. Thomas has argued that these gifts and favors are merely the “personal hospitality” of “close personal friends”...

Adding money – or, in the court’s parlance, “gratuities” – to these arrangements only makes this more obvious. It is not a coincidence that the court has chosen to legalize for state and local officials exactly the sort of corruption that they partake of so conspicuously themselves."

Related: Kleptocracy and kakistocracy explained.