Musk must be one of the biggest winners of the election. He took a relatively popular social media app and turned it into a tool for the Trump campaign and nativist authoritarians everywhere in just two years.
Some reasonable points here, and a challenge for us is to be open to the message!
Mastodon’s structure and culture of openness present opportunities to avoid many of the epistemic perils of biased and untrustworthy large corporate platforms. However, Mastodon’s risks include techno-elitism, white ignorance, and isolated, epistemically toxic communities.
Beyond Corporate Social Media Platforms: The Epistemic Promises and Perils of Alternative Social Media - @Lakephil@mastodon.social
I really enjoyed this list of The Most Iconic Speculative Fiction Books of the 21st Century
“Malaria is as old as Egyptian civilization itself, but the disease that plagued pharaohs now belongs to its history and not its future” - Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General.
The Verge 2004 - a fun selection of articles reflecting on why this year was a turning point for our online existence.
With the European Peace Facility, the EU is seeking greater flexibility that will allow it to bypass the African Union and directly fund national and sub-regional military initiatives.
The blockbuster film of the last few years has achieved a synthesis of these two trends: color-rich saturated imagery, hammer on the head straightforward storytelling. I think that the actual visual pleasure offered by these new films is such a breath of fresh air that they disarm people’s critical faculties (See also: Everything Everywhere All At Once, The Banshees of Inishiren, Saltburn). What has emerged reminds me most of the USSR’s most maligned aesthetic legacy, socialist realism.
tl;dr the big variation in non-GP specialist fees in Australia is largely due to differences between individual doctors, rather than factors such as patient complexity or structural costs.
Sources of specialist physician fee variation: Evidence from Australian health insurance claims data 🔒
Guizhou has been the target of successive visions of state-led sinofuturity, which have developed the province as unevenly as its karst landscape.
3.5 million Argentinians pushed into poverty this year
Argentina’s poverty rate has soared to almost 53% in the first six months of Javier Milei’s presidency, offering the first hard evidence of the far-right libertarian’s tough austerity measures are hitting the population
Poverty in Argentina soars to over 50% as Milei’s austerity measures hit hard