This 2017 article includes some terrific analysis of the past and future of global inequality, both within countries and across them.

Examining the “World Inequality Report” — published Thursday by the creators of the World Wealth and Income Database, who include the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez — it is tempting to see the rising concentration of incomes as some sort of unstoppable force of nature, an economic inevitability driven by globalization and technology. The report finds that the richest 1 percent of humanity reaped 27 percent of the world’s income between 1980 and 2016. The bottom 50 percent, by contrast, got only 12 percent.

[…]

And yet, a careful examination of the data suggests there is nothing inevitable about untrammelled inequality. Take China and India, developing countries of billion-plus populations playing catch-up to pull themselves out of poverty. Incomes have become much more concentrated in both. But China’s economic strategy has delivered much more growth at a lower cost in terms of economic disparity. Comparing Europe with the United States and Canada offers similar contrasts.

Policy, it turns out, matters. More aggressive redistribution through taxes and transfers has spared Europe from the acute disparities that Americans have grown used to. Unequal access to education is helping reproduce inequality in the United States down the generations. On the other end of the spectrum of development, China’s strategy based on low-skill manufacturing for export, and underpinned by aggressive investment in infrastructure, has proven more effective at raising living standards for the bottom half of the population than India’s more inward-looking strategy, which has limited the benefits of globalization to the well-educated elite.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/14/business/world-inequality.html

Luminus 45-foot pyrosome, whee!! And they can get twice that long…

Surprisingly evocative.

This is a broadcast from a rat burrow in New York City’s Lower East Side.

Rats primarily speak above the threshold of human hearing (20khz), so this audio has been resampled and pitch-shifted down into a human-audible range. The broadcast is cached from the last 24-hours recorded and re-broadcast each day. Why? Who? http://brianhouse.net

http://ratradio.nyc/

I don’t imagine that the actual pictures will look nearly as cool as the illustration above, but I’m pretty excited for this nonetheless 🙂

This week we may get the first glimpse of what scientists have long been able only to theorize, calculate and simulate: the edge of a black hole. This is the so-called event horizon, beyond which even light cannot escape and where all known physical laws break down.

Astronomers who have created a global network of radio telescopes called the Event Horizon Telescope are expected to release images of this elusive and inscrutable astronomical object on Wednesday morning. Such images would represent not only a major scientific accomplishment but also an opportunity to rethink the cosmos and our place in it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/opinion/black-hole.html

This is a phenomenal interactive explanation of how waves — and images! — can be decomposed into their component parts. Highly recommended if you want to teach someone about waves, audio, or compression (the page includes specific sections about all three of those).

http://www.jezzamon.com/fourier/index.html

The second report of the BEA also includes initial estimates of corporate profits and the taxes they pay (as well as much else). The purpose of this note is to update an earlier post on this blog that examined what happened to corporate profit tax revenuesfollowing the Trump / GOP tax cuts of late 2017. That earlier post was based on figures for just the first half of 2018.

We now have figures for the full year, and they confirm what had earlier been found – corporate profit tax revenues have indeed plummeted. As seen in the chart at the top of this post, corporate profit taxes were in the range of only $150 to $160 billion (at annual rates) in the four quarters of 2018. This was less than half the $300 to $350 billion range in the years before 2018. And there is no sign that this collapse in revenues was due to special circumstances of one quarter or another. We see it in all four quarters.

https://aneconomicsense.org/2019/03/28/taxes-on-corporate-profits-have-continued-to-collapse/

I found this essay pretty interesting; it tries to present the overall communist worldview rather than arguing point-by-point.

9.1 It’s a childish delusion that you just so happen to live in the only civilisation without propaganda.

9.2 Propaganda is rife. Consider public debate about just about any policy position. You’re constantly being told that even the slightest steps towards the subordination of exchange value to use value (e.g., universal healthcare) will maybe cause the economy to keel over dead and definitely rip ragged human economic activity in the sphere in question.

9.3 In many cases you know for a fact this can’t be true, because even in the capitalist world there are many countries where any policy that might be under debate has already been adopted. In the healthcare debate, people will tell you that the economy will suffocate, or at least that healthcare will bloat and become ineffective, if universal healthcare is implemented, even though anyone can drive to Canada.

9.4. In the US minimum wage debate, people will tell you that unemployment would spiral if minimum wages were raised to $15 dollars an hour. Meanwhile, in thoroughly capitalist Australia, a 21 year old fast food worker in Australia who is casual (without guaranteed hours) is entitled to $26 an hour (and no, Australian dollars don’t go much farther, or much less farther, than US dollars). At every turn, capitalism is presented as at once essential to human activity, but also very fragile and in need of the velvet glove treatment even though you can see it just isn’t true by buying a plane ticket.

Seeing Like a Communist – de Pony Sum – Medium

Nutt has long been developing a holy grail of molecules – also referred to as “alcosynth” – that will provide the relaxing and socially lubricating qualities of alcohol, but without the hangovers, health issues and the risk of getting paralytic. It sounds too good to be true, and when I discuss the notion with two alcohol industry experts, they independently draw parallels with plans to colonise Mars.

Yet Alcarelle finding its way into bars and shops is starting to look like a possibility. Seed funding was raised in November 2018, allowing Nutt and his business partner, David Orren, to attempt to raise £20m from investors to bring Alcarelle to market. “The industry knows alcohol is a toxic substance,” says Nutt. “If it were discovered today, it would be illegal as a foodstuff. The safe limit of alcohol, if you apply food standards criteria, would be one glass of wine a year.”

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/mar/26/an-innocent-drink-could-alcosynth-provide-all-the-joy-of-booze-without-the-dangers

I don’t agree with all her answers here, but as usual, danah boyd is asking better questions than almost anyone else, in this case about critical thinking about media in a networked age:

What’s common about the different approaches I’m suggesting is that they are designed to be cognitive strengthening exercises, to help students recognize their own fault lines, not the fault lines of the media landscape around them. I can imagine that this too could be called media literacy and if you want to bend your definition that way, I’ll accept it. But the key is to realize the humanity in ourselves and in others. We cannot and should not assert authority over epistemology, but we can encourage our students to be more aware of how interpretation is socially constructed. And to understand how that can be manipulated. Of course, just because you know you’re being manipulated doesn’t mean that you can resist it. And that’s where my proposal starts to get shaky.

Let’s be honest — our information landscape is going to get more and more complex. Educators have a critical role to play in helping individuals and societies navigate what we encounter. But the path forward isn’t about doubling down on what constitutes a fact or teaching people to assess sources. Rebuilding trust in institutions and information intermediaries is important, but we can’t assume the answer is teaching students to rely on those signals. The first wave of media literacy was responding to propaganda in a mass media context. We live in a world of networks now. We need to understand how those networks are intertwined and how information that spreads through dyadic — even if asymmetric — encounters is understood and experienced differently than that which is produced and disseminated through mass media.

Above all, we need to recognize that information can, is, and will be weaponized in new ways. Today’s propagandist messages are no longer simply created by Madison Avenue or Edward Bernays-style State campaigns. For the last 15 years, a cohort of young people has learned how to hack the attention economy in an effort to have power and status in this new information ecosystem. These aren’t just any youth. They are young people who are disenfranchised, who feel as though the information they’re getting isn’t fulfilling, who struggle to feel powerful. They are trying to make sense of an unstable world and trying to respond to it in a way that is personally fulfilling. Most youth are engaged in invigorating activities. Others are doing the same things youth have always done. But there are youth out there who feel alienated and disenfranchised, who distrust the system and want to see it all come down. Sometimes, this frustration leads to productive ends. Often it does not. But until we start understanding their response to our media society, we will not be able to produce responsible interventions. So I would argue that we need to start developing a networked response to this networked landscape. And it starts by understanding different ways of constructing knowledge.

https://points.datasociety.net/you-think-you-want-media-literacy-do-you-7cad6af18ec2

Gravitational slingshots work best around hugely massive bodies. In the 1960s, the physicist Freeman Dyson calculated that a black hole could accelerate a spacecraft to relativistic speeds. But the forces on the spacecraft as it approached such an object would be likely to destroy it.

So Kipping has come up with a clever alternative. His idea is to send photons around a black hole and then use the extra energy they gain to accelerate a light sail. “Kinetic energy from the black hole is transferred to the beam of light as a blueshift and upon return the recycled photons not only accelerate, but also add energy to, the spacecraft,” says Kipping.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613127/a-halo-drive-could-accelerate-interstellar-spacecraft-to-close-to-the-speed-of-light/