The Links:
I'll start of with John Oliver doing what, it seems, only John Oliver can do: taking an incredibly complex issue and distilling it down to the most outrageous and objectionable parts.
And if you're interested, here's the Washington Post report he discussed. I said this about Ferguson and I think it's true here. The Libertarian right has the high ground here and could win a lot of voters over from the left if they'd pick up issues of actual government overreach instead of, you know, Obamacare and OMG Socialism!!!1!
Also at WaPo, the cognitive dissonance of republicans denouncing food stamps as socialism but not farm subsidies.
Economic downturns hurt wellbeing more than economic upturns help wellbeing. People generally play their finances close to the teeth for a variety of reasons. When a downturn blows them up, they are going to take a much harder hit.
Another interesting study: some crazy Swedes found that the penalty for being obese is equivalent to the income improvement from 3 years of undergraduate study.
Walmart is dropping health coverage from all of it's eligible part time employees. So, on one hand, these people get put on exchanges (except in red states) and get healthcare and grow the risk pool and potentially decrease costs. On the other hand, Walmart no longer has to cover the costs of insuring it's employees. While I don't expect them to give those savings back to the people, I think removing employers from paying for healthcare is a good step forward. BUT WAIT! Did you know you can now buy health insurance at Walmart?
I missed this while on my trip: The Korasan Group was completely made up. Yeah, and after watching lots of airport CNN, not a single mention of Korasan now that the bombing campaign is underway.
Here's a fantastic post on urban sprawl and how it wasn't an accident. Remember kids, money always wins.
But the plans that promoted higher densities, public transit and protected green space died, while the plans that promoted low densities, automobiles and strip malls were realized. How and why is a longer story, but it’s not a crazy exaggeration to say that sprawl was vastly more profitable than not-sprawl and the people who stood to gain the most from sprawl had the most influence on how the city would grow.Good news everyone, we've killed 50% of life on earth in the past 40 years.
Kudos to Becky for totally calling this one like 2 months ago: Experts worry that Ebola is spreading more easily than expected. Perhaps because it's mutated! Muahahaha.
When it comes to technology, women are just like men, only cheaper.
Google wants to go into financial services. Obviously "don't be evil" no longer applies.
The "burn rate" of startups is growing. So what happens when this bubble bursts? After all, most startups never go on to be publicly traded. Many are bought by large tech companies that are profitable and wouldn't shutter in a tech bubble burst. So who's left holding the hot potato? Well, it's the VC that are funding all these little startups and the firms and funds they work for.
I think I'm going to file this under the "why single metrics suck" category. If all we care about in a college is the prestige and income of it's graduates we're not really learning anything are we? Hey look! The Ivy League is the best. And if all we care about is the cost vs. employment metric then large state schools and middle prestige private colleges win. I thought the point of big data was to tell us something new.
Academic writing sucks. Didn't we know this already? Too much passive voice, too many qualifiers in every sentence, not enough pictures? Right?
So what exactly is dry-cleaning? Reddit answers.
I believe the following stock photo is racist:
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