• The Great American Poisoning or, wtf is going on with our food system. We’ve evolved to exist in an ancestral environment where health was the default. Today, as I look around, I see the opposite. Americans have never been fatter. We’ve never been sicker. Our kids have never had more cancer, more obesity, more diabetes, more behavioral disorders. The rampant chronic disease we see should force us to ask: why is everyone suddenly sick? Could it be that our environment is killing us? (The Next)
• How an ‘Algorithm’ Turned Apartment Pools Green: RealPage, the rent-fixing software company currently under FBI investigation, also has apps for bogus fees, monetizing vacant apartments and inflating toxic property bubbles. (American Prospect)
• The Opaque Industry Secretly Inflating Prices for Prescription Drugs: Pharmacy benefit managers are driving up drug costs for millions of people, employers and the government. The job of the P.B.M.s is to reduce drug costs. Instead, they frequently do the opposite. They steer patients toward pricier drugs, charge steep markups on what would otherwise be inexpensive medicines and extract billions of dollars in hidden fees. (New York Times)
• The Influencer Is a Young Teenage Girl. The Audience Is 92% Adult Men. A family discovered—and ultimately accepted—the grim reality for young influencers on Instagram: The followers include large numbers of men who take sexual interest in children. (Wall Street Journal) see also Instagram Connects Vast Pedophile Network: The Meta unit’s systems for fostering communities have guided users to child-sex content; company says it is improving internal controls. Your occasional reminder that social media is toxic: (Wall Street Journal)
• The Big Bad BREIT Post: One year after writing our BREIT white paper, here it is. Along with the story about how it got stifled. (BakStack)
• Why NYC’s Hottest Dining Reservations Will Stay Impossible to Score: A proposed law aimed at bots and scalpers who cater to rich and desperate restaurant fans isn’t guaranteed to make getting a hot table easier. (Bloomberg)
• Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine: The AI-powered search startup Forbes has accused of stealing its content is surreptitiously scraping—and making things up out of thin air. (Wired)
• Columbia Task Force Reveals Full Extent of Antisemitism on Campus: Since Oct. 7, by Students and by Faculty Antisemitic comments by professors, harassment of Jewish students – Columbia University’s antisemitism task force has heard hundreds of testimonies since its formation in November. Its members tell Haaretz about the mandatory orientation they plan and say they have agreed on an ‘educational’ definition of antisemitism. (Haaretz) see also How America’s Rich Legacy of Fear and Hatred Fuels the Conspiracy Theories of Today: Panic about Catholics, Freemasons, and, later, Jews, is deeply woven into American history, and forms the basis of our fertile culture of conspiracy theorizing. (Talking Points Memo)
• How John Roberts Lost His Court: What he has “lost,” rather, isn’t control of the court’s judicial output, but of something less tangible but no less important: its ability to assure the public that it is functioning as a court where all parties get a fair hearing and where individual justices aren’t beholden elsewhere, either financially or politically. (New York Times)
• Trump super fans are impossible to argue with because they don’t actually believe in logic: The far-right worldview is incomprehensible until you realize that devotees believe truth flows from authority rather than reality. (Flux)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Peter Rawlinson, CEO/CTO of Lucid Motors. The Lucid Air is the most lauded EV of the current era, and across a variety of technologies, have become the #1 rated vehicle. Previously, he was the chief engineer designing the Model S at Tesla, creating that ground-breaking car from a clean sheet to a final product.
The American Dream is getting really expensive
Source: Sherwood
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