Wild times is a newsletter / collection of media I find online that I think is worth sharing.
By Amardeep S.


Wild Times, 35
February 25, 2018

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1 – How to Not Die in America – Molly Osberg @ Splinter

"The sheer number of doctors involved in emergency medical care—especially when the cause of illness is unknown—can be staggering. Often, once a person is sick enough not to know what’s going on, an army of costly specialists are called in. Doctors with the highest out-of-network markups are the ones patients are unlikely to choose themselves: pathologists, anesthesiologists, emergency medical doctors."

2 – Lobsters feel pain. Octopuses make jokes. Our laws need to protect them. – Ephrat Livni @ Quartz

“But what does it mean to be in pain—or just to be—when you are an ancient crustacean, with claws and a shell and a totally different kind of brain? Animal rights activists, scientists, writers, lawmakers, and philosophers are all trying to figure this out.”

3 – The War To Sell You A Mattress Is An Internet Nightmare – David Zax @ Fast Company

"I couldn’t know it then, but the outcome of that battle would influence the purchase decisions of many thousands, if not millions, of people seeking a good night’s sleep. It would also reveal just how thoroughly the internet and the businesses that thrived there had blurred the lines between product reviews and advertisements. All I’d wanted was a mattress, but what I got was a look at a little-known and hugely lucrative annex of e-commerce, one where the relationships can often get a little too comfy—until they’re not."

4 – Beyond the Bitcoin Bubble – Steven Johnson @ The New York Times

"Yes, the blockchain may seem like the very worst of speculative capitalism right now, and yes, it is demonically challenging to understand. But the beautiful thing about open protocols is that they can be steered in surprising new directions by the people who discover and champion them in their infancy. Right now, the only real hope for a revival of the open-protocol ethos lies in the blockchain. Whether it eventually lives up to its egalitarian promise will in large part depend on the people who embrace the platform, who take up the baton, as Juan Benet puts it, from those early online pioneers. If you think the internet is not working in its current incarnation, you can’t change the system through think-pieces and F.C.C. regulations alone. You need new code."

5 – Facebook’s Motivations – Ben Thompson @ Stratechery

"Facebook’s stated reasoning for this change only heightens these contradictions: if indeed Facebook as-is harms some users, fixing that is a good thing. And yet the same criticism becomes even more urgent: should the personal welfare of 2 billion people be Mark Zuckerberg’s personal responsibility?"

6 – Get your loved ones off Facebook. – Salim Virani

Backlog

1 – John Boehner Unchained

2 – 'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

3 – The Coming Software Apocalypse

4 – 20 of America's top political scientists gathered to discuss our democracy. They're scared.

5 – Yes, the election was rigged. Here's the proof.