Could There Be a Third Party for Moderates?: It turns out, Americans agree on an awful lot.
Who Is Andy Burnham, the Man Who Could Be Britain’s Next Prime Minister?: Charismatic, northern and exuding a relaxed optimism, Mr. Burnham is a contrast to Keir Starmer. His allies hope he could mend Labour’s relationship with voters. - "In 2022, after the last soccer World Cup, Mr. Starmer himself poked fun at his former colleague. In a speech to reporters, Mr. Starmer joked that Mr. Burnham 'got to see his boyhood team Argentina win the World Cup' but that 'it was a mixed bag because he also got to see his boyhood team France lose the final and his boyhood teams Morocco and Croatia lose in the semis.'"
Why cyclists don't stop at stop signs and shouldn't have to: Stop signs in Toronto were designed to control cars, and don't work for bikes. Cities with balanced transportation systems don't have them. - "I learned in design school that The User is Always Right. It doesn't matter what you think you have designed, the user's behaviour tells you what your product or system actually IS.... A great example is how roads are designed for 70 km/h, but then signed for 30 km/h – and then we wag our fingers at the speeders. These drivers are behaving perfectly normally for the system. If you wanted people to drive 30 km/h, then YOU FAILED. The people are not broken, YOUR SYSTEM IS BROKEN.
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"'Nearly everyone has jaywalked, rolled through a stop sign, or driven a few miles per hour over the speed limit, but most such offences face no legal consequences. Society also tends to see these relatively minor infractions that almost all people make—though they are unmistakably illegal—as normal and even rational. Bicyclists who break the law, however, seem to attract a higher level of scorn and scrutiny.'"
Boomer caregiving will wreck our politics We have maybe five years to escape gerontocratic capture - "We are not prepared — emotionally, politically, financially — for what it means to care for tens of millions of aging boomers while also trying to invest in the future for our children.
"Consider the demographic trends. In five years, America will have more people over 65 than under 18. Americans over 75 are the fastest-growing age group in the country. The worker-to-retiree ratio has collapsed from five-to-one in 1960 to about 2.5 today. Nearly 70% of people over 65 will need long-term care.
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"Even if you were willing to make the hard decisions, political incentives won’t allow it. Older Americans are growing in number and vote at much higher rates than the young. Many of us want to invest more in children, families, and fertility, but the boomer caregiving wave will pull spending and incentives further toward the old. Politicians will follow their most reliable and expanding voting bloc."
The Butlerian Jihad Has Begun: Do we need a 'Holy War' against the Thinking Machines? - "Magnifica Humanitas is valuable precisely because it does not make the vulgar mistake now being projected onto the fictional Butlerian Jihad. It treats the thinking machine neither as a demon nor a consciousness hiding inside the circuitry. Nor does it see AI as some rival species whose emergence must be met with holy violence.
It simply asks whose vision of the human person is being elevated through the thinking machine. And it warns against the very concentrations of power and structures of domination that haunted Frank Herbert’s writing.
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"The burning question regarding AI is not whether the machines are evil. It is whether human beings will allow the machines to become instruments through which other human beings will concentrate power. A properly conceived Butlerian Jihad must target technocracy, not technology."
The Democratic Base Is Angry: Is the party paying attention?
A ‘Death Train’ Is Haunting South Florida: The Brightline has been hailed as the future of high-speed rail in the United States, but it has one big, unignorable problem. - "What the Brightline is best known for is not that it reflects the gleam of the future but the fact that it keeps hitting people. According to Federal Railroad Administration data, the Brightline has been involved in at least 185 fatalities, 148 of which were believed not to be suicides, since it began operating, in December 2017. Last year, the train hit and killed 41 people-none of whom, as best as authorities could determine, was attempting to harm themselves. By comparison, the Long Island Rail Road, the busiest commuter line in the country, hit and killed six people last year while running 947 trains a day. Brightline was running 32.
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"'Fast trains and grade crossings are always a deadly combination,' the historian Richard White, whose 2011 book about American railroads was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, told me. He put it the most succinctly, but I did not talk with anybody who disagreed with that conclusion."
The Warrior-Witches of Ukraine’s Resistance: An underground intelligence network uses subterfuge and honey traps to direct drone strikes deep inside Russian-occupied territory. - "I asked the partisans why they would talk with me at all, sharing intimate details of the war's most dangerous operations. In part, they are sending a message to the occupier: You are hated here. Sestra put a finer point on this: 'I want every Russian soldier who has set foot on our land to carry that paranoia with him - suffocating, relentless, every second of every day. I want him to look at the grandmother at the market, at the bus driver, at the doctor in the clinic, at the ordinary passerby on the street-and to see in each of them his own potential destruction.'"
