"Facebook’s targeting algorithm is so powerful, they said, they don’t need to identify suckers themselves—Facebook does it automatically. And they boasted that Russia’s dezinformatsiya agents were using tactics their community had pioneered."

"“For two centuries the Negro was enslaved, and robbed of any wages—potential accrued wealth which would have been the legacy of his descendants.” —Martin Luther King Jr., in a 1965 Playboy interview with Alex Haley"

"Though President Donald Trump has spent his career boasting of his wealth, he claimed in the 1990s that outfitting apartments in his residential high-rise buildings with sprinkler systems would be too expensive—and lobbied against regulations that may have been able to save the life of a man who was killed in a"

"Consider, for example, the following quiz posted to Facebook by San Benito Tire Pros, a tire and auto repair shop in California. It asks Facebook users, “What car did you learn to drive stick shift on?”

I hope this is painfully obvious, but for many people the answer will be the same as to the question, “What was the make and model of your first car?”, which is one of several “secret questions” most commonly used by banks and other companies to let customers reset their passwords or gain access to the account without knowing the password."

"How did we get into this preposterous mess? Answering this question requires an understanding of (among other things) the peculiar nature of digital technology, the ideology of Silicon Valley, the astonishing political naivety of Zuckerberg, the ethical tunnel vision of software engineers and – most important – the business model that has come to be known as “surveillance capitalism”."

"Harlan Ellison is probably one of the best writers of the last century, but he may be more famous (or infamous) for his irascibility, his lawsuits, and his reputed bad behavior."

"I called Mark Zuckerberg a modern-day colonizer, and it made some international news. After a couple of weeks of these headlines and the two sides going back and forth, he dropped the lawsuit. We did win that battle. It’s still ongoing. There are no lawsuits anymore but they still haven’t gotten the land back, and Zuckerberg still has a wall built around his property. These Hawaiians are just looking to fish, or get to the beach. This issue has really brought some of the injustices we’ve been facing for years to the attention of the world."

"There’s a new playbook for oppression today. Instead of outright totalitarian rule, you construct the appearance of democracy, while controlling it by subtly — in some cases perhaps not even consciously — restricting the options available to individual voters; by controlling a tiered system of “representative” electors behind the scenes; or by simply outright stuffing the ballot box. (There can be much sound and fury about the distinctions between the available candidates, but if you’ve done your job correctly, and made democracy as awful as possible, in general only establishment candidates or easily manipulated narcissists will ever be nominated.)"

"We are idealists and we are realists. We are dreamers and we are builders. We are experiencers and we are experimenters. We long for certainties, yet we ourselves are full of the ambiguities of the Mona Lisa and the I Ching. We ourselves are a part of the yin-yang of the world. | Alan Lightman, Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine"

"“The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.”"

The Full Story

"While success is not pre-ordained, any company without a positive attitude to change is on its own death march."

The Full Story

"“People have the mistaken impression that mathematics is just equations,” he once explained. “In fact, equations are just the boring part of mathematics.”"

The Full Story

"Take a screenshot or picture of your AirPods serial number. You can’t replace any parts without it.

Do this when you first get them!!

You can take a picture of the box or a screenshot from Settings > General > About > AirPods so that Apple can pull up the serial number.

If you lose the case and don’t have the serial number anywhere, you can’t even replace the case without it."

""Fox has degenerated from providing a legitimate and much-needed outlet for conservative voices to a mere propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration," wrote Peters, a Fox News "strategic analyst."

"Over my decade with Fox, I long was proud of the association. Now I am ashamed," he wrote."

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"We could even say that the copy is more original than the original, or the copy is closer to the original than the original, for the older the building becomes, the further it is from its original state. A reproduction would restore it, as it were, to its ‘original state’, especially since it is not linked to a particular artist."

"The Far Eastern notion of identity is also very confusing to the Western observer. The Ise Grand Shrine, the supreme Shinto sanctuary located on Honshu island, is 1,300 years old for the millions of Japanese people who go there on pilgrimage every year. But in reality this temple complex is completely rebuilt from scratch every 20 years."

"Einstein was not only a great scientist, he was a great man. He stood for peace in a world drifting towards war. He remained sane in a mad world, and liberal in a world of fanatics."

"‘The most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it is comprehensible.’"

"It may surprise you to know that I once almost killed Dick Feynman, too, but that’s a different story for another time."

"Civil rights advocates are calling out Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos for her "mean-spirited, reckless, and unnecessary" decision to delay a rule that aims to standardize to how schools identify students with disabilities in hopes of addressing issues of discrimination."

""a woman who is subject to an adverse employment action because she is attracted to women would have been treated differently if she had been a man who was attracted to women. We can therefore conclude that sexual orientation is a function of sex and, by extension, sexual orientation discrimination is a subset of sex discrimination.""

"Chinese President Xi Jinping solidified his grasp on power yesterday, with the country's Communist Party abandoning term limits to allow Xi to serve long past his 2023 expiration date."