weekly reading list
things i've read this week i found interesting.
In Syria, the West’s Humanitarian Claims Crumble to Dust by Jonathan Cook: as the death toll from the earthquakes hitting Syria and Turkey exceeds 46 thousand lives, don't forget that the people of Syria have been living under the collective punishment by western powers choking them with sanctions. humans can't control forced of nature but the amount of damage and human sufferings is entirely political (as it appears in Turkey infrastructure was compromised by corruption)
The Foundation of Monte Albán, Intensification, and Growth: Coactive Processes and Joint Production: authors Linda Nicholas & Gary Feinman propose their hypothesis about egalitarian, collective "good" governance in Oaxaca valley settlements.
Surveillance Capitalism by John Bellamy Foster & Robert W. McChesney: outlines the history of cooperation between USA government and private companies to present issues of surveillance capitalism.
Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit by David Graeber about creativity, innovation and imagination.
The Case for Free-Range Lab Mice by Sonia Shah: a long-overdue discussion about the limited benefit of using lab animals in biological & medical research. the questions about this practice are not only ethical, but practical.
The Evolution of Meaning – from Pragmatic Couplings to Semantic Representations: author Kevin Mitchell writes about the distinction between deriving pragmatic and semantic meanings, and proposes evolutionary theory about their development.
Three Ideas from Linguistics that Everyone in AI Should Know by Gary Marcus and Elliot Murphy: large language models don't in fact, use language, at least not as humans use it. they merely spit out words & phrases that are statistically likely to be next; the author of this article focuses on 3 key elements of language that are absent from LLMs: reference, cognitive models and compositionality.
Africa's Forgotten Colony in the Sahara by Paweł Wargan: from European imperialism, to Moroccan nationalist interests and the greed of multinational mining corporations, this articles introduces a bit of the modern history of Western Sahara and the plight of the Sahrawi people.
The Carbon Triangle: analysis by Jeremy Wallace who identifies interactions between three major economic actors in contemporary China: finance, land and real estate, and how they impact the environment.
interview with Clara E. Mattei, the author of The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism
Inside Google’s Quest to Digitize Troops’ Tissue Samples: James Bandler answers the question: what's more creepy than the US' DOD's largest collection of human tissues going back over a century? reply: Google wants to make money off it.
Lever News covering the catastrophe that is US rail, in the name of profiteering, from Rail Companies Blocking Safety Rules, Biden DOJ Backing Norfolk Southern’s Bid To Block Lawsuits, all this after they screwed overworked rail workers for daring demanding more than one (1!!) single day of paid sick leave per year, amid rail companies high profits and terrible working conditions.
