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In keeping with my earlier post about being open to contextual details that may change how we ought to feel about events, note a bit of information from former New York Times reporter Nellie Bowles (about halfway down this page), concerning an article she wrote about the devastation to small businesses in Kenosha, which the paper’s editors…
We’re in divided times and are being pressed to take sides and choose narratives. We’re vulnerable, because such things are very much in our nature, and it can be difficult to have a healthy skepticism of people we perceive as our friends and allies, or to give the benefit of the doubt to the Others.…
I’m not sure this is the way to a solution: A bipartisan collective of House lawmakers introduced legislation on Nov. 9 that would require Big Tech providers such as Facebook and Google to allow users to opt-out of content selected by algorithms, providing additional transparency regarding content. The measure, dubbed the Filter Bubble Transparency Act…
Look, nobody should be surprised that Governor Dan McKee’s administration has apparently agreed to give members of state employees’ biggest labor union $3,000 for full vaccination status. That’s how this works. If you’re in the private sector, government gives you the choice of being vaccinated or losing your job. If you’re in the public sector,…
The RI Department of Labor and Training’s headline for monthly employment data tells some of the bad story: “Rhode Island-Based Jobs Fell by 2,100 from September; October Unemployment Rate Increases to 5.4 Percent“: Total nonfarm payroll employment in Rhode Island totaled 479,200 in October, reflecting a loss of 2,100 jobs from the revised September job…
Cal Newport describes an interesting natural experiment created by the way Facebook rolled out from one campus to the next: The authors of this paper connect a dataset containing the dates when Facebook was introduced to 775 different colleges with answers from seventeen consecutive waves of the National College Health Assessment (NCHA), a comprehensive and longstanding…
Problems with Rhode Island’s health care industry indicate an across-the-board failure of government management. Remember when they shut down our economy to avoid overwhelming our medical infrastructure? Well, that move — and all that came after it — may be resulting in a much more intractable, longer-term failure. Want to count the ways? One. Staff at…
In South Carolina, school districts and now the governor have taken parental concerns about explicit material in school libraries, as Matt McGregor reports for The Epoch Times: “It has come to my attention that public schools in South Carolina may be providing students with access—whether in school libraries, electronic databases, or both—to completely inappropriate books and…
I don’t know that I’ve ever seen it characterized as “doubling down” before when a party to a lawsuit has appealed to a higher court, but here’s Sarah Doiron on WPRI: Several parents who are challenging the state’s school mask mandate are doubling down on their efforts by appealing a Rhode Island Superior Court judge’s…
At the risk of expressing a forbidden opinion, this is not a healthy perspective: Even if Indigenous people spend Thanksgiving with family and festivities, [Tomaquag Museum executive director Lorén Spears] said, “They still know that this isn’t always a happy time for us because it reminds us of all the trauma and loss that our…