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Created
Thu, 15/08/2024 - 06:00

Bluetooth headphones are essential and addictive, you might even be using a pair now. Following Covid-19 pandemic headphones have become vital for work, while also being essential tools for personal privacy, in work, entertainment or fitness activities. These varied applications have made them indispensable in modern life, influencing work, leisure and well-being. Headphones can therefore be linked to the capitalist obsession with enhanced productivity and the modern desire for escape. Widespread headphone use has also garnered cultural significance with subcultures like hip-hop, making Bluetooth headphones fashion accessories and status symbols, which have established a thriving market for affordable and luxury models. This surge in popularity has made headphones the core of an industry characterized by rapid innovation.

The post Unplugged: The Environmental Detriment of Bluetooth Headphones appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

Created
Thu, 15/08/2024 - 05:00
I know you know that, but this is one of the stupidest things he’s ever said “The biggest threat is not global warming, where the ocean’s going to rise one, one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years. The big — and you’ll have more oceanfront property, right?” Donald Trump Trump said that speaking to Elon Musk in his X “interview” the other day. Philip Bump breaks it down: Trump often dismisses the threat posed by rising sea levels by suggesting that they are minor or insignificant. Speaking to Musk, it was an eighth of an inch over 400 years; how could anyone be worried about that? But that is nonsense. “Global mean sea level increased by 0.20 (0.15 to 0.25) m between 1901 and 2018,” the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change wrote last year. “The average rate of sea level rise was 1.3 (0.6 to 2.1) mm yr between 1901 and 1971, increasing to 1.9 (0.8 to 2.9) mm yr between 1971 and 2006, and further increasing to 3.7 (3.2 to 4.2) mm yr between 2006 and 2018 (high confidence).” Putting that in American, sea levels rose nearly eight inches from 1901 to 2018.
Created
Thu, 15/08/2024 - 03:30
Remember the 10 year old girl who had to travel to Indiana for an abortion? And they tried to prosecute the doctor who helped her? Well:  Indiana’s attorney general has dropped a lawsuit that accused the state’s largest hospital system of violating patient privacy laws when a doctor told a newspaper that a 10-year-old Ohio girl had traveled to Indiana for an abortion. A federal judge last week approved Attorney General Todd Rokita’s request to dismiss his lawsuit, which the Republican had filed last year against Indiana University Health and IU Healthcare Associates, The Indianapolis Star reported. The suit accused the hospital system of violating HIPAA, the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, and a state law, for not protecting patient information in the case of a 10-year-old rape victim who traveled to Indiana to receive abortion drugs. Dr. Caitlin Bernard ‘s attorneys later that she shared no personally identifiable information about the girl, and no such details were reported in the Star’s story on July 1, 2022, but it became a flashpoint in the abortion debate days after the U.S.
Created
Thu, 15/08/2024 - 03:06

“Is My Cat a Prisoner? And Other Ethical Questions About Our Pets.” — Headline from The Cut’s recent Pet Ethics issue.

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“Is It Bad That I Stopped Loving My Cat After I Buried Him in the Mi’kmaq Burial Ground, and He Came Back Wrong?”1

“Am I Forcing My Dog to Rescue My Son from Wells?”2

“Why I Wish I’d Loved My Puppy Less, So He Didn’t Grow Up to Be the Size of a Literal House”3

“Our Dog Loves Our Children. So Why Shouldn’t She Act as Their Full-Time Nanny?”4

“What Does Your Vet and His Parrot Receptionist Really Say to Your Pet Behind Your Back?”5

Created
Thu, 15/08/2024 - 00:30
Corporate capitalism too Sociologist Jessica Calarco (“Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net“) believes that one reason we cannot have nice things, The Ink explains, is “because Americans have been sold a manufactured ideology of personal responsibility, bolstered by the work of neoliberal economists, and for the most part accept it as tradition — even though it’s largely an invention of 20th-century business interests and crafted as part of the backlash to the New Deal.” That system is not just propped up by cheap labor, but by women’s labors specifically: The situation persists largely because women have been forced to make up for the lack of real social policy. Whether that’s to do with a conservative vision of women’s roles being as homemakers, helpmeets, and mothers or our reliance on poor women, women of color, and immigrant (and undocumented immigrant women) to fill the low-paid jobs in child and elder care that make American society possible, it’s women who do the devalued and relentlessly taxing work that can’t be made profitable in the market.
Created
Thu, 15/08/2024 - 00:13
As a subject, economics seems to have a fear and disgust of thinking about philosophy and methodology that might be described as Freudian. While other social scientists’ obsession with minute discussions of their methods and rhetoric, standards of proof and what they hope to achieve might be thought of as pathological in another way, the […]
Created
Wed, 14/08/2024 - 23:27
You are reading this because Mr. Sauce, Esq. pointed out I didn’t do a single Wiener Wednesday this summer. And I want to give him a hearty thanks because, however neglectful I’ve been to the blog, I couldn’t let this year pass without an addition to the Wiener Wednesday archives. It would be wrong. Plus,Continue reading WIENER WEDNESDAY: 203. Stuffed Franks