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Imagine there is a public speaking square in your city, much like the ancient Greek agora. Here you can freely share your ideas without censorship. But there’s one key difference. Someone decides, for their own economic benefit, who gets to listen to what speech or which speaker. And this isn’t disclosed when you enter, either. You might only get a few listeners when you speak, while someone else with similar ideas has a large audience. Would this truly be free speech? This is an important…

Utilitarianism would have us direct our efforts to boost global vaccine coverage. Credit: Shutterstock It's difficult to ask, but how many fatalities should Australia accept from COVID in 2022? …

Whatever happened to predictability? The milkman, the paperboy, and — reasonably priced real estate? For a brief moment, it looked like the iconic San Francisco home from the beloved sitcom Full House was on the market for a whopping $37 million. However, after a little digging, it turns out you won’t need to sell your soul to purchase the historic piece of property. Fans of the show looking to relive some of their favorite series moments might have had trouble gathering up the cash to purchase the Broderick…

The crypto crash has spooked many investors, but blockchain bros have high hopes for one nascent application: GameFi. A portmanteau of “game” and “decentralized finance,” the model offers a chance at earning cash by gaming. Players who complete in-game tasks are rewarded with crypto and NFTs, which can then be traded for real money. It’s a tempting pitch on paper. But play-to-earn shows signs of plateauing before it enters the mainstream. In April, active…

Samsung has had a firm grip on several niches in the automotive components industry for some years now. With its own digital cockpit, its proprietary automotive processor, and various EV battery supply deals, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the hardware giant enter the market with its own electric car at some point. But Samsung has recently decided not to manufacture a dedicated electric brand, as two senior executives told The Korea Times. Two reasons why The first reason behind this…

William Brewer, 33, is the author of I Know Your Kind (2017), a collection of poems about poverty and drug addiction in West Virginia, where he was born and grew up. Selected for the prestigious National Poetry Series in the US, and cited as an inspiration by Ocean Vuong, he has been described by New York magazine as “America’s poet laureate of the opioid crisis”. Psychiatry, debt and quantum gravity are among the themes of his first novel, The Red Arrow, narrated by a troubled ghostwriter urgently in search of a vanished…

Warpaint would like to clear something up: they are not – nor were they ever – on the verge of breaking up. “I don’t remember this,” bassist Jenny Lee Lindberg laughs when the subject comes up. “I don’t remember having those conversations be public.”“It’s, like, in our bio!” guitarist and vocalist Theresa Wayman chimes in.“‘Oh, you guys are about ready to break up,’” Lindberg says in a slightly mocking voice.“Yeah … no,” says drummer Stella Mozgawa, shaking her head.Sign up to our Inside Saturday newsletter for an…

As aggressive as the path for U.S. monetary policy tightening appears right now, one Federal Reserve governor doesn’t believe the central bank faces a world as ugly as when it last confronted inflation this high. Because of that, the Fed doesn’t need to take the same steps as it did under former leader Paul Volcker, when he took extremely aggressive action to kill inflation, which in turn caused an extremely deep recession, Fed governor Christopher Waller said in a public appearance Tuesday.…

If Google needs to achieve one thing during Google I/O this year, it’s to convince us that WearOS isn’t dead. To be saying this in 2022, a year after Google showed WearOS 3 to the world at Google I/O 2021, is hugely depressing. What was seen as a transformational moment, a moment of hope for Google’s wearable tech platform, has turned out to be nothing more than the status quo, as WearOS gets sidelined once again. Where are you WearOS? During the past 12 months, there’s been almost no evidence whatsoever that WearOS…

A new study shows face-to-face conversation time is down in three English-speaking nations. Credit: Pexels Jeffrey Hall is passionate about two things in particular—friendship and social media—and he thinks the latter is too often mistaken as the enemy of the former. …