"What Piff and his team found at that intersection is profound — and profoundly satisfying — in that it offers hard data to back up what intuition and millennia of wisdom (from Aristotle to Edith Wharton) would have us believe: Wealth tends to make people act like assholes, and the more wealth they have, the more of a jerk they tend to be.

At the intersection the researchers were monitoring, drivers of the most expensive cars were roughly four times more likely to cut others off and three times less likely to stop for pedestrians, even when controlling for factors like the driver’s perceived gender and amount of traffic at the time they were collecting data.

When someone from the research team posed as a pedestrian heading into the crosswalk, almost half of the grade-five cars failed to stop, as if they didn’t even see the person."
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-commentary/billionaires-psychology-tech-politics-1235358129/

Although our wealth concentration is not yet at the level of the U.S., we must take what is happening south of the border as a dire warning of the consequences of failing to rein in extreme inequality. Three experts write. #canpoli #uspoli

https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2026/03/16/Top-One-Per-Cent-Threaten-Canada/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=editorial

Why Most Ancient Civilizations Had No Word for the Color Blue

https://www.openculture.com/2025/04/why-most-ancient-civilizations-had-no-word-for-color-blue.html

Just what the climate needed — setting Tehran's oil storage facilities on fire.

I am standing in my kitchen, sorting the trash into four different containers, because my country wants the planet to survive; meanwhile Trump and Putin have decided that the planet will not be needed after they are gone.

How the BBC chose to report on the US and Israeli attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab, Iran:

1. It used “dead” instead of “killed,” softening the violence and removing agency.
2. It relied on passive construction, carefully avoiding naming the perpetrators — the United States and Israel.
3. It added “Iran says,” subtly framing the massacre itself as an allegation rather than an established event.

#iran #israel #bbc #news #journalism #Mediawatch #us #trump #genocide #islam

Great read by @tante

"We should push towards more reliable software, more secure software, software that is accessible, that protects people against misuse and allows them to be as safe as possible in doing what they want to do.

What do we get? Slop. "Slop generated by guys who – when called out for their irresponsible behavior – just start crying about how they only wanted to “share” or “inspire” or “educate” while handing out running chainsaws to kids."

https://tante.cc/2026/02/14/diffusion-of-responsibility/