This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Progressives Need a United Front for Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — Norman Solomon: The approach taken so far by Sanders and Warren on the campaign trail suggests how their supporters ought to proceed in relation to each other -- illuminating real and important differences without rancor, while teaming up to fend off policy attacks from corporate-backed opponents. What continues to be in effect between Sanders and Warren -- and what is needed among their supporters on the ground -- is the equivalent of a nonaggression pact. At the same time, we should be willing to draw clear distinctions between the policy positions of those two candidates. The need is for supporters to openly explain reasons for preferring Warren or Sanders while avoiding the start of a mutual demolition derby. In the process of strengthening progressive forces, it’s vital to defeat corporate Democrats, before proceeding to defeat Donald Trump.
• Parents' Jazz Answer Book - Parents' guidance — Phil Are Go!:
  
• Why We Should Abandon Real GDP As A Measure of Economic Activity — Blair Fix: The use of ‘real’ GDP to measure economic progress is based on ideas from neoclassical economics. According to some of the dominant interpretations of neoclassical theory, the price of a commodity reveals the utility (i.e. pleasure) that a consumer derives from it. When we aggregate the value of all commodities, neoclassical theory posits that we are aggregating the utility of the entire society. When ‘real’ GDP goes up, in other words, so does aggregate utility. Everyone becomes better off! Except they don’t. We’ve already shown that the instability of prices means the growth of ‘real’ GDP is ill-defined. We simply can’t say for sure how much aggregate utility is increasing. Second, we know that the growth of ‘real’ GDP correlates poorly with other measures of human well-being. Many ecological economists posit that this is because GDP treats everything with a price as contributing positively to society. Again, this comes down to the assumption that all prices reveal utility. If machine guns sell for the same price as MRI machines, neoclassical theory tells us that both contribute the same utility to society.
• Matt Bors:
  
• Corbyn’s Biggest Failure — Ian Welsh: If Corbyn fails his movement and his principles, it will not be because he lost a couple elections. It will be because he had the chance to change the Labour party, and he really didn’t, because he blinked when it came to dealing with other MPs.
• This Modern World — by Tom Tomorrow:
  
• For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity — Adam Belz at the Minneapolis Start Tribune: The other big draw of the older tractors is their lack of complex technology. Farmers prefer to fix what they can on the spot, or take it to their mechanic and not have to spend tens of thousands of dollars. “The newer machines, any time something breaks, you’ve got to have a computer to fix it,” Stock said. There are some good things about the software in newer machines, said Peterson. The dealer will get a warning if something is about to break and can contact the farmer ahead of time to nip the problem in the bud. But if something does break, the farmer is powerless, stuck in the field waiting for a service truck from the dealership to come out to their farm and charge up to $150 per hour for labor. “That goes against the pride of ownership, plus your lifetime of skills you’ve built up being able to fix things,” Peterson said.
• What Is Joe Biden Thinking When He Uses Words like Malarkey? — Ted Rall:
  
• Our Neophobic, Conservative AI Overlords Want Everything to Stay the Same — Cory Doctorow in the Los Angeles Review of Books: This conservativeness permeates every system of algorithmic inference: search for a refrigerator or a pair of shoes and they will follow you around the web as machine learning systems “re-target” you while you move from place to place, even after you’ve bought the fridge or the shoes. Spend some time researching white nationalism or flat earth conspiracies and all your YouTube recommendations will try to reinforce your “interest.” Follow a person on Twitter and you will be inundated with similar people to follow. Machine learning can produce very good accounts of correlation (“this person has that person’s address in their address-book and most of the time that means these people are friends”) but not causation (which is why Facebook constantly suggests that survivors of stalking follow their tormentors who, naturally, have their targets’ addresses in their address books). […] If you ask an ML system to predict who the police should arrest, it will suggest that they go and arrest people similar to the ones they’ve been arresting all along. As the Human Rights Data Analysis Group’s Patrick Ball puts it, “A predictive policing system doesn’t predict crime, it predicts policing.”
• #1504; The Confidence of One’s Convictions — Wondermark by David Malki !: