This fortnight, I have been mostly reading:

• Where loneliness can lead — Samantha Rose Hill in Aeon: The way we think about the world affects the relationships we have with others and ourselves. By injecting a secret meaning into every event and experience, ideological movements are forced to change reality in accordance with their claims once they come to power. And this means that one can no longer trust the reality of one’s own lived experiences in the world. Instead, one is taught to distrust oneself and others, and to always rely upon the ideology of the movement, which must be right. But in order to make individuals susceptible to ideology, you must first ruin their relationship to themselves and others by making them sceptical and cynical, so that they can no longer rely upon their own judgment: "Just as terror, even in its pre-total, merely tyrannical form ruins all relationships between men, so the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationship with reality. The preparation has succeeded when people have lost contact with their fellow men as well as the reality around them; for together with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and thought. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (ie, the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (ie, the standards of thought) no longer exist."
• Universities belong to the whole community: why we should fund the humanities — Daniel Gregory in Pearls and Irritations: The greatest difficulty in deciding how to fund universities is that students, academics and prospective employers are not the only stakeholders. Universities exist for the benefit of the whole community, including those who will never have the privilege of studying at one. It is easy to see how medical and scientific research benefits the community. It is easy to see how training engineers and computer programmers and nurses benefits the community. We can justify funding universities to do these things without even thinking about the interests of students and academics. What about the humanities? Does the community benefit from funding research and teaching in history and philosophy and the arts?
• The long-term unemployed are not an inflation constraint in a recovery — Bill Mitchell: The first issue to clear up is the definition of long-term unemployment. Long-term unemployment tracks the total unemployment rate in a lagged fashion. So as governments abandoned full employment in the in the 1970s and allowed unemployment to rise significantly, they also had to then contend with the politically troubling issue of long-term unemployment. The solution they took was the purely political – they redefined long-term unemployment. So in the early 1970s, a person was long-term unemployed if they has been unemployed for 13 or more weeks. This was changed in the late 1970s to 26 weeks and from the mid-1980s to 52 weeks. There is on-going pressure change the threshold to 104 weeks and confine it to a small number of so-called intransigents. The changes were designed to disabuse the citizens of the severity of the problem that occurs when government’s fail to deal with an economic downturn in a timely and sufficient manner.
• Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results — Cory Doctorow in Locus Online: Machine learning operates on quantitative elements of a system, and quantizes or discards any qualita­tive elements. And because it is theory-free – that is, because it has no understanding of the causal relationships between the correlates it identifies – it can’t know when it’s making a mistake. The role this deficit plays in magnifying bias has been well-theorized and well-publicized by this point: feed a hiring algorithm the resumes of previously successful candidates and you will end up hiring people who look exactly like the people you’ve hired all along; do the same thing with a credit-assessment system and you’ll freeze out the same people who have historically faced financial discrimination; try it with risk-assessment for bail and you’ll lock up the same people you’ve always slammed in jail before trial. The only difference is that it happens faster, and with a veneer of empirical facewash that provides plausible deniability for those who benefit from discrimination.
• KSP training slideshow quotes Hitler, advocates ‘ruthless’ violence — Satchel Walton and Cooper Walton in the Manual RedEye, a High School newspaper: A training slideshow used by the Kentucky State Police (KSP) — the second largest police force in the state — urges cadets to be “ruthless killer[s]” and quotes Adolf Hitler advocating violence. […] One slide, titled “Violence of Action,” in addition to imploring officers to be “ruthless killer[s],” instructs troopers to have “a mindset void of emotion” and to “meet violence with greater violence.” A line from Adolf Hitler’s fascist and anti-Semitic manifesto, Mein Kampf, is featured in the slide: “the very first essential for success is a perpetually constant and regular employment of violence.” The presentation also links to a Hitler page on Goodreads, a database of quotes and books. Two other slides quoting Hitler bring his total to three, making him the most quoted person in the presentation.
• Ink-Stained Wretches: The Battle for the Soul of Digital Freedom Taking Place Inside Your Printer — Cory Doctorow at the EFF: HP's latest gambit challenges the basis of private property itself: a bold scheme! With the HP Instant Ink program, printer owners no longer own their ink cartridges or the ink in them. Instead, HP's customers have to pay a recurring monthly fee based on the number of pages they anticipate printing from month to month; HP mails subscribers cartridges with enough ink to cover their anticipated needs. If you exceed your estimated page-count, HP bills you for every page (if you choose not to pay, your printer refuses to print, even if there's ink in the cartridges). If you don't print all your pages, you can "roll over" a few of those pages to the next month, but you can't bank a year's worth of pages to, say, print out your novel or tax paperwork. Once you hit your maximum number of "banked" pages, HP annihilates any other pages you've paid for (but continues to bill you every month).
• Facebook Manipulated the News You See to Appease Republicans, Insiders Say — Clara Jeffery at Mother Jones: Conservatives had been very effective at working the refs by accusing the platforms of liberal bias, especially after a widely publicized 2016 incident in which platform moderators were accused of suppressing pro-Trump content. After that, says a former employee who worked on News Feed, it was made clear that “we can’t do a ranking change that would hurt Breitbart—even if that change would make the News Feed better.” (Breitbart News, where Steve Bannon was still executive chair, seems to have been a particular obsession.) So, too, with the January 2018 changes: “Republican lobbyists in the DC office said, ‘Hold on, how will it affect Breitbart?’” recalls another ex-employee. Testing showed that the proposed changes would take a “huge chunk” out of Breitbart, Gateway Pundit, the Daily Wire, and the Daily Caller. There was “enormous pushback. They freaked out and said, ‘We can’t do this.’” The code was tweaked, and executives were given a new presentation showing less impact on these conservative sites and more harm to progressive-leaning publishers—including Mother Jones. “The problem was that the progressive outlets were real [news] outlets like yours,” recalls the ex-employee, “and the right ones were garbage outlets. You guys were one of the outlets who got singled out to balance the ledger.” […] The graphs and slides appear to have appeased Kaplan. Zuckerberg signed off on the algorithm changes. And soon, the million-plus readers who had chosen to follow Mother Jones saw fewer of our articles in their feeds. Average traffic from Facebook to our content decreased 37 percent between the six months prior to the change and the six months after.
• Calvin and Hobbes — by Bill Watterson: